Note 2 — THE LIMITATIONS OF MARGINAL UTILITY[1]

The conduct of mankind differs from that of the brutes in being determined by anticipated sensations of pleasure and pain, instead of actual sensations. Hereby, in so far, human conduct is taken out of the sequence of cause and effect and falls instead under the rule of sufficient reason. By virtue of this rational faculty in man the connection between stimulus and response is teleological instead of causal.

The reason for assigning the first and decisive place to pleasure, rather than to pain, in the determination of human conduct, appears to be the (tacit) acceptance of that optimistic doctrine of a beneficent order of nature which the nineteenth century inherited from the eighteenth.