 Locke and many of his time and tradition seem to have held views close to the simple picture of pleasure (of this entry’s second introductory paragraph), joined to an empiricist picture of our concepts of pleasure and good as similarly simple because acquired from the simple experience of pleasure. Their view that pleasure is an (at least cognitively) isolable conscious event or feature has counterparts among those ancient hedonist materialist philosophers who thought of pleasure as some smooth or gentle stimulation, motion, or physiological change (see Gosling and Taylor 1982, pp. 41, 394) and also among those nowadays who regard it as some short-term activity of the brain. Hedonist views that explain human value, motivation, and concepts of good and evil in terms of such supposedly simple affective feelings of pleasure and pain (e.g., Locke 1700/1979, Essay II, xx and xxi, 31 ff.) were also widespread, especially among writers in English, in the following two centuries. Pleasure was widely taken for granted as foundational in this way by the nascent behavioral and social sciences, until more demanding standards, first for stricter introspection and later for more objective (in this use: not based in experimental subjects’ judgments on the topic) methods, were  adopted.[3] 