  Mill had in effect rejected this view by accepting that pleasures display qualitative differences. Bradley recognizes that we talk as though they do, using expressions which appear to entail that pleasures and pains have immediately given felt qualities but he offers an explanation of why this is. He starts with the observation that while it is uncertain whether all sensations are ”coloured by pain and pleasure“ it is certain that ”without sensation we never have pleasure or pain“ (Collected Essays, p. 244). Just as sensations never occur apart from some psychic context, which may make a significant difference to the sensation, neither do pleasures and pains ”exist apart from sensation“ (Collected Essays, p.  245). He goes on to assert that ”pains and pleasures have no qualities of their own,“ it being ”the quality of the sensations, or arrangements of sensations, which we place to their credit. The kinds of pains which have been urged in disproof of the above, the feelings that shoot or that burn or gnaw, are each due to the special sort of sensations, together with the rhythm of intensity in the pain“ (loc cit). If this is true, it offers a reason why we might mistake a quantitative for a qualitative difference, namely, that we mistake variations in sensory intensities and intensity-patterns over time, with which pleasure is attached or attendant, for qualitative differences in the pleasures themselves. Given that further features of the overall experience are said to be attributable to the powers of the sensations, these—rather than the pains and pleasures—appear to be the causal agents. If this interpretation is correct, pains and pleasures are epiphenomena. For present purposes the importance of this is that it bolsters the Idealists’ argument that pleasure cannot be the end of rational action, leave alone the ultimate end of moral action. It also explains the so-called Paradox of Hedonism.