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THE CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE SERIES.

Edited by HAVELOCK ELLIS.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE EMOTIONS.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF
THE EMOTIONS

BY

TH. RIBOT

PROFESSOR AT THE COLLEGE OF FRANCE, EDITOR OF THE

“REVUE PHILOSOPHIQUE.”

LONDON

WALTER SCOTT, LTD., PATERNOSTER SQUARE

1897

PREFACE.

The psychology of states of feelings, it is generally recognised, is still in a confused and backward condition. Although it has benefited in some measure by the contemporary allurement of psychological research, it must be acknowledged that it has only exerted a moderate seduction upon workers; the preference has been given to other studies, such as those of perception, of memory, of images, of movement, of attention. If any proof is necessary we may find it in the bibliographies, now published in Germany, America, and France, which give the psychological inventory of each year; of the whole number of books, memoirs, and articles which appear, less than the twentieth part, on an average, relates to the feelings and emotions. It is a very small part compared to the part played by the emotions and passions in human life, and this region of psychology is not deserving of such neglect. It is true that in recent years W. James and Lange seem to have brought this state of stagnation to an end. Their thesis, paradoxical in appearance, has aroused, especially in America, many discussions, criticisms, defences, and, what is of more value, observations and researches.

It must be acknowledged that for those who have any care for precision and clearness the study of the feelings and emotions presents great difficulties. Internal observation, always an uncertain guide which leads us but a little way, is here especially questionable. Experiment has given some very useful results, but they are much less important and numerous than in other regions of psychology. Detailed researches and monographs are lacking, so that the subject abounds with questions on which little light has yet been thrown. Finally, the dominant prejudice which assimilates emotional states to intellectual states, considering them as analogous, or even treating the former as dependent oh the latter, can only lead to error.

We have, in fact, in every study of the psychology of feeling to choose between two radically distinct positions, and this choice involves a difference in method. Concerning the final and essential nature of states of feeling there are two contrary opinions. According to one, they are secondary and derived, the qualities, modes, or functions of knowledge; they only exist through it; they are “confused intelligence”: that is the intellectualist thesis. According to the other, they are primitive, autonomous, not reducible to intelligence, able to exist outside it and without it; they have a totally different origin: that is the thesis which under its present form may be called physiological. These two doctrines exhibit variations which I ignore, as I am not writing their history, but they all come into one or the other of these two great currents.

The intellectualist theory, which is of considerable age, has found its most complete expression in Herbart and his school, for whom every state of feeling only exists through the reciprocal relation of representations; every emotion results from the co-existence in the mind of ideas which agree or disagree; it is the immediate consciousness of the momentary elevation or depression of psychic activity, of a free or impeded state of tension. But it does not exist by itself; it resembles musical harmonies and dissonances, which differ from elementary sounds though only existing through them. Suppress every intellectual state, and feeling vanishes; it only possesses a borrowed life, that of a parasite. The influence of Herbart still persists in Germany, and, with some exceptions (Horwicz, Schneider, etc.), complete or mitigated intellectualism predominates.

The doctrine which I have called physiological (Bain, Spencer, Maudsley, James, Lange[^[1]]) connects all states of feeling with biological conditions, and considers them as the direct and immediate expression of the vegetative life. It is the thesis which has been adopted, without any restriction, in this work. From this standpoint feelings and emotions are no longer a superficial manifestation, a simple efflorescence; they plunge into the individual’s depths; they have their roots in the needs and instincts, that is to say, in movements. Consciousness only delivers up a part of their secrets; it can never reveal them completely; we must descend beneath it. No doubt it is awkward to have to invoke an unconscious activity, to call in the intervention of an obscure and ill-determined factor; but to wish to reduce emotional states to clear and definite ideas, or to imagine that by this process we can fix them, is to misunderstand them completely and to condemn ourselves beforehand to failure.

For the rest, this is neither the place to criticise the intellectualist thesis, nor to justify the other in passing; the whole work is devoted to this task.

The book consists of two parts. The first studies the more general manifestations of feeling: pleasure and pain, the characteristic signs of this form of psychic life, everywhere diffused under manifold aspects; then the nature of emotion, a complex state which in the order of feelings corresponds to perception in the order of knowledge.

The second deals with the special emotions. This detailed study is of great importance for reasons which will be explained later on, especially because we must not rest in generalities; it furnishes a means of control and verification. The nature of the emotional life cannot be understood unless we follow it in its incessant transformations—that is to say, in its history. To separate it from social, moral, and religious institutions, from the æsthetic and intellectual movements which translate it and incarnate it, is to reduce it to a dead and empty abstraction. Thus an attempt has been made to follow all the emotions one after the other in the progress of their development, noting the successive movements of their evolution or their retrogression.

The pathology of each emotion has been sketched to complete and throw light on the study. I have tried to show that beneath an appearance of confusion, incoherence, and promiscuity, there is, from the morbid to the normal, from the complex to the simple, a conducting thread which will always bring us back to the point of origin.

A work which has for its aim to set forth the present situation of the psychology of feeling and emotion might have been made very long. By eliminating every digression and all historical exposition, it has been made as short as possible.

TH. RIBOT.

CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION.
THE EVOLUTION OF THE AFFECTIVE LIFE.

In all affective manifestations there are two elements: the motor states or impulses, which are primary; the agreeable or painful states, which are secondary—Unconscious organic protoplasmic sensibility; microorganisms—Chemical interpretation; psychological interpretation—Are there pure states of feeling?—Affirmative facts—The period of needs, the instinct of conservation—The period of primitive emotions—How they may be determined; the genetic or chronological method—Fear, anger, affection, the self-feeling, sexual emotion—Are joy and grief emotions?—The abstract emotions and their conditions—The passions are the equivalent in feeling of an intellectual obsession.

At the outset it may be useful to sketch in rough outline the general evolution of the life of feeling from its humble origin in organic sensibility to its highest and most complex forms. Afterwards we shall present the corresponding and inverse picture, that of its dissolution.

If we take at random, in the form in which daily experience gives them to us, the states known under the vague names of “sentiments,” “emotions,” “passions”: joy and sorrow, a toothache, a pleasurable perfume, love or anger, fear or ambition, æsthetic enjoyment or religious emotion, the rage of gambling or benevolence, the shudder of the sublime or the discomfort of disgust, and so on, for they are innumerable, one first observation is obvious even on a superficial examination: all these states, whatever they may be, offer a double aspect, objective or external, subjective or internal.

We note in the first place the motor manifestations: movements, gestures, and attitude of the body, a modification in the voice, blushing or pallor, tremors, changes in the secretions or excretions, and other bodily phenomena, varying in different cases. We may observe them in ourselves, in our fellows, and in animals. Although they may not always be motor in the strict sense, we may so call them, since they are all the result of a centrifugal action.

We note also, in ourselves directly and by the evidence of consciousness, in others indirectly and by induction, the existence of certain states which are agreeable, painful, or mixed, with their modes or shades, extremely variable in quality and in intensity.

Of these two groups—the motor manifestations on one side, the pleasures, pains, and their compounds on the other side—which is fundamental? Can we put them on the same level, and if we cannot, which is that which supports the other?

My reply to this question is clear: it is the motor manifestations which are essential. In other words, what are called agreeable or painful states only constitute the superficial part of the life of feeling, of which the deep element consists in tendencies, appetites, needs, desires, translated into movements. Most classical treatises (and even some others) say that sensibility is the faculty of experiencing pleasure and pain. I should say, using the same terminology, that sensibility is the faculty of tending or desiring, and consequently of experiencing pleasure and pain. There is nothing mysterious in the tendency; it is a movement or an arrest of movement in the nascent stage. I employ this word “tendency” as synonymous with needs, appetites, instincts, inclinations, desires; it is the generic term of which the others are varieties; it has the advantage over them of embracing at the same time both the psychological and physiological aspects of the phenomenon. All the tendencies suppose a motor innervation; they translate the needs of the individual, whatever they may be, physical or mental; the basis, the root of the affective life is in them, not in the consciousness of pleasure and pain which accompanies them according as they are satisfied or opposed. These agreeable or painful states are only signs and indications; and just as symptoms reveal to us the existence of a disease, and not its essential nature, which must be sought in the hidden lesions of the tissues, organs, and functions, so pleasure and pain are only effects which must guide us in the search and determination of causes hidden in the region of the instincts. If the contrary opinion has generally prevailed, and priority been accorded to the study of agreeable and painful manifestations considered as the essential element in the emotional life and serving to define it, that is the result of a bad method, of an exclusive faith in the evidence of consciousness, of a common illusion which consists in believing that the conscious portion of an event is its principal portion, but especially the consequence of the radically false idea that the bodily phenomena which accompany all states of feeling are factors that are negligible and external, foreign to psychology, and without interest for it.

For the present what has just been said is only an affirmation; the proofs will come later, and will occupy the whole of this book; at the outset it is only necessary to indicate clearly the position taken up. We may now follow the evolution of the life of feeling in its chief stages, which are—pre-conscious sensibility, the appearance of the primitive emotions, their transformation either into complex and abstract emotions or into that stable and chronic state which constitutes the passions.

I.

The first period is that of protoplasmic, vital, organic pre-conscious sensibility. We know that the organism has its memory; it preserves certain impressions, certain normal or morbid modifications; it is capable of adaptation: this point has been well established by Bering (who had been preceded by Laycock and Jessen). It is the outline of the superior form of psychic conscious memory. In the same way there exists an inferior unconscious form—organic sensibility—which is the preparation and the outline of superior conscious emotional life. Vital sensibility is to conscious feeling what organic memory is to memory in the ordinary sense of the word.

This vital sensibility is the capacity to receive stimuli and to re-act to them. In a well-known memoir, now of ancient date,[^[2]] Claude Bernard wrote: “Philosophers generally only know and admit conscious sensibility, that which their ego bears witness to. It is for them the psychic modification, pleasure or pain, determined by external modifications.... Physiologists necessarily place themselves at another point of view. They have to study the phenomenon objectively, under all the forms which it puts on. They observe that at the moment when a modifying agent acts on man, it not only provokes pleasure and pain, it not only affects the soul: it affects the body, it determines other re-actions besides the psychic re-actions, and these automatic re-actions, far from being an accessory part of the phenomenon, are on the contrary its essential element.” Then he showed experimentally that the employment of anæsthetics, pushed to an extreme, first abolished conscious sensibility, then the unconscious sensibility of the intestines and glands, then muscular irritability, finally the lively movements of the epithelial tissue. In the same way among plants: under the influence of ether the sensitive plant loses its singular properties, seeds cease to germinate, yeast to ferment, etc. Whence follows the conclusion that sensibility resides, not in the organs or tissues, but in their anatomical elements.

Since then these investigations into protoplasmic sensibility have been pursued with much ardour among micro-organisms. These beings, sometimes animal, sometimes vegetable, are simple masses of protoplasm, generally monocellular, appearing homogeneous, without differentiation of tissues. Now very varied tendencies have been found among these organisms. Some seek light, others flee from it persistently. The protoplasmic mass of myxomycetes which live in the bark of the oak, if placed in a watch-glass full of water, remain there in repose; but if sawdust is placed around them they immediately emigrate towards it as if seized by home-sickness. The actynophrys acts in the same way with regard to starch. Bacteria can discover even the trillionth part of a milligram of oxygen in a neighbouring body. Certain sedentary ciliated creatures appear to choose their food. Some also have thought that they detected an elective tendency in the movement which draws the male ovule towards the female ovule. I have only recalled a few of the many facts which have been enumerated.

If it is necessary to mention other examples, I may refer to the case studied in our own days under the name of “phagocytosis.” The struggle for life goes on, not only among individuals, but also among the anatomical elements which constitute the individual. Every tissue—muscular, connective, adipose, etc.—possesses phagocytes (devouring cells), of which the duty consists in devouring and destroying old or enfeebled cells of the same kind. Besides these special phagocytes there are general phagocytes, such as the white corpuscles of the blood, which come to the help of the others when they are not equal to their task. They stand against the pathogenic microbes, waging upon them an internal struggle, and opposing the invasion of infectious germs. This apparently teleological property seems at first very surprising. Later investigations have shown that the phagocytes are endowed with a sensibility (called chemiotaxic), owing to which they are able to distinguish the chemical composition of their environment and to approach it or leave it accordingly; deteriorated tissues attract certain of them which incorporate the feeble or dead cells, while the healthy and vigorous elements are perhaps able to defend themselves by secreting some substance which preserves them from phagocytosis.

These facts, taken from among many others to which I shall again have to refer when dealing with the sexual instinct, have been interpreted in two very different ways: one psychological, the other chemical.

For some there is in all these phenomena a rudiment of consciousness. Since the movements are adapted and appropriate, varying according to circumstances, there must be choice they say, and choice involves a psychic element; the mobility is the revelation of an obscure “psyche” endowed with attractive and repulsive tendencies.

For the others (whose opinion I adopt), the whole may be explained on physico-chemical grounds. No doubt there is affinity, attraction and repulsion, but only in the scientific sense; these words are metaphors derived from the language of consciousness which should be purged of all anthropomorphic elements. Several authors have shown by numerous observations and experiments the chemical conditions which determine or prevent this pretended choice (Sachs, Verworn, Löb, Maupas, Bastian, etc.).

On this point, as on all questions of origin, we must decide according to probabilities, and the probabilities appear to be all in favour of the chemical hypothesis. In any case, this matter has only a secondary interest for us here. If we admit conscious tendencies, then the origin of the emotional life coincides with the very origin of physiological life. If we eliminate all psychology, there still remains the physiological tendency, that is to say the motor element, which in some degree, from the lowest to the highest, is never quite wanting.

This excursion into the pre-conscious period—since we so regard it—puts us in possession of one result. At the end of this investigation we find two well-defined tendencies, physico-chemical and organic—the one of attraction, the other of repulsion; these are the two poles of the life of feeling. What is attraction in this sense? Simply assimilation; it blends with nutrition. With sexual attraction, however, we must note that we already reach a higher grade; the phenomenon is more complex, the monocellular being no longer acts to preserve itself but to maintain the species. As to repulsion, we may remark that it is manifested in two ways. On one side it is the opposite of assimilation: the cell or the tissue rejects what does not suit it. On another side, at a somewhat superior stage, it is in some degree already defensive.

We have thus gained a basis for our subject by finding that beneath the conscious life of feeling there exists a very low and obscure region, that of vital or organic sensibility, which is an embryonic form of conscious sensibility and supports it.

II.

We now pass from darkness to light, from the vital to the psychic. But before entering into the conscious period of the life of feeling and following it in the progress of its evolution, this is perhaps the place to examine a sufficiently important question which has usually been wrongly answered in the negative: Are there pure states of feeling—that is to say, states empty of any intellectual element, of every representative content, not connected either with perceptions or images or concepts, simply subjective, agreeable, disagreeable, or mixed? If we reply in the negative, it follows that without exception no kind of feeling can ever exist by itself; it always requires a support; it is never more than an accompaniment. This proposition is held by the majority; it has naturally been adopted by the intellectualists, and Lehmann has recently maintained it in its most radical form; a state of emotional consciousness is never met with; pleasure and pain are always connected with intellectual states.[^[3]] If we reply in the affirmative, then the state of feeling is considered as having at least sometimes an independent existence of its own and not as condemned to play for ever the part of acolyte or parasite.

This is a question of fact, and observation alone can settle it. Although there are other reasons to give in favour of the autonomous and even primordial character of the life of feeling, I reserve them for the conclusion of this book, to remain at present in the region of pure and simple experience. There can be no doubt that, as a rule, emotional states accompany intellectual states, but I deny that it can never be otherwise, and that perceptions and representations are the necessary condition of existence, absolutely and without exception, of every manifestation of feeling.

