I pass to another objection made by the same writer to the Hedonistic conception of the supreme end of action as “the greatest possible sum of pleasures.” (It should be “the greatest possible surplus of pleasure over pain”: but the difference is unimportant for the present argument.) The phrase, he says, is “intrinsically unmeaning”: but his justification for this statement appears to be different in different treatises. At first he boldly affirmed that “pleasant feelings are not quantities that can be added,”[112] apparently because “each is over before the other begins.” The latter statement, however, is equally true of the parts of time: but it would be obviously absurd to say that hours, days, years are “not quantities that can be added.” Possibly this consideration occurred to Green before writing the _Prolegomena to Ethics_: at any rate in the latter treatise he admits that states “of pleasant feeling” can be added together in “thought,” only denying that they can be added “in enjoyment or imagination of enjoyment.”[113] But this concedes all that is required for the Hedonistic valuation of future feelings; no Hedonist ever supposed that the happiness he aims at making as great as possible was something to be enjoyed all at once, or ever wanted to imagine it as so enjoyed. And unless the transiency of pleasure diminishes its pleasantness--a point which I will presently consider--I cannot see that the possibility of realising the Hedonistic end is at all affected by the necessity of realising it in successive parts. Green, in another passage,[114] appears to lay down that “an end” which is “to serve the purpose of a criterion” must “enable us to distinguish actions that bring men nearer to it from those which do not.” This, however, would only be the case if by an “end” is necessarily meant a goal or consummation, which, after gradually drawing nearer to it, we reach all at once: but this is not, I conceive, the sense in which the word is ordinarily understood by ethical writers: and certainly all that I mean by it is an object of rational aim--whether attained in successive parts or not--which is not sought as a means to the attainment of any ulterior object, but for itself. And so long as any one’s prospective balance of pleasure over pain admits of being made greater or less by immediate action in one way or another,[115] there seems no reason why ‘Maximum Happiness’ should not provide as serviceable a criterion of conduct as any ‘chief good’ capable of being possessed all at once, or in some way independent of the condition of time.