The comparisons, metaphors and symbols, taken from Economy and used in ordinary conversation, lead to the false belief that mathematical constructions and those of the economic calculus are the real processes of the psyche or of the Spirit.
The pretended calculus of pleasures and pains, and the doctrines of optimism and pessimism.
The quantification of volitional acts, taken as a real fact and introduced into philosophy, has given origin to the idea of a calculus of pleasures and pains and of a balance of life, to be established with the pleasures on the profit side of the account and the sorrows on the side of loss. And there have even been ravings about a double mensuration of pleasures, to be based upon their intensity and duration. But the real man, at the moment he enjoys, has before him only his own enjoyment, and at the moment that he suffers, only his own sorrow: the past is past and life is not to be described like the profit and loss account of a business. The true economic man says to himself what Fra Jacopone sang in one of his lauds:
So much is mine
As enjoyed and bestowed for the love divine!
The sophisms that assume consistency owing to this false conception, are most strange. Let the little dialogue of Leopardi with the seller of almanacs suffice for all. No one would wish to live his life again, not because the sorrows always exceed the pleasures, as that dialogue suggests, but rather because man is not, as he believes, a consumer of pleasures. He is a creator of life, and for this reason the idea of doing again what has already been done, of retreading the same path, of reliving the already past, is repugnant to him, even were it all made up of pleasures as suggested, because he aspires only and always to the future. Optimism and pessimism, being each of them respectively unable altogether to deny pleasure and pain, are obliged to have recourse to these calculations and balances, in order to defend their preconceived conclusions: but in so doing they fall from Scylla into Charybdis and each reveals its own sophistical nature.
Indeed, a philosophy that calculates is a philosophy that toys or dotes, and if we have certainly advised the economists and mathematicians to calculate and not to think, we must, on the contrary, cry to the philosopher:—Think, and do not calculate! Qui incipit numerare, incipit errare!