There is a first class of facts which I only refer to in order not to ignore them. Although they have been invoked they seem to me to carry little weight. I refer to the emotions which suddenly break out in animals and are not explicable by any anterior experience. Gratiolet having presented to a very young puppy a fragment of wolf’s skin so worn that it resembled parchment, the animal on smelling it was seized with extreme fright. Kröner, in his book on cœnæsthesia,[^[4]] has collected similar facts. It is, however, so difficult to know what passes in the consciousness of an animal, and to ascertain the part of instinct and of hereditary transmission, that I do not insist. Moreover, in all these cases the emotion is excited by an external sensation which touches a spring and sets the mechanism of instinct at work; so that it might be argued that we are not here concerned with a pure and independent state of feeling. To remove all doubt, we require cases in which the state of feeling precedes the intellectual state, not being provoked by, but, on the contrary, provoking it.

The child at the beginning can only possess a purely affective life. During the intra-uterine period he neither hears nor sees nor touches; even after birth it is some weeks before he learns to localise his sensations. His psychic life, however rudimentary it may be, must consist in a vague state of pleasure and pain analogous to ours. He cannot connect them with perceptions, because he is still unable to perceive. It is a widely accredited opinion that the infant enters into life by pain; Preyer has questioned this; we shall see later on what grounds. At present we need not insist upon these facts, since we cannot interpret them except by induction. Adults will furnish us with unquestionable and abundant evidence.

As a general rule, every deep change in the internal sensations is translated in an equivalent fashion into the cœnæsthesia and modifies the tone of feeling. Now the internal sensations are not representative, and this factor, of capital importance, has been forgotten by the intellectualists. Of this purely organic state, which afterwards becomes a state of feeling, and then an intellectual state, we shall later on find numerous examples in studying the genesis of the emotions; it is enough for the moment to note a few of them. Under the influence of haschisch, says Moreau (de Tours), who has studied it so well, “the feeling which is experienced is one of happiness. I mean by this a state which has nothing in common with purely sensual pleasure. It is not the pleasure of the glutton or the drunkard, but is much more comparable to the joy of the miser or that caused by good news.” I once knew well a man who for ten years constantly took haschisch in large doses; he withstood the drug better than might be expected, and finally died insane. I received his oral and written confidences, often to a greater extent than I desired. During this long period I have often noted his feeling of inexhaustible satisfaction, translated now and again into strange inventions or commonplace reflections, but in his opinion invaluable. At the epoch of puberty, when it follows its normal development, we know that there is a profound metamorphosis. Certain conditions, known or unknown, act on the organism and modify its state (first moment); translated into consciousness, these organic conditions give birth to a particular tone of feeling (second moment); this state of feeling produces corresponding representations (third moment). The representative element appears in the last place. Similar phenomena are produced under other conditions, in which the cœnæsthesia is modified by the state of the sexual organs (menstruation, pregnancy). The emotional state is produced first, the intellectual state afterwards. But the most abundant source from which we may draw examples at will is certainly the period of incubation which precedes the appearance of mental diseases. In most cases it is a state of vague sadness. Sadness without a cause, it is commonly said, and rightly, if by that is meant that it is produced neither by an accident nor by bad news nor by ordinary causes; but not causeless, if we take into consideration the internal sensations which in such a case play a part which is unperceived but not the less effective. This inclination to melancholy is also the rule in the neuroses. Sometimes it happens that the state of feeling, instead of being a slow incubation, is an aura of emotional character and short duration (a few minutes to at most a few hours). Some patients, by repeated experience, are aware of this; they know by the change that the attack is approaching. Féré (Les Epilepsies) gives several examples; among others, that of a young man who under these circumstances became totally changed in character, which he expressed in an original manner by saying, “I feel that my heart changes.” That is because in the last stage this state of feeling takes form and becomes fixed in an idea, as may best be seen in persecutional insanity.

Without insisting, as would be easy, on any further enumeration of facts, we may reduce these pure states of feeling to four principal types:

1. Agreeable state (pleasure, joy): that of haschisch and similar drugs, certain stages of general paralysis of the insane, the sense of well-being experienced by the consumptive and the dying; many people who have escaped a death which they considered certain have felt themselves overwhelmed on its approach by a feeling of beatitude, without further definition, which is perhaps only the absence of all suffering.[^[5]]

2. Painful state (sadness, annoyance): the incubation period of most diseases, the melancholy of menstrual periods.

3. State of fear: without reason, without apparent causes, without justification, without object; fear of everything and of nothing: a fairly frequent state, which we shall examine in detail when we come to the phobias.

4. State of excitability: connected with anger, frequent in neurosis; it is an unstable and explosive state of being which, at first vague and undetermined, ends by taking form, attaching itself to a representation, and discharging itself on an object.

Finally, there are mixed states, formed by the co-existence or alternation of simple states.

From all which goes before it results that there is a pure and autonomous life of feeling, independent of the intellectual life and having its cause below, in the variations of the cœnæsthesia, which is itself the resultant and concert of vital actions. In the psychology of feeling the part played by external sensations is very scanty compared to that played by internal sensations, and certainly one must be unable to see beyond the first to set up as a rule “that there is no emotional state unconnected with an intellectual state.”

Having made this point clear, we may return to our general picture of the evolution.

1. Above organic sensibility we find the stage of needs—that is to say, of purely vital or physiological tendencies with consciousness added. In man this period only exists at the beginning of life, and is translated by internal sensations (hunger, thirst, need of sleep, fatigue, etc.). It is constituted by a bundle of tendencies essentially physiological in character, and these tendencies have nothing added or external; they are life in action. Each anatomical element, each tissue, each organ has but one end, to exercise its activity; and the physiological individual is nothing but the convergent expression of all these tendencies. They may present themselves under a double form. In the one case they express a lack, a deficiency; the anatomical element, the tissue, the organism has need of something. In this form the tendency is imperious and irresistible; such is the hunger of the carnivorous animal, which swallows its prey alive. In the other case they translate an excess, a superfluity: such are, a gland which needs to secrete, a well-nourished animal which needs to move: this is the embryonic form of the luxurious emotions.

All these needs have a point of convergence—the preservation of the individual; to use the current expression, we see in them the exercise of the instinct of preservation. On the subject of this instinct there have recently been discussions which seem to me sufficiently idle. Is the instinct of preservation primitive? is it derived? Some authors are for the first hypothesis; others (especially James and Sergi) lean towards the second. According to the point of view each of these two solutions is admissible and true. From the synthetic point of view the instinct of preservation is primordial, since it is nothing else but the resultant and sum of all the particular tendencies of each essential organ; it is only a collective formula. From the analytic point of view, it is secondary, since it presupposes all the particular tendencies into which it is dissolved, since each of its elements is simple, and since it adds nothing and is nothing but their translation into consciousness. One might ask in the same way if a sensation of sound is simple or compound, and here also, according to the point of view, the answer would vary. For consciousness the event is one, simple and irreducible; for objective analysis the event is compound, reducible to a definite number of vibrations. In the various regions of psychology we might find many problems of the same kind. The important point is to understand that the instinct of preservation is not an entity, but an abbreviated expression indicating a group of tendencies.

2. Emerging from the period of needs, which are thus reducible to tendencies of physiological order accompanied by physical pleasures or pains, we now enter the period of primitive emotions.

We cannot at the present point determine rigorously and in detail what is meant by an emotion (see Part I., Chap. vii.); it is enough to give a rough but comprehensible definition. From our standpoint, emotion is in the order of feeling the equivalent of perception in the intellectual order, a complex synthetic state essentially made up of produced or arrested movements, of organic modifications (in circulation, respiration, etc.), of an agreeable or painful or mixed state of consciousness peculiar to each emotion. It is a phenomenon of sudden appearance and limited duration; it is always related to the preservation of the individual or the species—directly as regards primitive emotions, indirectly as regards derived emotions.

Emotion then, even while we keep to its primitive forms, introduces us into a higher region of the affective life in which its manifestations become complex. But how can we determine these primitive forms—the simple irreducible emotions—for this is our principal aim? Many neglect this determination, or leave it to arbitrary chance. The old authors seem at this point to have followed a method of abstraction and generalisation which could only lead them to entities. It was an accredited doctrine among them that all the “passions” can finally be reduced to love and hate; we meet this thesis throughout. To reach this conclusion they seem to have brought together and compared the different passions, disengaged the resemblances, eliminated the differences, and by continued reductions abstracted from this multiplicity its most general characters.[^[6]]

If by love and hate we are to understand the movements of attraction or repulsion which lie at the bottom of the emotions, there is nothing to be said; but we are only given abstractions and theoretical concepts; such a determination is illusory and without practical utility. If we understand love (what love? for nothing is vaguer than this word) and hate in a more concrete sense, and pretend to consider them as the primitive source from which to derive all the other emotions, that is a purely mental opinion, an assertion which nothing justifies.

The determination of the primitive emotions must be made not by abstraction and generalisation, but by verification. To attain this I can see but one method to follow—the method of observation, which teaches us the order and the date of appearance of the various emotions, and gives us their genealogical and chronological list. We may count as primitive all those which cannot be reduced to previous manifestations, all those which appear as a new manifestation, and those alone; all the others are secondary and derived.

The materials for this investigation can only be sought in the psychology of animals and in that of children. The first will give us but little help. No doubt special and authoritative treatises enumerate the emotions of animals, but without any distinction between the simple and the compound, and with no precise indication as to the order of their appearance. It is not the same with infantile psychology; the numerous studies published on this subject during the last thirty years have rendered possible an attempt which could not be made before.

The question is then to determine in accordance with facts the order in which the emotions appear, only taking into account those which seem primitive—that is to say, not reducible to other emotions. I limit myself to their simple enumeration, with an indication of their chief characters; each of them will be the object of a special study in the second part of this book.

1. Fear is the first in date, according to unanimous observations. Preyer finds that it is manifested from the second day. At the same time the fact which he records seems to me to agree with surprise rather than with fear properly so called. In any case, according to the same author, it is easy to note it after twenty-four hours. Darwin thought he could only observe it at the end of four months, Perez at two months. The last is inclined to believe that this emotion is first aroused by auditory sensations, and then by visual sensations. The precocity of its appearance has been attributed to hereditary transmission, an assertion which we shall have to examine.

2. After the defensive emotion, the offensive emotion appears in the form of anger. Perez notes it between two and three months; Preyer and Darwin at ten months; they mean real anger, marked by the contraction of the eyebrows and other clear symptoms (to throw itself about, crying, etc.). Naturally the dates indicated for each emotion are not rigorously fixed; they must vary according to the child’s temperament and circumstances.

3. Then comes affection. Some authors use the word sympathy, which seems to me too vague. It shows itself by its fundamental method of expression, the movement of attraction, the seeking for contact. Darwin, who has well described it, remarks that it probably appears very early in life, judging by the infant’s smile, in the second month, but that he had no clear proof that the child recognised any one before the fourth month; at the fifth month he showed a wish to go towards his nurse, but only at twelve months did he show affection spontaneously and by plain gestures. Darwin adds that sympathy (?) was manifested exactly at ten months, eleven days, when the child’s nurse pretended to cry.[^[7]] According to Perez, it appears towards ten months.[^[8]] It is from this source that complex forms of great importance must later on be derived—the social and moral emotions.

With fear, anger, and affection we remain in the region of the emotions which man shares with animals; for even affection is met with very low in the animal series, at all events in the form of maternal love. These three emotions have therefore a very clear character of universality. We now make a step which introduces us into a purely human region.

4. This stage is marked by the appearance of emotions connected with the personality, the ego. Hitherto we have had an individual, a living being with more or less vague consciousness of his life; but the child, usually towards the age of at least three years, becomes conscious of himself as a person. Then appear new emotional manifestations, of which the source may be called for lack of a better term the self-feeling or egoistic emotion (selbstgefühl, amour propre), and which may translate itself in two forms: in a negative form as a feeling of powerlessness and debility, and in a positive form as a feeling of strength and audacity. This feeling of plenitude and exuberance is the source from which later numerous emotional forms are derived (pride, vanity, ambition). Perhaps also we must connect with it all those which express a superfluity of life: the need of physical exercise, play in all its forms, curiosity or the desire for knowledge, the need of creation by imagination or action.

5. There remains the sexual emotion; it is the last in chronological order and the moment of its appearance is easy to fix, since it has objective physiological marks. It is an error to suppose that it can be derived from affection, or that affection can be derived from it, as has sometimes been maintained. The observation of facts completely condemns this thesis, and shows that they cannot be reduced one to the other. Later on we shall meet with evident proofs.

Now we meet with one of those embarrassing questions with which our subject is full. Must we here conclude our list of primitive emotions, or must we add two others: joy and grief? It is possible to incline to the latter view. Thus Lange has included joy and grief among the four or five simple “emotions” which he has chosen as types of his descriptions. The following reasons, in my opinion, are against this solution. No doubt joy and grief present all the characters which constitute an emotion: movements or arrest of movements, changes in the organic life, and a state of consciousness sui generis. But in that case physical pleasure and physical pain must also be included among the emotions, for they both present the characters above enumerated; moreover, there is an identity of nature between physical pleasure and joy on one side, physical pain and grief on the other side, as I hope to prove later on; the only difference is that the physical form is preceded by a state of the organism, the moral form (joy, grief) by a representation. In other words, we should have to class pleasure and pain (without qualification or restriction) among the primitive emotions. Now these two alleged emotions present, with reference to the five already named, an evident and capital difference: their character of generality. Fear is quite distinct from anger, affection from self-feeling, and sexual emotion from the other four by its specific mark. Each of them is a complex state, distinct and impenetrable; just as vision is in relation to hearing, or touch to smell. Each expresses a particular tendency (defensive, offensive, attraction to the like, etc.), and is adapted to a particular end. Pleasure and pain, on the contrary, express general conditions of being; they are diffused everywhere and penetrate everywhere. There is pain in fear, in certain moments of anger and of the self-feeling; there is pleasure in sexual emotion, in certain moments of anger and of the self-feeling. These two states have no domain of their own. Emotion, by its nature, particularises; pleasure and pain by their nature universalise; they are the general marks of the affective life, and if they coincide like the emotions with motor, vaso-motor, and other phenomena, that is because no form of feeling can exist without its physiological conditions.

Such are the reasons for which I refuse to class the agreeable and painful states among primitive emotions, and to consider them as of the same nature. As to the moment of their appearance, physical pain is held to co-exist with the very beginning of extra-uterine life; physical pleasure resulting from satisfied appetite, the sensation of warmth, etc., must begin almost at the same period. Joy and grief are later. According to Preyer, the smile and brightness of the eyes indicate joy; “from the second month an infant takes pleasure in hearing singing and the piano.” I am not sure that this example is very decisive; I prefer to see here the pleasure that is mostly physical. Darwin observed it towards the fourth month, perhaps before, but very clearly towards twelve months on the return of an absent person. Grief may manifest itself, according to Preyer, towards the fourth month (tears before the fourth week). Darwin, in the observation already quoted, makes the first appearance at six months. On the whole, the observations are few and wanting in harmony, because of the great difficulty at this moment of life in distinguishing with certainty between the two forms of pleasure and the two forms of pain.

At the root of each of the primitive emotions there is a tendency, an instinct; but I do not claim that this list exhausts the human instincts; later on we shall have to return to this point (Part II., Introduction). Let us admit as a provisional hypothesis that these five emotions alone are irreducible, and all the others derived from them. In the sequel I shall try to indicate how these secondary emotions are the result of a complete evolution, of an arrest of development, or of a mixture and combination (Part II., Chapter vii.).

III.

Above these emotions, which, though composed of several elements, are simple as emotions, and may be called innate since they are furnished by the organism itself, there are numerous forms of feeling manifested in the course of life, aroused by representations of the past or the future, by the construction of images, by concepts, by an ideal. As each primitive emotion will be studied in its total development, from its lower to its most highly intellectualised forms, it is useless now to attempt a sketch of this ascending march, which, when reduced to generalities, would be vague and confused. It reaches its last stage in the loftiest regions of science, art, religion, and morals.

One may assert without risk that these higher forms are unattainable by the great majority of men. Perhaps scarcely one person in a hundred thousand or a million reaches them; the others know them not, or only suspect them approximately and by hearsay. They are a promised land only entered by a few of the elect.

To reach the higher sentiments, in fact, two conditions are needed: (1) one must be capable of conceiving and understanding general ideas; (2) these ideas must not remain simple intellectual forms, but must be able to arouse certain feelings, certain approximate tendencies. If one or other condition is wanting, the emotion is not produced.

