[36] (_p. 22_). It seems to me evident even from analysis of the notion of choice (1) that everything which is good is to be preferred, i.e. that in an act of choice it shall fall as a reasonable moment into the balance; (2) that everything bad forms a reasonable anti-moment, and therefore also that (3) in such cases--partly by direct means, partly by an addition in which the good and the bad are to be taken into account as quantities with opposite signs--the preponderance in which right choice is to be grounded may become evident, i.e. the preferability or superiority of the one as opposed to the other. According to this view, it does not, closely examined, require the special experience of an act of preference having the character of rightness, but only the experience of simple similarly qualified acts of pleasing and displeasing, in order to attain in the above-mentioned cases to the knowledge of the better. And therefore I have said that we derived our knowledge of preferability, not from the fact that our experience has the character of rightness, but that the said preferences possess the character of rightness because the knowledge of preferability has here been made the determining standard. I do not, however, mean to say that the same distinguishing character which was previously insisted upon in the case of certain simple acts of pleasing is not also here really present. [37] (_p. 24_). In order that the procedure here might have been rendered quite exact and really exhaustive, two other very important cases would still need to have been mentioned in the lecture. The one case is that of pleasure in the bad, the other that of displeasure in the bad. If we enquire: Is pleasure in the bad good? the answer has already been given in a measure quite rightly by Aristotle: No. “No one,” he says in the _Nicomachian Ethics_ (x. 2, p. 1174 a. 1), “would wish to feel joy in what is shameful even if it were made certain to him that no harm would result therefrom.” The hedonists, to which class belonged such noble men as Fechner (cf. his work on _The Highest Good_) contradicted this view. Their teaching is to be rejected; in practice as Hume has observed, they fortunately proved much better than in theory. There is still, however, a grain of truth in their view. The pleasure in the bad is, qua pleasure, good, and only at the same time bad as a wrong activity of feeling, and though, by reason of this perversion, it may be described as a preponderance of the bad, it cannot be regarded as something purely bad. While, therefore, abhorring it as bad, we are really making an act of choice in which freedom from what in the object is bad is preferred to the possession of what is good. And when we recognize the aversion as right, this is possible only because the preference has the character of rightness.