ignorance.  The weakness is moral, rather than intellectual, that makes us expect that the first flush of a great pleasure, a newly-attained joy or success, will continue unabated.  The poor man, probably, does not overrate the gratification of newly-attained wealth; what he fails to allow for is the deadening effect of an unbroken experience of ease and plenty.  The author of “Romola” says of the hero and the heroine, in the early moments of their affection, that they could not look forward to a time when their kisses should be common things.  So it is with the attainment of all great objects of pursuit:  the first access of good fortune may not disappoint us; but as we are more and more removed from the state of privation, as the memory of the prior experience fades away, so does the vividness of the present enjoyment.  It is the same with changes for the worse:  the agony of a great loss is at first overpowering; gradually, however, the system accommodates itself to the new condition, and the severity dies away.  What is called on these occasions the “force of custom” is the application of the law of Accommodation, or Relativity modified by habit.

[RELATIVITY IN PLEASURES.]

It is a familiar experience of mankind, yet hard to realise upon mere testimony, that the pleasures of rest, repose, retirement, are wholly relative to foregone labour and toil; after the first shock of transition, they are less and less felt, and can be renewed only after a renewal of the contrasting experience.  The description, in “Paradise Lost,” of the delicious repose of Adam and Eve in Eden is fallacious; the poet credits them with an intensity of pleasure attainable only by the brow-sweating labourer under the curse.

The delights of Knowledge are relative to previous Ignorance; for, although the possession of knowledge is in many ways a lasting good, yet the full intensity of the charm is felt only at the moment of passing from mystery to explanation, from blankness of impression to intellectual attainment.  This form of the pleasure is sustained only by new acquisitions and new discoveries.  Moreover, in the minor forms of the gratification due to knowledge, we never escape the law of relativity; the “power” delights us by relation to our previous impotence.  Plato supposed that, in knowledge, we have an example of a pure pleasure, meaning one that had no reference to foregone privation or pain; but such “purity” would be a barren fact, not unlike the pure air of a bladeless and waterless desert.  A state of uninterrupted good health, although a prime condition of enjoyment, is of itself a state of neutrality or indifference.  The man that has never been ill cannot sing the joys of health; the exultation of that strain is attainable only by the valetudinarian.

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