The formula of the evolution during this period is very simple; the order of development of the emotions depends strictly on the order of development of general ideas; it is the evolution of ideas which rules that of feelings. Here we are in perfect agreement with the intellectualist theory.

The faculty of abstraction and generalisation is very unequally apportioned. It depends on the race, the age, the individual. Some never pass the level of generic images which are only concrete images simplified and condensed. Some reach those medium forms of abstraction in which the word plays the part of substitute for the reality, but requires, in order to be understood, that the qualities of the thing which it represents should be figured by a vague scheme, the concomitant of the word. Some reach the stage of complete substitution, in which the word takes the place of the whole, and has need of no auxiliary to insure the mental operation. Each of these degrees (which include sub-divisions I do not indicate) has its possible echo in feeling. Thus every one, according to the range of his intelligence, may reach some or all these stages, and according to his temperament experience or not experience at each of them an emotional state. The emotions which are susceptible of a complete evolution will furnish the proofs. A very simple example may be found in the sexual impulse, which may in turn be physiological, psycho-physiological, chiefly psychological, and finally intellectual. At its lowest stage (in the micro-organisms and similar beings) we find facts of a purely vital and organic order, in my opinion unconscious; then consciousness appears, but the sexual emotion manifests itself in a purely specific shape without individual choice; it is simply an instinct, “the genius of the race making use of the individual to reach its own ends.” Later on individuality becomes marked; we find choice; the tender emotions, not found in the early stage, are superadded. Then comes the moment of equilibrium between the organic elements and the psychic elements, as usually found in the normal average man. This state is very complex, resulting from the fusion or convergence of numerous tendencies, hence its power of attraction. Then comes a rupture of equilibrium, a period of interversion; the physiological element is slowly effaced, the psychic element gains in intensity; it is a repetition of the primitive period, but in the opposite direction. This is the intellectual phase of love; the idea appears first, the physiological phenomena come afterwards. At a more elevated stage of refinement the concrete personal image is replaced by a vague impersonal representation, an ideal, a concept; this is pure platonic mystical love, the organic accompaniment of which is so feeble that it is usually denied.

These subtle and refined forms which the intellectualists regard as superior are really only an impoverishment of feeling. They are besides rare, and except in a few cases ineffective; for it is a rule that every feeling loses its strength in the measure that it becomes intellectualised. The blind faith in “the power of ideas” is in practice an inexhaustible source of illusions and errors. An idea which is only an idea, a simple fact of knowledge, produces nothing and does nothing; it only acts if it is felt, if it is accompanied by an affective state, if it awakes tendencies, that is to say, motor elements. One may have thoroughly studied Kant’s Practical Reason, have penetrated all its depths, covered it with glosses and luminous commentaries, without adding one iota to one’s practical morality; that comes from another source, and it is one of the most unfortunate results of intellectualist influence in the psychology of the feelings that it has led us to ignore so evident a truth.

IV.

It may be remarked that in contemporary treatises the word passion has almost entirely disappeared, or is only met with incidentally.[^[9]] Yet it has a long past which would be interesting to trace, if I had not forbidden myself all historical digressions. At present the term emotion is preferred to designate the chief manifestations of the affective life; it is a generic expression; passion is only a mode of it. Ordinary language rightly preserves the word, since it answers to a reality; and passion is an event of too much practical importance for us to dispense with speaking of it, explaining how it differs from emotion, what its nature is, and under what conditions it appears.

There is a fairly general agreement as to its definition; and beneath different formulas, according as they emanate from a moralist, a theologian, a philosopher, or a biologist, we always find the same essential characters: “it is an intemperate want;” “it is an inclination or liking carried to excess;” “it[“it] is a violent and sustained desire which dominates the whole cerebral being,” etc.; the terminology alone varies.[^[10]]

If we seek the special mark of passion and its characteristics among the phenomena of the affective life, we must distinguish it from emotion on one side and insanity on the other; for it is situated midway between the two.

It is difficult to express with clearness and precision the difference between emotion and passion. Is it a difference of nature? No, for emotion is the source whence passion flows. Is it a difference of degree? This distinction is precarious, for while there are calm emotions and violent passions, the contrary may also be met with. A third difference remains, duration. It is generally said that passion is an enduring state; emotion is the acute form, passion the chronic form. Violence and duration are the characters usually assigned to it; but we may further define its essential nature. Passion is in the affective order what an imperative idea (idée fixe) is in the intellectual order; we might add what a contraction is in the motor order. It is the affective equivalent of the imperative idea. This needs some explanation.

The normal intellectual state is a plurality of states of consciousness determined by the mechanism of association. If at a given moment a perception or representation arises and occupies alone the chief field of consciousness, ruling as a sovereign, making a space around it, and only permitting associations which are in direct relation with itself, we have a state of attention. This “monoideïsm” is by its nature exceptional and transitory. If it does not change its object, persisting or repeating itself constantly, we have the fixed idea, which may be called permanent attention. It is not necessarily morbid, as Newton’s celebrated phrase and other evidence show; but the latent or actual sovereignty of the fixed idea is absolute and tyrannical.

In the same way the normal state of feeling is the succession of pleasures, troubles, desires, whims, etc., which in their temperate form, and often dulled by repetition, constitute the prosaic round of ordinary life. At a given moment some circumstance causes a shock; that is emotion. Some tendency annihilates all the others, momentarily confiscating the whole activity to its profit; that is the equivalent of attention. Usually this passage of movements in a single direction is not enduring; but if, instead of disappearing, the emotion remains fixed, or repeats itself incessantly, always the same, with the slight modifications involved in passing from the acute to the chronic stage—that is passion, which is permanent emotion. In spite of apparent eclipses, it is always ready to appear, absolute and tyrannical.

Concerning the origin of passion, moralists and novelists have remarked that it comes into being in two different ways—by a thunderbolt or by “crystallisation,” by sudden action or by slow actions. This double origin denotes predominance either of the affective life or of the intellectual life. When passion is born suddenly it issues directly from emotion itself and retains a certain violence of nature, so much at least as its metamorphosis into a permanent disposition admits. In the other case the initiative is taken by the intellectual states (images, ideas), and the passion is slowly constituted as the result of association which itself is only an effect, for it obeys a latent influence, a hidden factor, an unconscious activity only revealed by its work. Representations only attract each other and associate by reason of their affective similitude, of the emotional tone which is common to them, and by successive additions these little streams form a river. This form of passion, on account of its origin, has less ardour and more tenacity.

After distinguishing passion from emotion, it is still necessary to separate it from insanity, its other neighbour. Certain authors have at once classed all passions with insanity; I cannot accept this proposition. It may suit the moralist, by no means the psychologist. But the task of separation is very delicate, and cannot be attempted in this Introduction. The distinction between the normal and the morbid, always difficult, is especially so in the case of the psychology of the feelings. I shall endeavour elsewhere (Part I., Chap. iv.) to find the indications which enable us to establish this separation legitimately, and the task which we now put aside in its general form will come before us later on in the case of each particular emotion.

PART I.
GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY.

CHAPTER I.
PHYSICAL PAIN.

Its anatomical and physiological conditions; pain nerves, transmission to the centres—Modifications of the organism accompanying physical pain: circulation, respiration, nutrition, movements—Are they the effects of paint?—Pain is only a sign—The analgesias: unconsciousness of pain and intellectual consciousness—Retardation of pain after sensation—Hyperalgesia—Nature of pain: theory that it is a sensation; theory that it is a quality of sensation—Pain may result from the quality or the intensity of the stimulus—Hypotheses regarding its ultimate cause: it depends on a form of movement, a chemical modification.

Many definitions of pain have, very unnecessarily, been offered. Some are even tautological, others imply a hypothesis as to its nature by relating it to strong stimulations.[^[11]] Let us regard it as an internal state which every one knows by experience, and of which consciousness reveals innumerable modes, but which by its generality and its multiplicity of aspect escapes definition.

In its primitive form pain is always physical, that is to say, connected with external or internal sensations. Sufficiently precise as regards superficial parts of the body, especially the skin, its localisation is vaguer when it is seated in the deeper parts, the viscera, the instruments of organic life. In the last case, when the pain is of internal and non-peripheral origin, coming from the great sympathetic or the related vagus nerve, it is accompanied by a state of anxiety, of depression, or of anguish, which we shall often encounter, and which frequently causes it to be said that “it seems to the patient that the workings of nature within him are suspended.” For the present, without distinguishing between these two origins, external and internal, we will study the objective characters of physical pain taken in general: first its anatomical and physiological conditions, then the bodily modifications which accompany it and in popular language are called its effects.

I.

The transmission of painful impressions from the periphery to the cortical centres is far from being determined in all the stages of its course.

The nerve terminations, from their outpost position, receive the first shock; but what part do they play? It is known that the nerves of the deep organs and the filaments of the great sympathetic have no specially constructed terminations. The nerves of special sense, on the contrary,—vision, hearing, smell, and taste,—possess special peripheral apparatus (retina, organ of Corti, etc.) of very complex anatomy; it is known that their rôle is specially sensorial; they are above all instruments of knowledge, seldom directly of pain or pleasure. So that the question of nerve terminations in relation to pain may chiefly be confined to the nerves of the tactile apparatus, taking the word in its largest sense. The extreme difficulty of isolating the purely peripheral impression from that which reaches the nerve itself renders almost insoluble the question as to the part played by these peripheral apparatus. Beaunis,[^[12]] relying on the cases of localised anæsthesia in which the patient no longer feels pain but still perceives contact, thinks that analgesia would reach the nerves before acting on their terminations, shut up in more or less resistant capsules.

Are there special nerves for the transmission of pain? Goldscheider, well known for his researches on cold and heat points on the skin, at first maintained that there are.[^[13]] According to him, the pain-bearing nerve filaments are interlaced with the sensorial nerves, more numerously with the nerves of general sensation (touch, heat, cold), less numerously with those of special sense. If the existence of these special pain nerves were well established, it would have as great an importance for our subject as the discoveries of Sachs and others, on the nervous filaments peculiar to the muscles, have had for the study of the kinæsthetic sense. But this physiologist has since repudiated his first assertion, and maintained that it was misunderstood; he admits pain points (points sensible to pain), but not a specific organ for pain nor special nerves to transmit it.[^[14]] Frey, on the other hand, professes to have proved experimentally both pain nerves and appropriate terminal organs. His observations have been rejected as inaccurate. At the present time there is nothing to establish the existence of pain nerves, and most authors have given strong reasons against the probability of such a discovery. Rejecting this hypothesis, we may admit that an impression of pain, like any other impression, is transmitted by the nerves of general or special sensibility. When it has entered the spinal cord at the posterior roots, the road it follows to reach the higher centres has given rise to much investigation and discussion. According to Schiff, transmission takes place through the grey substance, tactile impressions passing by the posterior fibres; there would thus be two distinct paths, one for the feeling, the other for the sensation properly so-called. Brown-Séquard also admits distinct paths, but through the grey substance alone; the anterior region is devoted to touch, the median to temperature, the posterior to pain. According to Wundt, impressions of touch and temperature have a primary path through the white substance when stimulation is moderate, a secondary path through the grey substance acting as a surplus channel when stimulation is violent. The hypothesis of separate paths, whatever they may be, has the advantage of harmonising with the well-known fact, to which we shall return, that the transmission of pain is slower than sensorial transmission. Lehmann, who takes up a rigidly intellectualist position, cannot admit that the element of feeling has a certain independence in relation to the element of sensation, existing by itself. He believes that the delay is explained by the fact that “pain requires a stronger excitation in the sensorial region than sensation without pain, and that consequently pain is only produced after sensation, as the excitation increases in intensity.”[^[15]] This explanation may be accepted, but it assumes that pain always depends on intensity of stimulus, which is not proved.

From the spinal cord we reach the medulla, to which some authors assign the chief part. The latest, Sergi, in his book Dolore e Piacere (Milan, 1894), makes it the seat of the affective phenomena in general (pains, pleasures, emotions). What in his opinion testifies to the importance of the medulla in the affective life is the number and nature of the nervous centres situated between the protuberance and the floor of the small ventricle, centres which act on the heart, the vessels, the lungs, the secretions, the intestinal movements. “The vital knot of Flourens is the vital centre and must also be the centre of pleasure and pain, which are merely alterations in the functions of organic life.”[^[16]] In his opinion (which is mine also) the part played by the brain in the genesis of states of feeling has been exaggerated; it only acts in two ways—by rendering the disturbances of organic life, the physical basis of the feelings, apparent to consciousness, and as a cause of stimulation by means of ideas.

However disposed we may be to restrict the part played by the brain—that is to say the cortical layer—it remains a predominant factor and the final terminus in the process of transmission. Here we plunge into darkness. Researches into cerebral localisation teach us on this subject nothing which is generally admitted. During the first period of such studies, which may be called that of circumscribed localisation à outrance, Ferrier placed the seat of the emotions in the occipital lobes, because, in his opinion, that region of the cortex receives the visceral sensations, because the sexual instinct is dependent upon them, and finally, because these lobes are more developed in women than in men. It is needless to bring forward the numerous criticisms of this thesis. During the second and present period of localisation, which may be called that of disseminated localisation, functional rather than anatomical, authors are little inclined to admit a particular centre for the affective life in general, and still less for pain. All the sensory centres, and even all the motor centres (perhaps there are fundamentally only sensori-motor centres with preponderance of one or the other element), may under certain conditions of activity produce in consciousness a feeling of pleasure or pain.

The hypothesis of a cortical centre is not, therefore, probable; I shall return to this point in discussing the emotions.

II.

The modifications of the organism which accompany physical pain have been so often described that it is enough to trace a slight outline of them. They may be reduced to a single formula: pain is associated with diminution and disorganisation of the vital functions.

1. It acts on the movements of the heart, generally decreasing its frequency; in extreme cases the slackening may go so far as to produce syncope. In animals submitted for experiment in the laboratory, even after removal of the encephalon, painful impressions diminish the cardiac contractions. In man, though the frequency of the pulse is sometimes increased in one form or another, there is always a modification of the rhythm appreciable by the sphygmograph. Bichat was right when he said: “If you wish to know whether pain is real, examine the pulse.”

2. The influence on respiration is more irregular and more unstable; the rhythm becomes abnormal, sometimes rapid, sometimes slow; the inspirations are successively short and deep. But the final result is a notable diminution in the carbonic acid exhaled—that is to say a real slackening of combustion. The temperature is lowered. “I had imagined,” says Mantegazza, “that pain would be accompanied by an increase of heat, muscular action being very intense under the influence of great suffering. Experiment on animals and on myself proved the contrary.”[^[17]] Heidenhain and Mantegazza have in fact noted an average diminution of two degrees centigrade, which, according to the latter, may last an hour and a half or more; it would be due to the contraction of the peripheral blood-vessels.

3. The action of pain on digestion is well known, and shows itself by retardation or disturbance: loss of appetite, arrest of secretions, indigestion, vomiting, diarrhœa, etc. If permanent it acts on the general nutrition, and shows itself in modifications of the urinary secretion, and lasting discoloration of the skin or hair. It is not infrequent to find blanching of the hair, the beard or eyebrows in a few days under the influence of great pain.[^[18]]

4. The motor functions translate pain in two opposite ways: the passive form of depression, arrest, or total suppression of movements, in which the patient seems overcome; the active form, marked by agitation, contortions, convulsions, and cries. The latter case seems to contradict the general formula connecting pain with diminished activity, and seems to me to have been misinterpreted by some authors. This violent excitement, indeed, is an expenditure which quickly makes itself felt and soon leaves the individual enfeebled. It does not flow, as in joy or play, from a surplus of activity; it is weakening, irregular and spasmodic. It seems to me to originate in the instinctive expression of the emotions. The wounded animal shakes the painful part of his body, his paw or his head, as if trying to expel the suffering. All these disorderly and violent motor reactions are a defence of the organism, a useless and often hurtful defence, but resulting from acts which, formerly or under other circumstances, were adapted to their end.

