The _physical_ sanction includes the pleasures and pains arising in the ordinary course of nature, unmodified by the will of any human being, or of any supernatural being.
The _political_ sanction is what emanates from the sovereign or supreme ruling power of the state. The punishments of the Law come under this head.
The _moral_ or _popular_ sanction results from the action of the community, or of the individuals that each person comes in contact with, acting without any settled or concerted rule. It corresponds to public opinion, and extends in its operation beyond the sphere of the law.
The _religious_ sanction proceeds from the immediate hand of a superior invisible being, either in the present, or in a future life.
The name Punishment is applicable only to the three last. The suffering that befalls a man in the course of nature is termed a _calamity_; if it happen through imprudence on his part, it may be styled a punishment issuing from the physical sanction.
Chapter IV. is the VALUE OF A LOT OF PLEASURE OR PAIN, HOW TO BE MEASURED. A pleasure or a pain is determined to be greater or less according to (1) its _intensity_, (2) its _duration_, (3) its _certainty_ or _uncertainty_, (4) its _propinquity_ or _remoteness_; all which are obvious distinctions. To these are to be added (5) its _fecundity_, or the chance it has of being followed by other sensations of its own kind; that is pleasures if it be pleasure, pains if it be pain. Finally (6) its _purity_, or the chance of its being unmixed with the opposite kind; a pure pleasure has no mixture of pain. All the six properties apply to the case of an individual person; where a plurality are concerned, a new item is present, (7) the _extent_, or the number of persons affected. These properties exhaust the meaning of the terms expressing good and evil; on the one side, happiness, convenience, advantage, benefit, emolument, profit, &c.; and, on the other, unhappiness, inconvenience, disadvantage, loss, mischief, and the like.
Next follows, in Chapter V., a classified enumeration of PLEASURES AND PAINS. In a system undertaking to base all Moral and Political action on the production of happiness, such a classification is obviously required. The author professes to have grounded it on an analysis of human nature, which analysis itself, however, as being too metaphysical, he withholds.