We find it sometimes asserted by persons of enthusiastic and passionate temperament, that there are feelings so exquisitely delightful, that one moment of their rapture is preferable to an eternity of agreeable consciousness of an inferior kind. These assertions, however, are perhaps consciously hyperbolical, and not intended to be taken as scientific statements: but in the case of pain, it has been deliberately maintained by a thoughtful and subtle writer, with a view to important practical conclusions, that ``torture'' so extreme as to be ``incommensurable with moderate pain'' is an actual fact of experience. (See ``A Chapter in the Ethics of Pain'', by the late Edmund Gurney, in a volume of essays entitled Tertium Quid.) This doctrine, however, does not correspond to my own experience; nor does it appear to me to be supported by the common sense of mankind:---at least I do not find, in the practical forethought of persons noted for caution, any recognition of the danger of agony such that, in order to avoid the smallest extra risk of it, the greatest conceivable amount of moderate pain should reasonably be incurred.