Lehmann experimented on five persons, submitting them in turn to agreeable and disagreeable impressions, in both cases registering the changes in respiration and in the volume of the arm with the help of Mosso’s plethysmograph.[^[19]] His experiments led him to the following conclusions:—

Every agreeable impression produces an increase in the volume of the arm and in the height of the pulse, with increased depth of the respiratory cavity.

A disagreeable impression, when weak, immediately produces a diminution in the volume of the arm and the height of the pulse; but almost at once the volume begins to increase, notwithstanding the diminished pulse, and usually passes beyond its normal state, even when the pulse has returned to its first condition. If the impression is strong but not painful these changes are accentuated, and from the first are accompanied by deep inspirations. Finally, if the impression is painful, not only considerable changes of volume, but powerful respiratory movements and disturbance of the voluntary muscles are produced.

Disagreeable stimulation produces at first a spasm of the superficial vessels, relaxation of the deep vessels, and decreased fulness of the heart’s contractions. The first two factors together produce a sudden and strong diminution in the volume of the limbs. The last two factors together produce a diminished height of pulse, and in consequence of the enfeebled cardiac contractions there is a stasis of the venous blood showing itself in the increased volume of the limb.

These bodily modifications, of which I have summarised the chief features, are commonly regarded as the effects of pain, and this opinion seems even to be accepted in many works on psychology. The opinion cannot, however, be accepted. Pain considered as a psychic event, an internal fact, a pure state of consciousness, is not a cause but a symptom. The cause is the stimulation (of whatever nature) which, coming from the exterior environment, acts on the external senses, or coming from the interior environment, acts on the organic life. It is shown in two ways: on the one hand in the state of consciousness which we call pain, on the other by the physical phenomena above enumerated. The consciousness expresses in one way what the organism expresses in another way. This is not a mere opinion, for experiment shows that circulatory, respiratory, and motor modifications are produced when consciousness is probably defective. Mantegazza has shown that if an intact animal is subjected to pricks, cuts, and burns, cardiac troubles follow; but that the same phenomena are produced after the removal of the encephalon. François-Franck, investigating the effects of painful stimulation on the heart, found that the anæsthesia of chloroform suppresses troubles of the heart, while, on the contrary, removal of the cerebral hemispheres fails to abolish them. Formerly, Longet and Vulpian maintained that in animals reduced to the medulla and lower parts of the cerebro-spinal axis the cries and movements that occur when they are pinched are purely reflex; this interpretation has been contested by Brown-Séquard. In human anencephalic (or headless) monsters, cries, movements of suction and the like have been observed during the few days they are able to live. We must then admit either that the state of consciousness we call pain can be produced in the absence of the brain, or else that the physical phenomena can exist alone without their psychic concomitant.

Pain (as a state of consciousness) is only a sign, an index, an internal event revealing to the individual his own disorganisation. The only case in which pain is a cause is when, being firmly fixed in consciousness and completely filling it, it becomes an agent of destruction, but then it is only a secondary cause. That is one of those cases, so frequent in the sciences of life, in which what is primarily an effect becomes in turn a cause. It is therefore an error, though common to most psychologists, to consider pain and pleasure as fundamental elements of the affective life; they are only marks, the foundation is elsewhere. What would be said of a doctor who confused the symptoms of a disease with its essential nature?

We touch here a point so important that it needs emphasis. The thesis that pain is only a symptom, and altogether, in spite of the sovereign part it plays in human life, a superficial phenomenon in relation to the tendencies which lie at the basis of the affective life, finds support in the facts of analgesia, the disappearance of capacity to feel pain. This insensibility presents itself under two forms: spontaneous and artificial.

Spontaneous analgesia is the rule in hysteria; it may vary in degree, position, and extent. The demonologists of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance knew these migrations of insensibility to various parts of the body, and they sought with care for the stigmata diaboli, that is, the regions insensible to pain. Some authors assign to it a purely psychic cause: painful impressions cannot be felt because they are outside the field of consciousness, which in these patients is in an almost permanently disassociated, scattered, and destroyed state.[^[20]] It is, on the contrary, certain that an intense fixed idea, profound concentration of attention, fanatical exaltation, can produce temporary or permanent analgesia. Many soldiers, in the heat of battle, have not felt their wounds. Pascal, plunged in his problems, escaped his neuralgias. The Aïssaouas, the fakirs, certain Lamas of Thibet tear and cut themselves, secured against pain by delirium, and one may well believe that many martyrs, in the midst of their torture, have only experienced a sense of rapture. In certain forms of insanity (maniacal excitement, melancholia, idiocy, etc.) this spontaneous analgesia is frequent, and takes on extraordinary forms. Numerous examples may be found in special treatises.[^[21]] One crushes glass in his mouth for half-an-hour without feeling any pain. Another breaks his leg in a struggle, and a fragment of the tibia projects through the torn skin, yet he continues to pursue the object of his rage, and then sits down to eat without the least sign of pain on his face. There are many who, intentionally or by accident, plunge their arms into boiling water or place them on a red-hot stove, until the skin falls off in shreds, without appearing to be disturbed. An endless series of such facts might be narrated.[^[22]]

The artificial analgesias, produced by chloroform and the various anæsthetics employed in surgical operations, are more instructive. It has been asked if the movements, objurgations, and cries of some patients do not prove that the analgesia is not complete, even when it seems so. Richet has expressed the opinion that it is not consciousness but recollection which is defective; he regards the pain as so rapid that it is only a mathematical movement and leaves no echo behind it, there being a series of evanescent states of consciousness. It is quite possible to maintain this hypothesis; but the most important fact recorded by this author seems to me to be that, when pain has disappeared, a certain degree of knowledge of it remains. In other words, there is a process of scission: the feeling man has disappeared, the intellectual man remains. In many simple operations the contact of the instrument is often felt, but not the pain. But there are more complex cases. "In an operation for fissure of the anus with fistula, the patient felt the contact of the scissors and easily distinguished four incisions; she could not speak, but felt no suffering. In the course of a similar operation I asked the patient, ‘How old are you?’ She replied that she was forty-one, but when restored to consciousness she could recall no sensation of wound or burn and complained that the operation had not taken place. I asked another during the operation, ‘How are you getting on?’ the reply was, ‘Not badly.’ At the same moment I pricked her vigorously; she felt nothing. Again, in another case when I introduced a forceps into the mouth to hold the tongue the patient said, ‘Take away that cigarette.’ On awaking he could remember nothing. Another when a quill was passed beneath his nose said, ‘Do not tickle me’ at the moment when the large arteries were being tied, the most painful part of the operation. Finally, a man under chloroform, while his spermatic cord was being tied, heard the clock strike and tranquilly remarked, ‘Half-past eleven,’ recalling nothing when he awoke."[^[23]]

I have quoted these facts to show the extent to which pain, as a state of consciousness, is separable, how it can be added or cast off, and to what extent it presents the character of an epiphenomenon.

This relative independence of the pain-phenomenon, against which the intellectualists have always rebelled,[^[24]] seems to me corroborated by the retardation which I have already noted in passing. If we strike a corn while walking, we feel the shock before the pain; the cold of the knife is felt before the pain of the incision. Beau estimates that pain is delayed seven-tenths of a second behind the tactile impression. Burckhardt, by precise investigation, fixes the rapidity of transmission in the cord at 12 m. 9 per second for painful impressions, and 43 m. 3 for the others. In certain diseases like tabes dorsalis the pain may be separated from the needle-prick which causes it by from one to two seconds. Many other facts may be quoted. If a fold of the skin is seized in a pressure forceps, stopping at the moment when the pressure is sufficient, pain, not felt at first, gradually appears, coming in waves, and being at last unbearable. A man whose thumb was seized in a machine only knew of his injury by feeling his arm drawn, and only began to suffer a quarter of an hour afterwards. It has also been remarked that the syncope produced by violent shocks and traumatism does not appear at once; between the accident and the fainting several minutes may elapse.[^[25]]

Pain is the result of a sum of impulses. Naunyn has shown that, in tabes, a mechanical stimulus (like a hair on the cutaneous surface of the foot), which is below the threshold of consciousness both as contact and as pain, if repeated from 60 to 600 times a second, is perceived at the end of from six to twenty seconds, and soon becomes an intolerable pain to the patient.

Although excessive sensibility to pain (hyperalgesia) belongs to the pathology of our subject, which will be dealt with in a later chapter, it is necessary to say a few words about it in contrasting it with analgesia, especially in view of the conclusions here reached. This condition is more difficult to observe than insensibility, because here there is only a difference of degree, not the difference between being and not being. But in some cases there is so great a disproportion between the stimulus and the subject’s reaction that we may say without hesitation that sensibility is no longer normal.

It has been observed, in a general manner, that the lower races are not very sensitive to pain. Thus Negroes in Egypt endure, almost without suffering, the most extensive surgical operations (Pruner Bey), and Mantegazza (op. cit., chap. xxvi.) reports a large number of examples. In the peasant sensibility is usually less keen than in the town-dweller, and it may be admitted without hesitation that susceptibility to pain increases with civilisation; what is called stoicism should often be called a feeble degree of sensibility. Hyperalgesia is best seen in cases of extreme nervous over-excitement. In some it is generalised, constituting the “supplicium neuricum,” and the patient says that he is the prey of unspeakable torments. It is less frequent in the case of the special nerves, but is sometimes met. One suffers from the slightest noise, and cannot tolerate the least smell. Pitres quotes the case of a person who shut herself up in a dark room, only coming out at night with a thick shade against the rays of the stars. Those who entered her dark room during the day had to wear sombre clothes, completely concealing the shirt-collar, of which the white reflection was horribly disagreeable to her.[^[26]] Cutaneous hyperalgesia is very common, sometimes extending over the whole body, sometimes disseminated in patches. Weir Mitchell, in his book on injuries of the nerves, reports numerous examples; among others, a wounded soldier to whom the mere crumpling of paper caused atrocious pain. Opium-smokers, when they interrupt their habits, feel the least breath of air as icy cold, and complain of intolerable pains in all parts of the body. Hyperalgesia of the deep tissues is also frequent among the hysterical and hypochondriacal.

It must be remarked in passing that just as insensibility to pain (analgesia) is independent of incapacity to receive sensorial impressions (anæsthesia), so hyperalgesia is distinct from hyperæsthesia. The latter is a power of perception much surpassing the average; it is known that certain races and individuals possess extraordinary visual, auditory, or olfactive acuteness; the tactile hyperæsthesia of the blind is also known, and in hypnotised subjects the delicacy of the senses has sometimes seemed miraculous. Hyperalgesia then, like analgesia, shows that pain is relatively independent of the sensations which arouse it.

III.

We may conclude, from what goes before, that though physical pain (of which alone I am speaking at present) is always bound to an internal or external sensation, and forms part of a psychic complexus, it may be separated and disjoined. It has then its own conditions of existence, and we may, in advance, say as much for pleasure.

What are these conditions of existence? or, more simply, what is pain in its nature? At the present time there are two distinct doctrines on this point: one, which counts few adherents, regards physical pain as properly a sensation; the other, more generally admitted, regards it as a quality of sensation, or more correctly, as an accompaniment, a concomitant.[^[27]]

The first, though recent in its complete form, is not without antecedents. It found a momentary support in the supposed discovery of pain-bearing nerves. Nichols, one of the promoters of this hypothesis, has developed it in this direction; but the attempt has proved futile. Strong, one of its warmest partisans, supported himself on other grounds. In his opinion the difficulty arises from the ambiguity of the word pain, which may mean two things—displeasure (Unlust), or physical pain in the positive sense. He reduces the latter to cuts, pricks, burns—in short, to those pains that affect the skin. It is, in his opinion, strictly a sensation like blue or red—not an attribute, but a substantive. The pain of a burn, for instance, is a mixture of two sensations, heat and pain. General sensibility is composed of four kinds of sensibility: touch, heat, cold, and pain. Each can be abolished separately. Cocaine and chloroform suppress pain, not touch; saponine suppresses touch, not pain; syringomyelia destroys sensibility to pain and heat, not touch; in some forms of neuritis there is suppression of touch without analgesia. These various facts are invoked as the chief arguments in favour of the hypothesis of pain-sensation, though they may all be explained also by the other doctrine.

This hypothesis is full of difficulties. First, there is the absence of anatomical basis, of special organs and nerves. It will be necessary to return to this important point when dealing with pleasure (Chap. iii.). Nichols tells us that there is nothing to prove that nerves of pain do not exist, though they have not been experimentally established—which is indeed something; that histological research could not determine in the peripheral apparatus what belongs to touch and what belongs to pain; and that proof must be deduced from cases of tactile sensation without pain and vice versâ—which fails to constitute any degree of proof. Moreover, the distinction set up between displeasure (moral pain?) and physical pain is arbitrary, factitious, wholly unjustified. There is, however, a still less admissible distinction. Strong expressly declares that he limits himself to pains localised on the cutaneous surface. Now by what right can we cut off the group of physical—strictly physical—pains, the states of torture originating in the internal organs, the multiple neuralgias as intolerable as any external pain, without speaking of discomfort, prostration, exhaustion? Are these also sensations, or something else? We are not told. Finally—and Strong himself has stated the objection—it must be acknowledged that we should here have a strange kind of sensations which do not externalise themselves. While other impressions, visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, olfactive, are referred to causes which provoke them, the pains of a prick, a cut, a burn remain strictly subjective and are not located in the needle, the knife, the burning coal, as we locate a sound in the bell, a bitter taste in absinth. The only possible reply (which the partisans of pain-sensation have not made) would be that this phenomenon has a character of its own; it always remains a sensation, and never becomes a perception, whence the absence of externalisation. But then why assimilate it to blue or red? Moreover, pain-sensation, as it exists in the adult, approaches so closely to the affective state, that what is essential in the doctrine of pain-sensation vanishes. Whatever may be thought of the probability of some future discovery of terminal organs for physical pain, as Rutgers Marshall remarks, it must be agreed that there is no proof of the existence in the environment of a special stimulus to which physical pain specially corresponds, and for that reason also it would be a great mistake to place in the well-determined class “sensation,” a mental state which lacks one of the most marked characteristics of sensation in general. That conclusion is mine also.

The opposite doctrine, which has of late been called the quale-theory, is often maintained in an unsatisfactory form, because in fact it reduces itself to an affirmation of quantity. The pain which accompanies sensation may depend either on its intensity or on its quality alone.

It is needless to insist on the first case, since many old authors never cease repeating that the painful impression is the result of a stimulation which is strong, intense, violent, prolonged.

On the contrary, it is necessary to remark that this exclusive affirmation cannot be applied everywhere and always. This evidently appears in the cases of hyperalgesia, which is the reason why I brought them forward. The very disagreeable sensation which is caused by a knife against the skin certainly comes from the nature rather than the intensity of the stimulus. Beaunis remarks that certain odours, tastes, and contacts are painful at once, and do not need to be intense. Did the contact of the quill which threw Weir Mitchell’s patient into a state of anguish act by its intensity? No doubt we must recognise that hyperalgesias constitute a group apart, not strictly comparable with ordinary cases; they are pathological forms, variable in degree; but the pathological is merely an exaggeration of the normal. The error of those who refer pain solely to intensity of stimulation is in considering objective conditions only; they forget the part played by the sentient subjects. Pains which depend on the quality of the stimulus are especially of subjective origin, because the degree of excitability in the patient’s nervous elements is the essential ruling factor.

If we admit that these two conditions—intensity and quality—act one upon the other, what afterwards happens? What is the intimate nature of the pain-producing process? The hypothesis which is most natural and simple, and in agreement with the mechanical conceptions predominant in the biological sciences, would be founded on the admission that pain corresponds to a particular form of movement. On this supposition, the affective nervous road, from the periphery to the centres, would be traversed by three different kinds of movement or of molecular disturbance: the first giving birth to pure sensation, that is to say a state of knowledge, an intellectual state; the second, which may or may not be present, giving birth to pain; the third, also either present or absent, giving birth to pleasure.

