g. in the
theatre the people who eat sweets do so most when the actors are poor.
Now since activities are made precise and more enduring and better
by their proper pleasure, and injured by alien pleasures, evidently
the two kinds of pleasure are far apart. For alien pleasures do pretty
much what proper pains do, since activities are destroyed by their
proper pains; e.g. if a man finds writing or doing sums unpleasant and
painful, he does not write, or does not do sums, because the
activity is painful. So an activity suffers contrary effects from
its proper pleasures and pains, i.e. from those that supervene on it
in virtue of its own nature. And alien pleasures have been stated to
do much the same as pain; they destroy the activity, only not to the
same degree.
Now since activities differ in respect of goodness and badness,
and some are worthy to be chosen, others to be avoided, and others
neutral, so, too, are the pleasures; for to each activity there is a
proper pleasure. The pleasure proper to a worthy activity is good
and that proper to an unworthy activity bad; just as the appetites for
noble objects are laudable, those for base objects culpable. But the
pleasures involved in activities are more proper to them than the
desires; for the latter are separated both in time and in nature,
while the former are close to the activities, and so hard to
distinguish from them that it admits of dispute whether the activity
is not the same as the pleasure.
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