that the rational and animal parts of our nature differ only as _more_
and _less_--which is tantamount to avowing that man is but a magnified
brute--he ought not to have penned his celebrated utterance, that
pleasures differ only in continuance and intensity: he should have
admitted that they differ likewise in kind; or in other words, that
pleasures differ in quality as well as in quantity. The goodness of a
pleasure, then, is not the mere amount of it. To repeat St.
Augustine's reflection on the drunken Milanese: "It makes a difference
what source a man draws his delight from." [Footnote 2] As in man
reason is nobler than sense, preferable, and a better good to its
possessor--for reason it is that makes him man and raises him above
the brute--so the use of the reason and the delight that comes thereof
is nobler, preferable, and a better good to him than the pleasure that
is of the mere operation of his animal nature. A little of the nobler
delight outweighs a vast volume of the baser: not that the nobler is
the pleasanter, but because it is the nobler. Nor can it be pretended
that the nobler prevails as being the more durable, and thereby likely
to prove the pleasanter in the long run. The nobler is better at the
time and in itself, because it is the more human delight and
characteristic of the higher species. I have but to add that what is
better in itself is not better under all circumstances. The best life
of man can only be lived at intervals. The lower operations and the
delights that go with them have a medicinal power to restore the
vigour that has become enfeebled by a lengthened exercise of the
higher faculties. At those "dead points" food and fiddling are better
than philosophy.

[Footnote 2: Interest unde quis gaudeat. (S. Aug., Confess., vi., 6.)]

6. This medicinal or restorative virtue of delight is a fact to bear