There is another possible hypothesis, quite different from the others, which I should be willing to accept, but which cannot be presented as more than a theory. It would consist in attributing the genesis of pain to chemical modifications in the tissues and nerves, especially the production of local or general toxins in the organism. Pain would thus be one of the forms of auto-intoxication. Oppenheimer alone seems to me to have worked in this direction.[^[28]] In his opinion, as regards the origin of pain, “the real cause, in any sensorial or other organ, resides in a change in the tissues, especially a chemical change, by which either the products of destruction rise above the normal average, or else modifications result from the presence of a foreign body in the organism.” The connection between the peripheral tissues and the centres would be by the vaso-motor nerves (constrictor or dilator). The tissues would be the terminal organs of pain, the vaso-motors the paths of conduction. In organs which only undergo slight changes when active (tendons, ligaments, bones, etc.) conscious sensibility is almost absent. “Pain is not, as many believe, the highest degree of sensation produced in the organs of special sense; it is the most intense sensation produced in the vaso-motor nerves under the influence of violent stimulation.”

This hypothesis will perhaps be justified by the future. I shall return to it when studying the emotions. We shall then see that these are accompanied by deep and well-established chemical modifications in the organism.

Physical pain is a large subject, which, as may be seen, has not been neglected of late, and concerning which there is still much to say. It is not possible, however, to deal further with it here, since it only occupies a limited area in the psychology of the emotions.

CHAPTER II.
MORAL PAIN.

Identity of all the forms of pain—Evolution of moral pain: (1) the pure result of memory; (2) connected with representations; positive form, negative form; (3) connected with concepts—Its external study; physical signs—Therapeutics—Conclusions—A typical case of hypochondriasis.

In passing from physical pain to moral pain we by no means change our subject, or enter another world. Languages with their special terms—“tristesse,” “chagrin,” “sorrow,” “Kummer,” etc.—create an illusion by which psychologists for the most part seem to have been duped—the illusion that between these two forms of pain there is a difference of nature. In any case they do not explain themselves clearly on the point, and seem to share the common opinion.[^[29]] It is the object of this chapter to establish that, on the contrary, there is a fundamental identity between physical and moral pain, and that they only differ from each other in the point of departure, the first being connected with a sensation, the second with some form of representation, an image or an idea.

I.

At first sight it seems paradoxical, and to many even revolting, to maintain that the pain caused by a corn or a boil, that expressed by Michelangelo in his sonnets concerning his inability to reach his ideal, or that felt by a delicate conscience at the sight of crime, are identical in their nature. I purposely bring together these extreme cases. Yet there is no call for indignation if we remember that we are concerned with the pain alone, not with the events which provoke it, these latter being extra-affective phenomena. The best method of justifying our thesis, however, is to follow the evolution of moral pain in its ascending march from its lowest to its highest point. It will suffice to note the chief stages.

First Period.—Moral pain is at first connected with an extremely simple representation, a concrete image—that is to say, the immediate copy of a perception. It may be defined as the ideal reproduction of physical pain. It only presupposes a single condition, memory. The child who has had to swallow an unpleasant remedy, or who has had a tooth extracted, experiences when the next occasion approaches a pain which may be called physical, since it is connected with a simple image, of which it is the weakened copy and echo. It may be said in the language of mathematicians, that in this case the moral pain is to the physical pain as the image is to the perception. This form is so simple as to be found in many animals not reckoned among the highest. It is not yet moral pain—grief or sorrow—in the complete and rigorous sense, but it must be noted, because it corresponds to what naturalists call a transitional form.

Second Period.—It is connected with complex representations and forms a very large class, the manifestations of which are the only ones met with in average human beings. At this stage moral pain presupposes reflection, or, more explicitly, first the faculty of reasoning (deductive or inductive), and secondly constructive imagination. It would be possible to quote a crowd of examples, taken at random: the news of a death, of an illness, of ruin, of frustrated ambition, etc. The point of departure is a dry and simple fact, but the pain attaches itself to all the perceived results which flow from it. Thus ruin means a series of privations, wretchednesses, labours begun over again, fatigues, and exhaustions. It is in this detailed translation, varying according to individuals and cases, that moral pain lies. It is clear, and is proved by observation, that the man endowed with an ardent and constructive imagination will feel intense pain when another, with a poor and cold imagination, remains indifferent, seeing nothing in his misfortune but the present actual fact—that is to say, a very little thing; the sum of pains evoked is proportional to the sum of representations evoked. The child remains insensible at the news of death or ruin; if he is moved it is through imitation; there is nothing in his experience enabling him to deduce what these fatal words contain, and to represent the future.

Moral pain presents itself under various forms—positive, negative, or mixed.

In the positive form it is an expenditure of movement, the representation of an exhaustive labour, of an incessant effort to begin again what is already felt in consciousness by anticipation. Such is the case of the candidate who fails at an examination to which he must go up again.

In the negative form it is an arrest of movement, a lessening, the consciousness of a deficit, a privation, cravings ceaselessly arising and ceaselessly disappointed. The death of a beloved person is the most perfect example.

In the mixed form we may see it in the ruined millionaire, the dethroned king, who set to work again to reconstruct the past. On the one hand the representation of the long labour of a new conquest; on the other, tendencies of all sorts which were formerly satisfied, and are now inexorably brought to a stop.

A complete study of the second group of moral pains would include two moments: the egoistic form, the first in date, and the sympathetic or altruistic form. The latter seems to appear early, since Darwin noted it at the age of six months and eleven days in one of his children, who was much affected when his nurse pretended to be unhappy and cry. Preyer even alleges, as we have seen, that grief appears at the age of four months. This sympathetic form of pain is found in certain animals, especially those living in society. In certain monogamous couples the death of one of the partners may cause the other to perish. I will not pause here at present to describe these two great forms of the affective life which will occupy us so often in the course of this study.

Third Period.—Grief in this case is connected with pure concepts or with ideal representations. This is intellectual pain, which is much rarer, and produces little effect, at all events for any length of time, on the ordinary man. Such is the pain of the religious person who feels he is not sufficiently devout, of the metaphysician tormented by doubt, of the poet and the artist, conscious of an abortive creation, of the man of science who unsuccessfully pursues the solution of a problem.

These forms of pain are chiefly negative and secondarily positive. They consist, first, in unsatisfied needs, privations, lacunæ in existence; afterwards in effort, expenditure of force, fatigue, achieving nothing.

II.

Having shown that the pain-phenomenon, in the course of evolution, attaches itself to representations more and more elevated and finally to superior conceptions, we will examine moral pain objectively, from without, to show afresh its identity with physical pain, or, more exactly, to prove that pain is invariable in its nature, under whatever form it manifests itself.

1. Grief is accompanied by the same modifications in the organism as physical pain. It is needless to repeat the description: circulatory disturbance, constriction of the vaso-motors, syncope; decrease of respiration or constant changes in its rhythm, sudden or prolonged reverberation on nutrition, loss of appetite, indigestion, arrest or diminution of secretions, vomiting. I may remark that rapid change of colour in the hair, already noted, is specially met with in violent moral shocks (Marie-Antoinette, Ludovico Sforza, etc.). The voluntary muscles of the larynx, the face, the whole body, undergo the same influences and express them in the same ways. For moral as for physical pain, there are silent forms and agitated forms.

2. If we admit the old maxim: “Naturam morborum medicationes ostendunt,” as we see every day the same general therapeutics applied to both forms of pain, we have here evidence in favour of their identity: no doubt there are curative methods proper to each; for moral pain, consolations, distractions, travel; but are not opium, sedatives, and tonics employed to relieve both?

3. I brought together at the beginning of this chapter the grossest forms of physical pain and the most refined forms of moral pain; but there are composite forms in which sensations and representations seem to form an equilibrium, so that such painful states might be entered under either head. This is the case with certain melancholics of whom I shall have to speak later, but we may take as a type the hypochondriacal person in whom we find the point of junction of the two pains. The physical troubles of hypochondriasis have often been described. There are localised pains, but in addition a large number of simply represented pains, enlarged as by a lens, and referred to the lungs, the heart, the liver, the spleen, the kidneys, the stomach, the intestines. The joints are cracking; there are conjectures concerning the appearance of the face, the tongue, the urine, and above all what perpetual anxiety! One of them said: “I feel better to-day, and that makes me anxious; it is not natural.” Is this physical pain or moral pain? Sometimes one, sometimes the other predominates, according to the individual and the moment. Clouston has observed that in melancholics sadness often diminishes when physical pain increases. They are so intimately intertwined that no point of departure can be established between them. This morbid state is worthy of mention because it also is a transitional form. We need have no hesitation in generalising, and saying that there is no physical (that is to say, localised) pain, however slight, unaccompanied by some fugitive mental irritation, and no mental irritation unaccompanied by some slight physical troubles.

The foregoing does not imply that grief is a very refined physical pain, or that it arises therefrom, as—according to the well-known formula: Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu—it is supposed that the superior forms of knowledge arise from sensation alone. That would be a misconstruction. Physical pain is not a genus of which moral pain is a species. The thesis which I maintain is that pain is always identical with itself, that it has its own conditions of existence, that the innumerable modes which it presents to us in the physical order and in the moral order are related to the sensorial or intellectual elements which excite and envelop it.[^[30]]

The question still remains why certain representations have the unfortunate privilege of arousing pain. This is a question which I can only touch on, because it belongs to another part of the subject. For the moment I simply reply that it is because they are the beginning of mental disorganisation, just as physical pain is the beginning of physical disorganisation. The sentient being, man or animal, is a bundle of needs, of appetites, of physical or psychic tendencies; everything that suppresses or impedes them is translated into pain. Physical suffering is the blind and unconscious reaction of the organism to every hurtful action. Grief is the conscious reaction to every decrease of psychic life. The man shut in by narrow and commonplace surroundings would certainly feel no æsthetic pain, because having no need of æsthetic satisfaction he could not be impoverished or impeded by its absence.

In short, pain under all its forms reveals an identical nature. The distinction between physical pain and moral pain is practical, not scientific.

CHAPTER III.
PLEASURE.

Subject little studied—Is Pleasure a sensation or a quality?—Its physical concomitants: circulation, respiration, movements—Pleasure, like pain, is separable: physical and moral anhedonia—Identity of the different forms of pleasure—The alleged transformation of pleasure into pain—Common ground of the two states—Hypothesis of a difference in kind and in degree—Simultaneity of two opposite processes: what falls under consciousness is the result of a difference—Physiological facts in support of the above.

In treating of grief, one is apt to be embarrassed by the abundance of documents, and the difficulty of being brief; in dealing with pleasure the contrary is the case. Are we to conclude that this is because, for centuries past, physicians have been collecting observations on pain, while there exists no profession having for its object the observation of pleasure? Or is it because humanity is so constituted as to suffer more from pain than it can enjoy from pleasure, and therefore studies everything relating to pain in order to find deliverance therefrom, while accepting everything agreeable naturally and without reflection? We cannot, however, accuse psychologists of having neglected this study, although the bibliography of Pleasure is very scanty compared with that of Pain. In general, they have considered these two subjects as complementary to one another, pleasure and pain being opposed to each other as contraries, so that the knowledge of the one implies the knowledge of the other. But this is only a hypothesis—perhaps true, perhaps false—resting in great part only on the testimony of consciousness, which is always open to question and never above suspicion. “It may be,” says Beaunis, very justly, “that pleasure and pain, which seem to us two opposite and mutually contradictory phenomena, may in the end be nothing but phenomena of the same nature, only differing in degree. It is possible that they may be phenomena of different orders, but incapable of such comparison with one another as would enable us to declare one contrary to the other. It is possible that they may depend simply on a difference of excitability in the nervous centres. Again, it is possible that they may be included, sometimes in one category, sometimes in the other.”[other.”][^[31]]

I.

The formulas universally made use of in characterising pleasure indicate this vague position of the problem: “Agreeable states are the correlatives of actions which conduce to the well-being or preservation of the individual.” “Generally speaking, pleasures are the concomitants of medium activities, where the activities are of kinds liable to be in excess or in defect” (Herbert Spencer). “Experience attests that, in all the sensory regions, sensations of moderate energy are specially accompanied by a feeling of pleasure. Thus this feeling connects itself with the sensations of tickling due to cutaneous excitations of slight energy” (Wundt). According to this writer, the gamut of pleasure is less rich and extensive than that of pain, and he finds the proof of this assertion in the language expressive of universal experience. “Language,” he says, “has created numerous expressions for disagreeable feelings, emotions, and inclinations, while the joyful moods of the mind are dismissed with a brief general designation. This phenomenon arises less from the fact that man observes with especial care and minuteness his disagreeable or troublesome states, than from the greater uniformity which pleasurable feelings in reality possess. This is particularly evident in the case of the sensory feelings [those connected with the sensations]. Pain has not only numerous degrees of energy, but numberless gradations according to its seat.” Mantegazza, when determining the synonyms of pleasure, appears to uphold the contrary view.[^[32]] For my own part, I am of Wundt’s opinion.

The anatomical and physiological conditions of the genesis and transmission of pleasure are a terra incognita. In cases of physical pleasure, what takes place at the peripheral terminations, in the nerves, in the cerebro-spinal axis? Most authors do not even propound these questions. The physiology of pain, in spite of its uncertainties, is rich and instructive compared with that of pleasure.

In recent times it has been maintained that pleasure, as well as grief, ought to be regarded as a sensation, not as the concomitant of various psychic states; that both are fundamental senses having their own proper nervous energies distinct from other sensations. In other words, the expression, “sensations of pleasure and pain,” ought to be taken in the strict sense borne by the word sensation. I have already touched on this point in treating of pain, but it may not be out of place to return to it here; for, apart from its hypothetical character, I cannot think this assertion a happy one. In fact, if there is any psychological state clearly delimited and differentiated from all others, it is sensation.

Sensation is determined and circumscribed by a special organ serving for this purpose only, as in the case of sight, hearing, etc., or at least by special nerves and special peripheral terminations, as in the case of touch, and temperature. Internal sensations, in spite of the nervous apparatus proper to them, have a vaguer character; hence some psychologists call them indifferently sensations or feelings. The kinæsthetic sensations, or those of movement, long included under the designation of muscular sense (an improper term, gradually falling out of use), have, though diffused through the organism, nerves peculiar to themselves; those of the muscular tissue, the articulations (the periosteum, the ligaments, the synovial membranes, the tendons). But pleasure and pain have neither special nerves nor special organs. We have seen the opinion admitted with regard to the pain-bringing nerves; as for the nerves of pleasure, I know no author who has hazarded such a hypothesis, however tentatively. It is true that one of those who admit the existence of nerves of pain (Frey) gets out of the difficulty very easily by saying that pleasure, consisting only in the absence of pain, requires no special nerves. May we not say, then, that it is a complete falsification of the meaning of words to class among sensations psychical phenomena answering to none of the required anatomical or physiological conditions?[^[33]]

The manifestations taking place within the organism are better known when we are in a condition of pleasure. Let us take as typical the constant pleasures, putting aside those which, by their exuberance, as we shall see later on, border on pathological forms. Whether the point of departure is a physical excitation, a representation, or a concept, two distinct events take place, as in the case of grief: on the one hand an internal state of consciousness, which we describe as agreeable; on the other a bodily external condition, of which the following are the principal characteristics.

Taken as a whole, they may be opposed, almost point for point, to the description already given of the physical manifestations of grief, and betray a heightening of the vital functions. This contrast is not without importance in favour of the common thesis which regards pleasure and pain as a pair of opposites.

1. The circulation increases, especially in the brain, as shown by various symptoms, in particular the increased lustre of the eyes. The experiments of Lehmann, already quoted (Chapter I.), prove that physical, as well as æsthetic pleasure, is accompanied by dilatation of the vessels and an increase of the heart’s contractions.[^[34]]

2. The same thing is to be observed with regard to the respiration, which becomes more active; in consequence, the temperature of the body rises, and the nutritive exchanges, becoming more rapid, result in a rich alimentation of the organs and tissues. “In joy, all parts of the body receive advantage, and are likely to last longer; the cheerful and contented man is well nourished and remains young. It is a truism that people in good health are contented” (Lange). Joy also tends to make the secretions (lacteal, spermatic, etc.) more abundant.

