Suppose for the present that there is only one creature in the valley. The king separates his apathy with regard to the action AB. Let us say he separates his apathy into 1000 pleasure and 1000 pain. Of the pleasure he lets the being experience the whole, of the pain he bears an amount which we will represent by 2. Thus the being has 1000 pleasure and 998 of pain, and the action is completed. His sensation is measured by the number 1000 in the first act, and by 998 in the second act.
But the king did not choose to make the fundamental actions of this limited and finishing kind. As the type of the fundamental activity, he chose an action, and made the being go through it again and again. Thus the being would go through the act A, then the act B. When the action AB was complete it would go through an act of the kind A again, then through an act of the kind B. Thus the creature would be engaged in a routine of this kind, AB, AB, AB, and so on.
And if the creature had been alone, and this had been the sole activity in which it was concerned, the king would have gone on bearing 2 of pain in each of these actions. The king would have kept the routine going on steadily, the creature bearing 1000 of pleasure in each A, and 998 of pain in each B.
At this point it may be asked that an example should be given of one of these elementary routines which the king set going. And this seems a reasonable request, and yet it is somewhat too peremptory. For in the world we may know of what nature the movements of the atoms are without being able to say exactly what the motion of any one is. In such a case a type is the only possible presentation. Again, take the example of a crystal. We know that a crystal has a definite law of shape, and however much we divide it we find that its parts present the same conformation. We cannot isolate the ultimate crystalline elements, but we infer that they must be such as to produce the crystal by their combination.
Now life on the valley was such in its main features as would be produced by a combination of routines of the kind explained. There were changes and abrupt transitions, but the general and prevailing plan of life was that of a routine of alternating acts of a pleasurable and a painful kind. It was just such as would be built up out of elementary routines, on which the king could count, and which, unless he modified their combinations, tended to produce rhythmic processes of a larger kind. And even the changes and abruptnesses had a recurrent nature about them, for if any routine in the valley altered suddenly, it was found that there were cases of other routines altering in like manner, when the conditions under which they came were similar. Thus the fundamental type of the action which the king instituted was that of a routine AB, AB, as described above. But there were two circumstances which caused a variation, so that this simple routine was modified.
Firstly, there was not one being only but many.
Secondly, the king wished to have some of his pain-bearing power set free from time to time. He did not wish to have to be continually spending it all in maintaining the routines he had started at first, and those immediately connected with them.
When he first began to organize the life of the beings he did not consciously keep back any of his pain-bearing power, but threw it all in the activities which he started. Still from time to time he wished to start new activities quite unconnected with the old, and for this reason he withdrew some of his pain-bearing power, as will be shown afterwards.
There were many beings. The king chose that the type of activity in each should be a routine. In that way he could calculate on the activity, and hold it in his mind as a settled process on whose operation he could count. But as the routines of the beings proceeded they came into contact with one another, and made, even by their simple co-existence, something different from what a routine by itself was. They interwove in various ways. Then, in order to take advantage of the combinations of these routines, or to modify them, it was necessary to set going other routines.
In order to be able to originate these connected routines the king adopted the following plan.