The next great theorem of this theory of acquisition is at cross-purposes with this one. Men get useful goods only at the cost of producing them, and production is irksome, painful, as has been recounted above. They go on producing utilities until, at the margin, the last increment of utility in the product is balanced by the concomitant increment of disutility in the way of irksome productive effort,--labor or abstinence. At the margin, pleasure-gain is balanced by pain-cost. But the "effective utility" of the total product is measured by that of the final unit; the effective utility of the whole is given by the number of units of product multiplied by the effective utility of the final unit; while the effective disutility (pain-cost) of the whole is similarly measured by the pain-cost of the final unit. The "total effective utility" of the producer's product equals the "total effective disutility" of his pains of acquisition. Hence there is no net surplus of utility in the outcome. The corrective objection is ready to hand,[36] that, while the balance of utility and disutility holds at the margin, it does not hold for the earlier units of the product, these earlier units having a larger utility and a lower cost, and so leaving a large net surplus of utility, which gradually declines as the margin is approached. But this attempted correction evades the hedonistic test. It shifts the ground from the calculus to the objects which provoke the calculation. Utility is a psychological matter, a matter of pleasurable appreciation, just as disutility, conversely, is a matter of painful appreciation. The individual who is held to count the costs and the gain in this hedonistic calculus is, by supposition, a highly reasonable person. He counts the cost to him as an individual against the gain to him as an individual. He looks before and after, and sizes the whole thing up in a reasonable course of conduct. The "absolute utility" would exceed the "effective utility" only on the supposition that the "producer" is an unreflecting sensory apparatus, such as the beasts of the field are supposed to be, devoid of that gift of appraisement and calculation which is the hypothetical hedonist's only human trait. There might on such a supposition--if the producer were an intelligent sensitive organism simply--emerge an excess of total pleasure over total pain, but there could then be no talk of utility or of disutility, since these terms imply intelligent reflection, and they are employed because they do so. The hedonistic producer looks to his own cost and gain, as an intelligent pleasure-seeker whose consciousness compasses the contrasted elements as wholes. He does not contrast the balance of pain and pleasure in the morning with the balance of pain and pleasure in the afternoon, and say that there is so much to the good because he was not so tired in the morning. Indeed, by hypothesis, the pleasure to be