3. The innervation of the voluntary muscles expresses itself by exuberance of movements, by joyful exclamations, laughter, and singing. Certain cases of extreme and sudden joy have been known to produce all the effects of alcoholic intoxication. Sir H. Davy danced in his laboratory after making the discovery of potassium. At the London International Congress of Psychology (1892), Münsterberg communicated the following experiments under the title of “The Psychological Foundation of the Feelings.” A line ten centimetres in length is drawn with the right hand. When this movement has been thoroughly practised, it should be repeated with closed eyes, passing the hand first from right to left, with a movement of centripetal flexion, then from left to right, with a movement of centrifugal extension. In such a case mistakes will be made, sometimes in the one direction, sometimes in the other. Let us repeat the same experiments under the influence of certain affective states (sadness, gaiety, anger, etc.), noting all errors and their direction. Münsterberg has discovered them to be determined by a very exact law. In vexation, the extensor movements (centrifugal) are too short (average error, 10 mm.), and the flexor movements (centripetal) too long, the average excess being 12 mm. In joy, on the other hand, the centrifugal movements are in excess by (on an average) 10 mm., and the centripetal movements too short by an average of 20 mm. From this he concludes that, in pleasure, motion tends to increase; in pain, to diminish.

The manifestations of joy may be summed up in a single word—dynamogeny. Joy produces energy.

It is superfluous to say that we consider pleasure, for the same reasons as pain, to be an additional phenomenon, a symptom, a sign, a mark, denoting the satisfaction of certain tendencies; and that it cannot be regarded as a fundamental element of the life of the feelings. Like pain, pleasure is separable from the complex of which it forms part, and under certain abnormal conditions may totally disappear. Anhedonia (if I may coin a counter-designation to analgesia) has been very little studied, but it exists. I need not say that the employment of anæsthetics suppresses at the same time pain and its contrary; but there are cases of an insensibility relating to pleasure alone. “The sensation of sexual pleasure is, in very rare cases, subject to lesions affecting no other part of the organism. Brown-Séquard saw two cases of special sexual anæsthesia, all other kinds of sensibility, those of the urethral mucous membrane and the skin, still persisting. Althaus quotes another case. It would no doubt be possible to find such cases in larger numbers were it not for the false modesty which prevents patients from speaking of the subject. Fonssagrives cites a very remarkable example observed in a woman.”[^[35]] This insensibility exists not only for physical but also for moral pleasure (joy, high spirits, etc.). Apart from the cases of profound melancholy, which will occupy us later on, where the individual is untouched by the slightest impulse of joy, there are cases of anhedonia which seem simpler and clearer. “Antoine Cros mentions the case of a patient, a young girl, suffering from congested liver and spleen, which of course altered the state of her blood, and thus, for a time, modified her constitution. Her moral character was greatly altered by it. She ceased to feel any affection for father or mother; would play with her doll, but could not be brought to show any delight in it; could not be drawn out of her apathetic sadness. Things which previously had made her shriek with laughter now left her uninterested. Her temper changed, became capricious and violent.”[^[36]] Esquirol has recorded the case of a magistrate, a very intelligent man, suffering from a liver complaint. “Every affection seemed to be dead in him. He showed neither perversion nor violence, but there was complete absence of emotive reaction. If he went to the theatre (as he continued to do from force of habit) he could find no pleasure there. Thoughts of his house, his home, his wife, his absent children, affected him no more, he said, than a theorem of Euclid.” We have here a specimen of what we may call a purely intellectual existence—that of the Wise Man of the Stoics.

These facts—and we shall find analogous ones in other chapters, under other headings—show that, as we have seen in the case of pain, pleasure does not depend simply on the quantity of excitement. To attribute all pleasures to excitements of medium energy is equivalent to the formula: “Pain is due to an intense and prolonged excitement.” In both cases intensity alone is emphasised; but there are pleasures irreducible to medium energy and depending on the quality of the excitement and the nature of the sentient subject. Will it be said that sexual pleasures are the concomitants of a medium activity? The pleasure produced by harmonious chords is, for a musical ear, a matter of quality, not of intensity. We find it impossible, therefore, to reduce the objective conditions of pleasure to a single formula.

Although general opinion has established a distinction between sensory and spiritual pleasures, this distinction is purely theoretical. Pleasure, as an affective state, always remains identical with itself; its numerous varieties are determined only by the intellectual condition originating it—sensation, image, concept. It would be tedious to repeat in detail the analysis already given of pain in order to apply it to pleasure; it will be sufficient to indicate the principal points.

All forms of pleasure are accompanied by the organic modifications previously enumerated. Primarily, it can only be physical—i.e., combined with a sensation, such as the pleasure of a soft, warm contact, the satisfaction of hunger and thirst in children and animals. Then pleasure becomes an anticipation, as in the case of a dog when his food is being brought to him; to employ the term used by Herbert Spencer, it is a presentative-representative state. Then, in this ascending evolution, pleasure appears attached to pure representations. This—as in the case of pain—is the main group, that of the varied and numerous joys which console humanity for its sufferings; these, too, are divided into egoistic and sympathetic pleasures. There remain the highest and rarest manifestations attached to pure concepts—the pleasures of æsthetic creation, those of the metaphysician or the man of science. We might further show how the transition from pleasure, considered as strictly physical (that of the thirsty man drinking a cool beverage in long draughts), to the subtlest, most ethereal intellectual pleasures, may in fact be gradually traced step by step; that the two elements—sensory and representative—are always coexistent, and that we qualify any given pleasure solely according to the preponderance of one or the other. Finally, if we have found in hypochondriasis a composite form, which might be classed with equal justice as a physical or moral pain, in the domain of pleasure it is not difficult to discover analogous forms. The æsthetic pleasure called forth by forms, by colours, and especially by sounds, affords us an example. It is incontestable that these three kinds of sensation can, unassisted, in and by themselves, produce a sensory pleasure. Certain colours, certain qualities of sound, certain chords, produce at once an agreeable impression. Then the representations evoked by memory excite, in their turn, a degree of pleasure quite distinct from the original sensations. Fechner, in his Vorschule der Æsthetik, distinguishes, in his analysis of the elements of the Beautiful, the direct factor, i.e. sensation, and the indirect or associative factor, that is to say, the associated ideas evoked. These two coexistent factors are only separable by psychological analysis, and the position established by Fechner for the intellectual elements has its equivalent for the emotional states.[^[37]]

II.

The generally accepted formula connecting pleasure with medium activities is supported by a commonly observed fact—viz., that pleasure carried to excess or continued too long often transforms itself into its opposite. The pleasures of eating may lead to nausea, tickling soon becomes a torture, as well as heat and cold, and one cannot endure even a favourite melody when played for two consecutive hours. In a word, a sensation or representation at first agreeable may, either gradually or suddenly, be found to have its opposite associated with it. While the sensory or intellectual element remains the same—at least in appearance—the affective state is changed.

So familiar an occurrence, well known from the remotest antiquity, from which various consequences have been deduced by philosophers, would not in itself possess sufficient importance to arrest our attention, did it not, for all its insignificant appearance, afford us the opportunity of penetrating the depths of our subject.

We may remark that the same transformation takes place inversely—a state in itself disagreeable may become agreeable. This transmutation is to be found at the root of nearly all the pleasures which we call acquired: a taste or smell at first repugnant may become delightful.

The same thing happens with regard to certain physical exercises connected with touch and the muscular sense. The use of alcoholic drinks, of tobacco, of all sorts of narcotics, would furnish us with abundance of examples. Pleasure is found in certain forms of literature which were at first found revolting; the same thing may be said of painting; and the history of music is one long piece of evidence in favour of this transformation of tastes.

In the first place, we have to note that the hackneyed expression, “transformation” of pleasure into pain, and vice versâ, is inaccurate. Pain cannot be changed into pleasure or pleasure into pain, any more than black can be changed into white. What is meant is that the conditions of existence of the one disappear to give place to the conditions of existence of the other. There is succession, but not transformation; a symptom does not transform itself into its opposite.

This succession, abrupt or gradual, leads us to ask whether there might not be a common basis, a certain identity of nature, between the two antagonistic phenomena. The question thus put may be answered by one of two alternative hypotheses.

1. The admission that the difference is fundamental and irreducible, that pain is as clearly to be distinguished from pleasure as the visual sensation is from the auditory sensation: that these feelings constitute an antinomy—an irreconcilable antagonism. The clearest affirmation of this thesis is found in those writers who make pleasure and pain “sensations” comparable to other sensations, and having their own specific character.

2. The admission that the difference is one of degree, not of nature; that the two contrary manifestations are only two moments of the same process; that they differ from each other only as sound differs from noise, or a very acute sound from a very deep one, both resulting from the same cause—the number of vibrations in any given space of time. I am myself inclined to maintain this second hypothesis.

Let us take as an example a simple case where the process is manifested in its totality. We have a person in a so-called indifferent, neutral, or medium state, that is to say, one which cannot be described as agreeable or painful; the individual is simply alive, that is all. He is sensitive to the perfume of flowers; some are placed in his room—pleasure is the result. At the end of an hour all is changed; the subject is incommoded by the smell of the flowers, and avoids them. Hence we have three successive moments: indifference, pleasure, pain.

But these three moments in consciousness have their correlatives in the modifications of the organism: circulation, respiration, motion, the various phases of nutrition. The first answers to the average vital formula of the individual; the second to an increase in the vital functions, and, according to the usual formula (which we shall examine later on), to an augmentation of energy; the third to a lowering of the vital functions and a diminution of energy. Such are the data of observation and experience. Féré’s researches on the olfactory sensations (to mention no others) have shown that the feelings accompanying them, pleasant or otherwise, show themselves in an augmented or diminished pressure on the dynamometer. In a subject whose dynamometric force is normally 50-55, a disagreeable odour lowers the index to 45, an agreeable one raises it to 65. In another (a hysterical patient) the odour of musk, at first very pleasant, raises the dynamometer from 23 to 46; in three minutes it becomes disagreeable, and the pressure sinks to 19.[^[38]] We find, therefore, that the organism is subject to perpetual fluctuations, indicated in the consciousness by agreeable or disagreeable feelings: the two opposites are connected with one and the same cause, the vital functions forming their common basis; and I should be inclined to propound the following hypothesis:—

In most cases, if not in all, two contrary processes are going on simultaneously—one of increase, the other of diminution; what comes into the consciousness is only the result of a difference.

A difference between what? Between receipt and expenditure. Let us, in order to show this clearly, take a point at which the destructive and constructive activities exactly balance one another, a condition corresponding to the neutral or indifferent state of psychologists, and let us represent the same by the numerical formula 50 = 50. At a subsequent point of time the destructive activities predominate; let us suppose them equal to 60, while the value of the constructive falls to 40. On comparing the second moment with the first, we find a negative difference of -20, whose psychic equivalent is a painful state of consciousness. Let us then suppose a third moment, when the constructive activities are in the ascendent and equal 60, while the destructive fall to 40; there will be a positive difference of +20, whose psychic equivalent is a pleasant state of consciousness. I must beg the reader to take all this only by way of illustration.

Thus understood, the “transformation” of pleasure into pain, and pain into pleasure, is only the translation into the order of affective psychology of the fundamental rhythm of life. The latter reduces itself to the ultimate fact of nutrition, consisting of two mutually interdependent processes, one of which implies the other, assimilation and dissimilation. Except in extreme cases, such as inanition and exhaustion on the one hand, and plethora on the other, in which one of the two processes prevails almost without counterpoise, they usually oscillate on either side of a medium, as pleasure and pain do on either side of an alleged neutral state. In physiology it happens that a very clear and easily verified phenomenon covers and hides a contrary phenomenon, so that the principal part of the occurrence is erroneously taken for the whole. Thus one knows that a muscle is heated by exercise, which seems to contravene the law of the transformation of energy, as the mechanical work done ought to consume a part of that mode of motion which we call heat. Béclard and several others after him have shown that there is a real lowering of temperature at the beginning of positive work, and that two opposite phenomena appear in the muscle when in action: one physical, absorbing heat and determining a cooling of the active muscle; the other chemical, producing a heating of the muscle. The latter masks the former. In the same way, the well-known experiments of Schiff have shown that the brain is heated when it receives impressions and elaborates them; it ought to grow cold, since it is doing work; but Tanzi’s experiments seem to establish the existence of alternating oscillations of cold and heat while the brain is at work. We recall these facts, though not in direct relation to our subject, to show that the coexistence of two opposite processes, the most apparent of which conceals the other, is not a chimera. There are frequently two simultaneous phenomena, of which the one is seen and not the other.

According to this hypothesis, then, the conditions of existence of pleasure and pain are implied the one by the other, and always coexistent. What is expressed by consciousness is a surplus, and what is called their transformation is only a difference in favour of one or the other.[^[39]]

I add some final remarks on the so-called transformation of pain into pleasure. Being rarer than its opposite, it presents some peculiarities to be noted.

Very acute pleasures exhaust quickly—a condition very favourable to the rapid appearance of pain; I do not see that acute pain ever changes into pleasure, except perhaps in a few cases to be examined in the following chapter.

The “transformation” does not take place abruptly, but always by a gradual transition.

Some have attempted to explain it by habit; but this is so general a term as to require fresh definition in each individual case. It has also been said that the painful sensation, being accompanied by disorganisation and lowering of the vital power, produces, ipso facto, an organic repair, a vital increase, which is the essential condition of pleasure. But this does not prove that the period of reintegration coexists with the first impression and imparts to it a contrary affective sign. The novice in the use of tobacco is at first incommoded by headache, nausea, etc.; then there follows a period of repair, but it is not directly connected with the act of smoking.

It seems to me preferable to admit, with Beaunis, that the agreeable states we speak of are not simple but complex, consisting of a certain number of elements. “It may happen that, among the elements which compose sensation, some are agreeable and some painful; with habit and exercise the painful element gradually disappears from the consciousness, and only the agreeable elements of the sensation remain. In this case there would not really be a transformation of the pain into pleasure, but an extinction, a disappearance of the disagreeable elements of the sensation, and a predominance of the agreeable ones.”[^[40]]

The cause of this change seems to me to lie in the biological function called adaptation, of whose true nature very little is known, and which appears to reduce itself to nutritive modifications. Experiment shows that its efficacy cannot be depended on: it succeeds in some persons, but fails in others.

CHAPTER IV.
MORBID PLEASURES AND PAINS.

Utility of the pathological method—Search for a criterion of the morbid state; abnormal reaction through excess or defect; apparent disproportion between cause and effect; chronicity—I. Morbid pleasures, not peculiar to advanced civilisation—Different attempts at explanation—This state cannot be explained by normal psychology: it is the rudimentary form of the suicidal tendency—Classification—Semi-pathological pleasures: those destructive of the individual, those destructive of the social order—II. Abnormal pains—Melancholic type—Whence does the painful state arise in its permanent form? from an organic disposition? or from a fixed idea?—Examples of the two cases.

The title of this chapter may seem paradoxical, pleasure being as a rule the expression of health, and even of exuberant life, and pain, by its very definition, a diseased state. It must be admitted that, for the latter, the expression abnormal would be preferable. However, the facts we are about to study are not rare, and deserve separate examination, because the deviations and anomalies of pleasure and pain serve to make the nature of each better understood.

Taking our subject, for the first time, on the pathological side, a proceeding to be applied later on to each of the simple or complex emotions in turn, certain preliminary remarks are indispensable.

The application of the pathological method to psychology needs no justification; its efficacy has been proved. The results obtained are too numerous and too well known to need enumeration. This method, in fact, has two principal advantages—(1) it is a magnifying instrument, amplifying the normal phenomenon; hallucination explains the part played by the image, and hypnotic suggestion throws light on the suggestion met with in ordinary life; (2) it is a valuable instrument of analysis. Pathology, it has justly been remarked, is only physiology out of order, and nothing leads better to the understanding of a machine than the elimination or the deviation of one of its wheels. Aphasia produces a decomposition of memory and its different signs, which the subtlest psychological analysis could not attempt or even suspect.

