The Nicomachean Ethics — trans. F. H. Peters (1881)

to go to the bottom of it, if the exercise is pleasant to them. Thus, those who delight in geometry become geometricians, and understand all the propositions better than others ; and similarly, those who are fond of music, or of architecture, or of anything else, make progress in that kind of work, because they delight in it. The pleasures, then, help to increase the exercise ; but that which helps to increase it must be closely connected with it : but when things are specifically different from one another, the things that are closely connected with them must also be specifically different. The same conclusion follows perhaps still more clearly from the fact that the exercise of one facult}^ is impeded by the pleasure proper to another ; e.g. a lover of the flute is unable to attend to an argument if he hears a man playing, since he takes more delight in flute-playing than in his present business ; the pleasure of the flute-player, therefore, hinders the exercise of the reason.

The same result follows in other cases, too, whenever a man is exercising his faculties on two things at a time ; the pleasanter business thwarts the other, nd, if the difference in pleasantness be great, thwarts more and more, even to the extent of suppressing altogether. Thus, when anything gives us intense light, we cannot do anythbig else at all, and when e do a second thing, we do not very much care about le first; and so people who eat sweetmeats in the theatre do this most of all when the actors are bad. Since its proper pleasure heightens the exercise : a faculty, making it both more prolonged and Iter, while pleasure from another source spoils it.

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it is evident that there is a great difference between these two pleasures. Indeed, pleasure from another source has almost the same effect as pain from the activity itself For the exercise of a faculty is spoilt by pain arising from it; as happens, for instance, when a man finds it disagreeable and painful to write or to calculate; for he stops writing in the one case and calculating in the other, since the exercise is painful. The exercise of a faculty, then, is affected in opposite ways by its proper pleasure and its proper pain; and by "proper" I mean that which is occasioned by the exercise itself But pleasure from another source, we have already said, has almost the same effect as its proper pain ; i.e. it interferes with the exercise of the faculty, though not to the same extent.

Again, as the exercises of our faculties differ in goodness and badness, and some are to be desired and some to be shunned, while some are indifferent, so do the several pleasures differ ; for each exercise has its proper pleasure. The pleasure which is proper to a good activity, then, is good, and that which is proper to one that is not good is bad : for the desire of noble things is laudable, and the desire of base things is blamable ; but the pleasures which accompany the exercises of our faculties belong to them even more than the desires do, since the latter are distinct both in time and in nature, while the former are almost coincident in time, and so hard to distinguish from them that it is a matter of debate whether the exercise be not identical with the pleasure.

It seems, however, that the pleasure is not the same as the act of thinking or of feeling ; that is imp. 333pi^ssible : but the fact that the two are inseparable makes some people fancy that they are identical.

As, then, the exercLses of the faculties vary, so do their respective pleasures. Sight is purer than touch, hearing and smell than taste * : there is a corresponding difference, therefore, between their pleasures ; and the pleasures of the intellect are purer than these pleasures of sense, and some of each kind are purer than others.