Note 36 — CONTENTS

(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.