The principal difficulty of this method lies in determining the precise moment when it can be applied. The distinction between the healthy and the morbid is often extremely difficult to establish. No doubt there are cases where no hesitation is possible; but there are also debatable zones lying between the territories of health and disease. Claude Bernard ventured to write, “What is called the normal state is purely a conception of the mind, a typical ideal form entirely disengaged from the thousand divergences among which the organism is incessantly floating, amid its alternating and intermittent functions.” If this is the case with regard to bodily health, we may expect to find it still more so with regard to mental. The dilemma: Either this man is mad or he is not, is, in many cases, says Griesinger, meaningless. The psychical organism, being more complex and less stable than the physical, makes it still more difficult to fix a norm. Finally, this difficulty attains its maximum in our subject, because the emotional—the most mobile among all the forms of psychic life—oscillates incessantly around one point of equilibrium, always ready to sink too low or rise too high.

As, however, it is necessary to adopt some definite characteristics which may serve as pathological signs, as criteria for distinguishing the healthy from the morbid in the emotional order, we shall accept those proposed by Féré. According to him, an emotion may be considered as morbid—

1. When its physiological concomitants present themselves with extraordinary intensity (I think we should add, or an extraordinary depression).

2. When it takes place without sufficient determining cause.

3. When its effects are unreasonably prolonged.[^[41]]

These three signs, which I shall call respectively abnormal reaction by excess or defect, disproportion (apparent) between cause and effect, and chronicity, will frequently be of service to us in the study of the emotions. For the moment we are only treating of pleasure and pain.

I.

Beginning with pleasure, I shall first examine a typical case studied by several physiologists, who have not furnished any, to me, satisfactory explanation. I mean the special state which has been called “the luxury of pity” (Spencer), pleasure in pain (Bouillier), and which it would be more accurate to call “the pleasure of pain.” It consists in being pleased with one’s own suffering and tasting it like a pleasure.

This disposition of the mind is not, as one might think, peculiar to blasé persons and to epochs of refined civilisation; it seems inherent in humanity the moment it emerges from barbarism. Bouillier[^[42]] has quoted from the ancient writers passages referring to it, not only in Lucretius, Seneca, and other moralists, but in the Homeric poems, which reflect a very primitive civilisation, yet in which a man “rejoices in his tears.” Parallel passages might have been found in the Bible, and also, I suppose, in the epics of ancient India. We have not, therefore, to deal with a rare phenomenon, though it becomes more frequent as we advance in civilisation.

A few examples will be of greater value than any opinions I could cite. They may be found of all sorts—pleasure in physical pain, and pleasure in moral pain. Certain patients find intense enjoyment in irritating their sores. Mantegazza[^[43]] says: “I knew an old man who acknowledged to me that he found an extraordinary pleasure, and one which seemed to him equal to any other, in scratching the inflamed surfaces surrounding a senile sore in his leg from which he had suffered for some years.”

A celebrated man of the Renaissance, Cardan, says in his autobiography that “he could not do without suffering, and when this happened to him, he felt such an impulse arise in him, that every other pain seemed a relief.” When in this state, he was in the habit of torturing his own body till forced to shed tears by the pain.[^[44]] I might enumerate a long series of these pleasures of physical pain. Of the pleasures of moral pain I will give but one example: melancholy in the ordinary, non-medical sense-the melancholy of lovers, poets, artists, etc. This state may be considered as typical of the deliberate enjoyment of sadness. Any one may be sad, but melancholy is not to be attained by every one. I may mention also, in passing, the pleasures of ugliness in æsthetics, and the taste for sanguinary spectacles and tortures which we shall have to consider in another place.

If we leave the facts and come to the explanations proposed, we shall find that they are not numerous. Bouillier (op. cit.) seems to adopt the opinion of a Cartesian, who said, “If the soul, in all movements of the passions, even the most painful, is in some measure tickled by a secret feeling of pleasure, if it takes pleasure in pain, and does not wish to be consoled, it is because of a consciousness that the state in which it finds itself is the state of heart and mind best suited to its situation.” I fail to understand this pretended explanation. I prefer that of Hamilton, who places the principal cause in the increased activity imparted to our whole being by the sense of our own sufferings. This, at least, is logical, since pleasure is connected with its habitual correlative—an increase of activity. Spencer has examined the problem at greater length.[^[45]] "Here I will draw attention only to another egoistic sentiment, and I do this because of its mysterious nature. It is a pleasurably painful sentiment, of which it is difficult to identify the nature, and still more difficult to trace the genesis. I refer to what is sometimes called ‘the luxury of grief.’... It seems possible that this sentiment, which makes a sufferer wish to be alone with his grief, and makes him resist all distraction from it, may arise from dwelling on the contrast between his own worth, as he estimates it, and the treatment he has received—either from his fellow-beings or from a power which he is prone to think of anthropomorphically. If he feels that he has deserved much while he has received little, and still more if instead of good there has come evil, the consciousness of this evil is qualified by the consciousness of worth, made pleasurably dominant by the contrast.... There is an idea of much withheld, and a feeling of implied superiority to those who withhold it.... That this explanation is the true one I feel by no means clear. I throw it out simply as a suggestion, confessing that this peculiar emotion is one which neither analysis nor synthesis enables me clearly to understand."

This explanation seems to me only a partial one, and not applicable to all cases. In my opinion, no efforts of this kind can be successful, because the authors remain on the ground of normal psychology. This class of facts ought to be treated by the pathological method. It may be said that this is only the substitution of one word for another. By no means, as we shall see by the result.

The mistake lies in attacking, in the first instance, phenomena of too delicate a nature, and considering them as isolated facts. We must proceed, not by synthesis or analysis, but by the cumulative method—i.e., we must establish a chain of facts, of which the last links, being of overwhelming importance, shall throw light on the first. I indicate the principal stages of this gradation thus—Æsthetic melancholy (transitory and intermittent); spleen, melancholia (in the medical sense);[^[46]] then, advancing a step further, suicidal tendencies, and finally, suicide. This last term makes all the others comprehensible. The first stages are only embryonic, abortive, or modified forms of the tendency to self-destruction, of the desire which makes it seem agreeable. The weaker forms—checked in an immense majority of cases—approximate more or less to destruction, and can only be explained if compared with the extreme case.

The evolutionists have stated the hypothesis that there must have existed certain animals so constituted that, in them, pleasure was connected with destructive acts, pain with useful ones, and that, as every animal seeks pleasure and shuns pain, they must have perished in virtue of their very constitution, since they sought the destructive and shunned the preservative influences. There is nothing chimerical in this supposition, for we see men find pleasure in acts which, as they very well know, will speedily result in their deaths. A being thus constituted is abnormal, illogical; he contains within himself a contradiction of which he will perish.

But, one may say, if pain and hurtful acts on the one hand, pleasure and serviceable acts on the other, form indissoluble pairs, of such a kind that the painful state in consciousness is the equivalent of destructive acts in the organism, and inversely, we should here have an interversion—pleasure would express disorganisation; pain, reorganisation. This hypothesis is not a very probable one, and scarcely seems necessary. If we admit, as has been said in the preceding chapter, that there always exist two simultaneous and opposite processes whose difference is all that is perceptible to the consciousness, it is sufficient for one of the processes to be accelerated or the other retarded, in an abnormal manner, in order to change the difference in favour of one or the other. No doubt the final result contradicts the rule, since in the above cases the surplus which ought to be negative (pain) is positive (pleasure). But this is a new proof that we are confronted with a deviation, an anomaly, a pathological case to be treated as such.

I have taken by itself and studied a typical case; it now remains, not to enumerate, but to classify pathological pleasures in order to show their frequency. Taking as a guide the excellent definition of Mantegazza, “Morbid pleasure is that which is either the cause or the effect of an evil,” I divide them into three classes.

1. Semi-pathological pleasures, which form the transition from the healthy to the frankly morbid. These require an excessive or prolonged expenditure of vital energy. We know that the pleasures of taste, smell, sight, hearing, touch, muscular exercise, the sexual relations, produce fatigue and exhaustion, or even suddenly become painful. The pleasures of affection, of self-love, of possession, when they become passions—that is to say, when they increase in intensity and stability—cease to be pure pleasures; a painful element is added to them. This phenomenon is natural and logical, since every increase in activity entails losses, and consequently conditions of pain. This class is scarcely morbid, since pain here succeeds pleasure. This is not the case with the other two, in which pleasure rises from the midst of destruction, and dominates the consciousness.

2. Pleasures destructive of the individual. I do not stop to discuss certain anomalies of taste and smell which will be described elsewhere; but the pleasures due to intoxication and narcotics are so widespread that they seem inherent in humanity. At all times, in all places, even in the savage state, man has found artificial means of living—if only for a moment—in an enchanted world. He has himself created this pleasure for his own destruction. But there are still clearer cases—of tendencies not acquired or invented—when pleasure makes and dominates the process of disorganisation. Thus, during a certain period of the general paralysis of the insane, the patient believes himself to possess the supreme degree of strength, health, riches, and power; satisfaction and happiness are expressed in his whole bearing. Thus in certain forms of acute mania, on one side (which we shall pass over for the present) it shows itself in anger; on another, in exuberant spirits, abounding joy—a feeling of energy and vigour. Some patients say, after their recovery, that they never felt so happy as during their illness (Krafft-Ebing). We may also mention the case of consumptive patients, many of whom are never so rich in hopes or so fertile in projects as when at the point of death. Finally, we have the sense of well-being (“euphoria”) of the dying. It has been attempted to explain this by analgesia, as if the suppression of pain were identical with the appearance of joy. Féré, who has examined the question in his Pathologie des Emotions,[^[47]] concludes that this exaltation is due to momentary but positive conditions of the cerebral circulation.

Must we admit that, in these cases, by an inconceivable derogation from natural determinism, pleasure becomes the translation into consciousness of a deep and incurable disorganisation? There is no need of this. It is more rational to admit that this pleasure is here, as elsewhere, connected with its natural cause, a superabundance of vital activity. Every pathological pleasure is accompanied by excitability; but the latter is not a normal activity, or the fever-patient and the neuropath would enjoy an excess of health. In reality, we are confronted with a complex case; on the one hand, a perpetual and enormous loss, which goes on rapidly, without becoming perceptible to the consciousness; on the other, a superficial excitement, which is momentary and conscious. The anomaly is in this psychic disproportion, or rather in the short-sighted consciousness, which cannot pass its narrow limits and penetrate into the region of the unconscious.

3. Destructive pleasures of a social character, which are connected, not with the suffering of the individual himself, but with that of others. Such is the pleasure felt in killing and seeing killed—in sanguinary spectacles, bull-fights, fights between animals, and, in a much feebler degree, in hearing or reading tales of bloodshed. These pleasures can be explained; they denote the satisfaction of tendencies to violence and destruction, which, strong or weak, conscious or unconscious, exist in all men. They may be studied under the heading of the pathology of tendencies, which I shall treat later on; let me only remark in passing that these tendencies involve a certain display of energy, which is one of the conditions of active pleasure.

One question in conclusion. Can pleasure, and joy in particular, be the cause of a grave catastrophe, such as madness or death? Some alienists—Bucknill, Tuke, Guislain, etc.—quote cases of madness which they attribute to sudden joy, such as an unforeseen inheritance, or success in obtaining a long-wished-for situation. The same thesis has been maintained in the case of death[^[48]] occurring suddenly, or after syncope. Griesinger maintains that it is extremely rare—if it ever happens—for excessive joy by itself to produce madness. Others absolutely deny the fact.[^[49]] It is certain that joy is seldom seen figuring in any enumeration of the causes of madness. Joy, as a state of consciousness, could not have such effects. The catastrophe can only be explained by sudden and violent organic troubles, which cannot have this effect unless there already exists a predisposition. It is not joy which maddens or kills, but the shock received by a being in an abnormal state. It would be more correct to say that an event which, in the generality of men, ought to cause joy, here produces a peculiar pathological state ending in madness or death.

II.

The other side of the subject may be briefly disposed of. We occasionally, though rarely, meet with people who grieve over good fortune when it comes to them; these have the pain of pleasure. I do not think that any psychologist has dwelt on them, and it seems to me useless to make a study of these cases. Though in form the reverse of the pleasure of pain, it fundamentally resembles it. This disposition of mind, found in certain pessimists, is rightly called eccentric or bizarre—i.e., general opinion instinctively looks on it as a deviation, an anomaly. This, moreover, is only a special instance of a general state of mind—morbid or pathologic sadness—which we are about to study. I have remarked above that, as pain and sadness always involve a morbid element, the expression abnormal would be more accurate and less open to criticism.

In order to affirm that a physical or moral pain is outside the usual law, and may be described as abnormal, we shall have recourse to the three distinctive marks given at the opening of this chapter, and we can take, as our one type, that of melancholia in the medical sense. It presents the required characteristics: the long duration, disproportion between the cause and effect experienced, and excessive or insufficient reaction.

It is needless to give a description of the melancholic state; it may be found in all treatises on mental disease. This affection assumes many clinical forms, varying from melancholia attonita, which simulates a stupid apathy, to the agitated form accompanied by incessant groans, from the slight to the profound and incurable forms. It will be sufficient to enumerate the most general features. In comparing melancholy with ordinary sadness, we may follow the cumulative method, because the morbid state is nothing but the normal condition thrown into high relief.

1. We know that the physiological characteristics of normal sadness are reducible to a single formula: lowering of the vital functions. The same is the case with melancholia, where, however, the organic depression is much more accentuated. Constriction of the vaso-motor nerves, resulting in a diminished calibre of the arteries, anæmia, and lowered temperature of the extremities; lowering of the cardiac pressure, which may descend from an average of 800 grammes to 650 and even 600 grammes; a progressive slackening of nutrition, with various resultant manifestations, such as digestive troubles, checked secretions, etc.; slow and rare movements; a dislike of all muscular effort, all work, all physical exercise, unless there are (as sometimes happens in cases of agitated melancholia) moments of disordered reflex movements and attacks of fury. Such is the general condition. It is obvious that this represents pain carried to an extreme degree, and that we find, here too, as well as in normal melancholy, passive and active pains.

2. The psychic characteristics consist, in the first place, of an emotional state varying from apathetic resignation to despair; some patients are so crushed as to think themselves dead. It has been noted that, in general, persons of a gloomy disposition are inclined to melancholia, while those of a cheerful one rather tend towards mania. In both cases there is an exaggeration of the normal condition. The intellectual disposition consists in the slackening of the association of ideas, in indolence of the mind. Ordinarily, a fixed idea predominates, excluding from the consciousness all that has no relation to it; thus the hypochondriac thinks only of his health; the nostalgic, of his country; the religious melancholiac, of his salvation. Voluntary activity is almost nil; aboulia, “the consciousness of not willing, is the very essence of this disease” (Schüle). Sometimes there are violent and unexpected reflex impulses, which are a new proof of the annihilation of the will. To sum up: while normal sadness has its moments of intermission, the melancholiac is shut up in his grief as if by an impenetrable wall, without the slightest fissure through which a ray of joy might reach him.

Here arises a question we cannot neglect, because it is connected with one of the principal theses of this work, the fundamental part played by the feelings. Passive melancholia, being taken as the type of the painful state under its extreme and permanent form, what is its origin? There are two possible answers. We may admit that a physical pain, or a certain representation, engenders a melancholic disposition, and poisons the affective life. Or we may admit that a vague and general state of depression and disorganisation becomes concrete and fixes itself in an idea. On the first supposition the intellectual state is primary, and the affective state resultant. On the second the affective state is the first moment, and the intellectual state results from it.

This problem, rather psychical than practical, has only occupied a very small number of alienists. Schüle admits the twofold origin.[^[50]] Sometimes the patient, suffering from a painful and causeless depression, which he cannot shake off, inquires no further; but, most frequently, he connects the painful feeling with some incident in his previous or present life. Sometimes, much more rarely, the haunting idea is the first to appear, and forms the pivot of the melancholic state and its consequences. Dr. Dumas,[^[51]] who has devoted a special work to this question, founded on his own observation, comes to the same conclusions as Schüle. One of his patients attributed her incurable sadness, in turn, and without sufficient reason, to her husband, to her son, to expected loss of work. In others, the melancholy is of intellectual origin: the loss of fortune, the idea of irrevocable damnation, etc. He is thus led to admit that a melancholia of organic origin is the most frequent, one of intellectual origin the rarest.

