"Closely connected with this is the interesting question whether in general pleasure can be a countervailing equivalent for pain, and what coefficient or exponent must be assigned to a degree of pleasure to counterbalance for consciousness an equal degree of pain. Schopenhauer, citing the verse of Petrarch, “Mille piacer’ non vagliono un tormento (a thousand pleasures are not worth one pain),” makes the eccentric assertion that altogether a pain can never be balanced by any degree of pleasure; that therefore a world in which pain can occur at all is, under all circumstances, with ever so much preponderating happiness, worse than none. This view could hardly be supported; whether, however, there do not lie in it a core of truth so far as the co-efficient necessary for equivalence does not at all need to be = 1, as is usually assumed, that were well worthy of consideration."