followed by fatigue or pain, the latter are exempt from both : 

 the most durable gradually languish and fade away, and in 

 proportion to this decay the attention bestowed upon them 

 declines and subsides: all are diminished by repetition. 



Tb. The nature of simple and complex pleasures or pains 

 cannot here be explained, but shall in the sequel. Human 

 life, it must be owned, has in no instance, ever exhibited an 

 unbroken series of such happiness as has been here defined ; 

 many of the perceptions experienced during its continuance 

 are purely painful, and by these, feelings even of the plea- 

 surable kind are too frequently infested, sullied, debased and 

 degraded, a truth of which we are fatally convinced both 

 from experience and from observation. 



8. Hence the only happiness of whose attainment we can 

 entertain any rational hope, or discover any instance in the 

 present state of our existence, is of the mixed kind, made up 

 indeed of pain and pleasure, but in such proportion, as that 

 upon the whole, on balancing the account, pleasure may be 

 found to predominate either in the comparative number of 

 its perceptions, or in their intensity, or in duration ;* but if, 

 on settling the account, painful perceptions be found to ex- 

 ceed in those respects, then a life so conditioned must upon 



the 



• In strictness, that condition may be denominated happy, in which the amount or 

 aggregate of pleasures exceeds that of pain; — the degree of happiness depends on this 

 excess. Paley's Moral Philos. c. 6. so also Maupertuis and 2 Search. 18S. 



