30. And yet it must be said that the better is that which is rightly loved with a greater love, which is rightly more pleasing, though in quite another sense. The “more” refers not to the relation of intensity between the two acts, but rather to a peculiar species of phenomena belonging to the general class of pleasure and displeasure, i.e., to the phenomena of choice. Thereby are meant relating acts which in their peculiar nature are known to every one in experience. In the province of ideas there is nothing analogous. In the province of judgment there are, it is true, alongside the simple, subjectless propositions, predicative judgments which are acts of a relative character, but this resemblance is very imperfect. The case here which has most similarity is that of a decision respecting a dialectically propounded question: “Is this true or false?” in which a sort of preference is given to one above the other. But even here it is always something true which is, so to speak, preferred to something false, never something more true over something less true. Whatever is true is true in a like degree, but whatever is good is not good in equal degree, and by “better” nothing else is meant than what, when compared with another good, is preferable, i.e. something which for its own sake, is preferred with a right preference. For the rest a somewhat wider usage of language allows us also to speak of a good as “better” over against a bad or purely indifferent, or even to call something bad over against something still worse “the better.” We then say not of course that it is good, but still better than the other.
This shortly in explanation of the notion of the better.
31. Next the question: How do we know that anything is really the better? Assuming the existence of simple knowledge of things as good and bad, we appear, so analogy suggests, to derive this insight from certain acts of preferring which have the character of rightness. For, like the simple exercise of pleasure, so also the act of preferring is sometimes of a lower or impulsive, and sometimes of a higher kind, and like the evident judgment, is qualified as right. The cases in point are, however, of such a nature that many might say, and perhaps with a better right, that it is analytical judgments which furnish us here with the means of progress, and that instead of our learning the preferability from the actual preferences, the preferences have the qualification of rightness because they already presume the recognition of the standard of preferability.[37]