SECTION II.

THE REMOTE CAUSES OF PLEASURABLE AND PAINFUL SENSATIONS, CONTEMPLATED AS PAST, OR FUTURE.

Before entering into the detail of this part of the subject, one important observation is to be made; that the remote causes of our Pains and Pleasures are apt to be objects, far more deeply interesting, than those which are immediate. This at first sight appears paradoxical. It is the necessary result, however, of the general Law of our nature.

The immediate causes of our pleasurable and painful sensations have never any very extensive operation. The idea of any one is rarely associated with more than a limited number of pains or pleasures. Food, for example, the cause of the pleasures of eating; pleasures, perhaps, from the frequency with which they are repeated, and the portion of life over which they are spread, more valuable, as a class, than any other which we enjoy; has never appeared an object of sufficient interest, to make the affection with which it is regarded be thought worthy of a name. The idea of Food, though associated with pleasures which constitute so important a class, is associated with the pleasures but of one class: some of the remote causes are associated with the pleasures of almost every class. Money, for example, instrumental in procuring the causes of almost all our pleasures, and removing the 207 causes of a large proportion of our pains, is associated with the ideas of most of the pleasurable states of our nature. The idea of an object associated with a hundred times as many pleasures as another, is of course a hundred times more interesting.