[Sidenote: _The pretended calculus of pleasures and pains, and the doctrines of optimism and pessimism._] The quantification of volitional acts, taken as a real fact and introduced into philosophy, has given origin to the idea of a _calculus of pleasures and pains and of a balance of life,_ to be established with the pleasures on the profit side of the account and the sorrows on the side of loss. And there have even been ravings about a double mensuration of pleasures, to be based upon their _intensity_ and _duration._ But the real man, at the moment he enjoys, has before him only his own enjoyment, and at the moment that he suffers, only his own sorrow: the past is past and life is not to be described like the profit and loss account of a business. The true economic man says to himself what Fra Jacopone sang in one of his lauds: So much is mine As enjoyed and bestowed for the love divine! The sophisms that assume consistency owing to this false conception, are most strange. Let the little dialogue of Leopardi with the seller of almanacs suffice for all. No one would wish to live his life again, not because the sorrows always exceed the pleasures, as that dialogue suggests, but rather because man is not, as he believes, a consumer of pleasures. He is a creator of life, and for this reason the idea of doing again what has already been done, of retreading the same path, of reliving the already past, is repugnant to him, even were it all made up of pleasures as suggested, because he aspires only and always to the future. _Optimism and pessimism,_ being each of them respectively unable altogether to deny pleasure and pain, are obliged to have recourse to these calculations and balances, in order to defend their preconceived conclusions: but in so doing they fall from Scylla into Charybdis and each reveals its own sophistical nature. Indeed, a philosophy that calculates is a philosophy that toys or dotes, and if we have certainly advised the economists and mathematicians to calculate and not to think, we must, on the contrary, cry to the philosopher:--Think, and do not calculate! _Qui incipit numerare, incipit errare!_ VII HISTORICAL ANNOTATIONS The concepts of the useful and of the moral and the various attempts either to absorb the one in the other or to distinguish them, while recognizing their relations, are the problem on which has laboured the Philosophy of the practical as Ethic and Economic. Has this problem ever been fully solved? It will be permissible to doubt it, when we observe that a philosophical concept of the useful has been wanting until our own days; and that in consequence one of morality must also, strictly speaking, have been wanting, for it could not have been understood in its fulness and purity, owing to the obscure position of the term with which it is united. [Sidenote: _Greek Ethic and its ingenuousness._]