Can we trace back these two modes of manifestation to a common and deeper cause? This is Krafft-Ebing’s[^[52]] solution: “We must consider psychic pain and the arrest of ideas as co-ordinate phenomena; and there is reason to think of a common cause, of a nutritive trouble of the brain (anæmia?), leading to a diminished expenditure of nervous activity. Taken comprehensively, melancholia may be considered as a morbid condition of the psychic organism founded on nutritive troubles, and characterised on the one hand by the feeling of pain and a particular mode of reaction on the part of the whole consciousness (psychic neuralgia), on the other by the difficulty of psychic movements (instinct, ideas), and finally, by their arrest.”

I am unwilling to incur the reproach of inferring more from facts than they contain, and of insisting on unity at any price; but it follows from the preceding that if the element of feeling is not everywhere and always primary, at least it is so in the majority of cases. Besides, it is closely connected with fundamental trophic troubles, so that we arrive at the same conclusion by another road. Dumas (op. cit., pp. 133 et seq.) has insisted on the depressing influences of marshy soil, on the stagnation, the physical and moral apathy of the inhabitants of Sologne, the Dombes, the Maremma, and other regions infested by malaria, a condition which may be summed up in two words, sadness and resignation. These facts are quite in favour of the organic origin of melancholia.

The special study of the anomalies of pleasure and pain is not important for itself alone. The formula generally admitted since Aristotle, which couples pleasure with utility, pain with what is injurious, admits of many exceptions in practice. Perhaps the constitution of a pathological group in the study of pleasure and pain may permit us to solve some difficulties, to prevent the rule and the exceptions being placed on the same plane, and unduly assimilated to one another. We shall see that this is so in one of the following chapters.

CHAPTER V.
THE NEUTRAL STATES.

Two methods of study—Affirmative thesis founded on observation, deduction, and psycho-physics—Negative thesis: the psychological trinity; confusion between consciousness and introspection—Diversity of temperaments.

Up to the present, pleasure and pain have been studied first separately, as two perfectly distinct states, pure, by hypothesis, from every admixture. We then examined those singular cases where pain becomes the material or occasion of pleasure, and vice versâ. We have still to speak of those cases where the agreeable and the painful coexist in varying proportions in the consciousness—e.g., in the mountain-climber who feels at the same time fatigue, the fear of the precipices, the beauty of the landscape, and the pleasure of difficulty vanquished. Nothing is more frequent than these mixed forms; they would even be the rule if one could admit, with certain authors, that there are no unmixed pleasures or pains; but by their complex and composite nature they are, in fact, emotions, and we shall come to them again later on.

The subject of this chapter is quite different. It is the much-discussed, still unsolved, and perhaps insoluble problem of neutral states, states of indifference, free from any accompaniment, either pleasurable or painful. Do such exist? Both the affirmative and negative are maintained by good authorities; there is even a psychologist who seems to me to have adopted each thesis in turn.[^[53]]

The question can only be entered on in two ways—by observation and by argument. Let us examine the results of these two methods.

1. Does the state of indifference exist as an observable fact? Bain is, among contemporary writers, the principal champion of this thesis, which has excited a lengthy discussion.[^[54]] He does not pretend to affirm that there is a single state of feeling free from every agreeable or disagreeable element; but if these elements only exist as infinitesimal quantities, psychology need take no account of them. Pleasure and pain are clearly defined generic states; yet there is a practical interest in knowing whether any neutral conditions exist. Bain finds the type of these in cases of simple excitement, which may be accompanied either by pleasure or by pain, but remain distinct from either. The sensation of burning, the smell of asafœtida, the taste of aloes, these are modes of excitement which we call pain, because in them pain predominates. The noise of a mill, the confused murmur of a great city, are modes of excitement which may be called agreeable or disagreeable; but the excitement is the essential fact, the pleasure and pain are accidental.

Bain does not appear to me happy in most of the examples he has chosen. I quote some of them. The shock produced by surprise—but surprise is only a mitigated form of fear, and in nearly all cases instantaneously assumes a painful or pleasurable character. The state of expectation: “The intense objectivity of one’s looks when following a race, or a great surgical operation, is not, strictly speaking, unconsciousness, but a maximum of energy with a minimum of consciousness. It is rather a mode of indifference—more of an excitement than an affective state.” Here we may make the same comment; moreover, there is in expectation a feeling of effort which soon becomes fatigue, and, in most instances, expectation involves the anticipation of some event either desired or dreaded.

Those who do not attempt to prove the existence of neutral states by direct observation deduce them from general principles. Thus Sergi considers them as the necessary effect of determinate biological conditions. Pleasure and pain being the two fundamental forms—the two poles of the life of feeling, there must exist between them a neutral zone corresponding to a state of perfect adaptation. Pain is a state of consciousness revealing a conflict of the organism with exterior forces—a want of adaptation of one to the other; whence a loss of energy. Pleasure is a state of consciousness which makes it evident that the reaction of the organism is connected with external excitations, whence arises, by synergy, a heightening of vital activity. Indifference is the neutral state of consciousness showing a perfect adaptation of the organism to constant and variable intensities—in other words, excitations which neither increase nor diminish vital activity, but preserve it, produce a state of equilibrium and appeal to the consciousness neither as pleasure nor pain.[^[55]] This hypothesis—viz., that at certain moments the sentient being neither loses nor gains, and that such is the substratum of the psychic state called neutral, seems to me extremely probable, but remains no more than a hypothesis.

Now let us question the psycho-physicists who have treated this subject according to their own special method, while coming to different conclusions. It is difficult to adopt a procedure more theoretical than theirs, or one better adapted to show the insufficiency of the intellectualist method in this domain of psychology. In truth, the subject treated by them is a special aspect of the problem, not its totality; they are inquiring whether, in the “transformation” of pleasure into pain, and vice versâ, there is, in the passage from one contrary to the other, a point of neutrality or indifference. Wundt graphically represents the phenomenon by a curve: the portion of this curve above the line of the abscissa has a positive value, and corresponds to the development of pleasure; the portion below corresponds to the development of pain, and has a negative value; the precise point where the curve cuts the line of the abscissa (to rise in the direction of pleasure or descend in that of pain) corresponds to neutrality or indifference. Lehmann, who, however, admits that weak sensations are neutral states, gives a curve rather different from that of Wundt. From an observation first made by Horwicz, and experiments conducted by Lehmann himself, it appears that, if one dips one’s finger into water whose temperature gradually rises from 35° to 50° Centigrade during a space of 2 minutes and 20 seconds, one feels first an agreeable warmth, then some slight, unpleasant prickings, then oscillations of intense prickings with moments of rest, and lastly, pain. His conclusion is contrary to Wundt’s, for he finds that the passage from pleasure to pain does not take place in a neutral state.[^[56]]

Experiments are not to be despised; but as for the figure supposed to illustrate the phenomenon, it is merely misleading; this mathematical conception explains nothing. The assimilation of pleasure to a positive, and pain to a negative value, is quite arbitrary. Moreover, the passage from plus to minus quantities through zero is an operation which has its base in our faculty of abstraction, and for its materials abstract and homogeneous quantities. The different degrees of pleasure and pain are nothing of this sort. We do not even know if these two phenomena have a common foundation, if there is a common measure between the two, if they are not both irreducible, and we have no right to place, theoretically, a Nullpunkt at the point of transition from one to the other. The problem is one of a concrete order; it is a question of fact, whether soluble or not, which is put before us.

2. Let us now listen to those who refuse to admit states of indifference.

Every state of consciousness is a trinity in the theological sense: it is the knowledge of some exterior or interior event; it includes motor elements; it has a certain tone of feeling. We describe it as intellectual, motor, or emotional, according to the preponderance of one of these elements, not its exclusive existence. It is a well-known fact that the clearer a perception, the weaker is its tone of feeling, and the more intense an emotion, the more attenuated the intellectual element which has evoked it; but diminution is not equivalent to disappearance. If neutral states existed, one of the fundamental elements of psychic life would exist only in an intermittent form, and at some moments even cease to be.

Besides this, let us observe ourselves and interrogate our own consciousness. “Let us consider ourselves at one of those moments of calm and apparent indifference, when it seems as if nothing could move us, and our numbed sensibility remains, as it were, suspended between pleasure and pain. This deceptive appearance of insensibility and aridity always masks some more or less feeble sensations of ease or uneasiness, some more or less slight and confused sentiments of joy or grief which are none the less real for being in nowise vivid or exciting. Moreover, how could our sensibility fail to be, constantly, more or less impressed by so many general causes which, independent of particular causes, so constantly act upon us, at every instant of our life, and which, so to speak, ceaselessly besiege us, from within and from without?” Bouillier, the author of this passage (op. cit., chap. xi.), supports his assertions by citing the innumerable impressions which come from the internal organs, from the state of the air and sky, from light, from the most trivial incidents of common life.

It is certain that the domain of the indifferent states, if existent at all, is very scanty. Yet, however skilfully Bouillier may support his thesis, there is one irrefragable objection to be urged against it: the testimony of the consciousness, always doubtful, is here more so than elsewhere. What he proposes to us is, in fact, to observe ourselves. From the moment when we begin to do this, we no longer have to deal with the natural consciousness, in its raw state, but with that somewhat artificial consciousness which is created by attention. We look, not with our eyes, but through a microscope; we amplify, we enlarge the phenomenon; and here the method of enlargement is not to be trusted. It causes certain subconscious states to cross the threshold of the consciousness; it makes them pass out of the penumbra into full light, and disposes us to believe that such is their normal condition. We know that some individuals, by fixing the attention firmly on some particular part of the body, can bring about in it a sensation of weight, of irritation, of arterial pulsation, etc. Do these modifications always exist, unperceived only so long as the attention is not directed to them? or does attention produce them by means of an increased vascular activity, increasing, but not creating? The latter supposition is the more probable. The hypochondriac who obstinately and patiently watches the details of his organic life feels within himself the motion of the vital mechanism which escapes most men. It would be easy to give other examples, proving that we must distinguish between consciousness pure and simple and internal observation, and that it is the less allowable to argue from one to the other, since in practice the problem is reduced to a difference of intensity.

This question well deserves to be called, as it has been by J. Sully, “one of the cruces of psychology.” Those who wish to take sides in it can only guide their decision by probabilities and preferences. I am inclined to favour the thesis of indifferent states. I find it difficult to admit that certain perceptions or representations, incessantly repeated, imply anything more than the fact of knowledge. The sight of my furniture, arranged in its usual order, causes me no appreciable degree of pleasure or displeasure; or if these exist as infinitesimal quantities, psychology, as Bain justly says, has no concern with them. Fouillée also points out that the feeling of indifference is not primary, but due to an effacement.[^[57]]

The repugnance of certain psychologists to admit indifferent states arises from the fact that this thesis appears to them to introduce discontinuity into the affective life. The mobile and incessantly alternating series of pleasurable or painful modifications would, in that case, have moments of interruption, gaps, and vacant spaces. I yield to no one in asserting the continuity of the affective life; but it must be sought elsewhere. It is in the appetites, the tendencies—conscious or unconscious—the desires and aversions, which, for their part, are always at work, permanent and indestructible. Here, again, we find the mistake of considering pleasure and pain, which are only symptoms, as essential and fundamental elements.

I find it strange, moreover, that, in a subject so much studied and discussed, no one should have contributed an observation which seems to me of some importance. Each author supposes the formula adopted by himself to be applicable to all men. This is to state the question in a philosophical, not in a psychological form—i.e., without taking into account individual variations of temperament and character, an element by no means to be neglected. It is to suppose, without the least proof, that all cases are reducible to unity. On the contrary, there are presumptions that the solution adopted, whatever it is, may be true for some men and false for others. A nervous, excitable temperament, in a perpetual state of vibration, constantly kept on the alert by the workings of passion or thought, may, by its very constitution, leave no moment accessible to an intermission of the incessantly renewed states of pain and pleasure. A lymphatic temperament, on the other hand, a cold disposition, a limited intelligence, poor in ideas, constitute a soil perfectly suited to the frequent appearance and long continuance of indifferent states.[^[58]]

These differences, which are matter of common observation, show the necessity of distrusting an over-simple solution.

CHAPTER VI.
CONCLUSIONS ON PLEASURE AND PAIN.

The beginning of life—I. Conditions of existence of pleasure and pain; lowering and heightening of vital energy—Féré’s experiments—Meynert’s theory—II. Finality of pleasure and pain—Exceptions: explicable cases; irreducible cases.

I shall not delay long over the question, as much debated as the one we have just quitted and still less accessible: Which first makes its appearance in consciousness, pleasure or pain? In our own day, especially, optimists and pessimists have contested this point at great length, although, in my opinion, they have no concern with it. Their doctrines are two antithetical conceptions of the world, depending solely on temperament and character, which could neither be confirmed nor invalidated by the solution of this problem. It is clear that it is a question of origin, of psychogenesis, foreign to experimental psychology, and admitting only of probable solutions.

Descartes expressed the singular opinion that “joy was the first passion of the soul, since it is not credible that the soul should have been placed in the body, except when the latter was well disposed; hence the natural result would be joy.” Others, following theoretic views less strange in character, maintain that, pleasure having for its cause the free play of our activity, pain is connected with the arrest of pleasure, and hence is posterior to it.[^[59]] The majority of writers appear to me to favour the contrary hypothesis; the impressions of cold, of contact, the beginning of pulmonary respiration, etc., are cited as proving the priority of pain; still more so, the cries of infants and of the new-born young of animals. Yet Preyer, in two passages which have not excited much remark, refuses all significance to the cry, and sees in it nothing but a reflex action.[^[60]] It does not seem doubtful that psychic life, in its first or intra-uterine and earlier extra-uterine phases may almost be reduced to a series of pleasurable and painful impressions. Do they resemble those of the adult? It is probable that they do; but it must not be forgotten that to assimilate the plastic forms of the primitive epoch to the fixed and rigid ones of adult life is a mode of reasoning conducive to numerous errors.

Leaving aside this question of origin, it is impossible to close the study of pleasure and pain without a summary recapitulation of the general theories forming the philosophy of our subject. These may be classified under two heads: the how and the why; what are the conditions of existence of pleasure and pain? and what is their utility?

I.

On the first point there has been, from antiquity to the present day, an almost universal and very rare agreement between different schools: pleasure has, as its condition, an increased, pain a diminished activity. I employ this vague formula designedly, because it covers all special formulas. Of these it would be idle to enumerate even the chief. At bottom, in language varying according to the era and the doctrine, all authors say the same thing, employing, according to their cast of intellect, a metaphysical, physical (Léon Dumont), physiological, or psychological formula. The intellectualists themselves agree with the others; considering sensibility as a confused form of intelligence, they say that pleasure is a confused judgment of perfection, and pain a confused judgment of imperfection. In short, if each formula is stripped of the variations adapting it to the particular philosophy of each author, there is a common residue, which, in all alike, is the essential.

The history of these variations on the same theme would be monotonous and unprofitable; it is as well, however, to note that, as our own century advances, the theoretic conception of the ancients tends to grow more precise, to rely more on the support of experience and be justified thereby. We have already seen the two formulas—augmentation, diminution—taking definite shape, showing themselves in the objective and observable changes of nutrition, of the secretions, the movements, the circulation, and the breathing.

Féré’s experiments, he says, “agree perfectly, in showing that pleasurable sensations are accompanied by an increase of energy, and disagreeable ones by a diminution. The sensation of pleasure resolves itself, therefore, into a feeling of power, that of displeasure into a feeling of impotence. We have thus reached the material demonstration of the theoretic ideas propounded by Bain, Darwin, Spencer, Dumont, and others.”[^[61]] I may remind the reader that Féré has applied his dynamometric researches to all kinds of sensations: to smell, to taste, to vision modified by glasses of the principal colours of the spectrum, red giving a dynamometric pressure of 42, which progressively descends to 20-17 for violet. For auditory sensations, he finds that the dynamic equivalent is in proportion to the amplitude and number of the vibrations. The same results are found to follow motion, the movements of the upper or lower limb exercising a dynamogenic influence on the corresponding member. Still further: an excitation imperceptible to the consciousness, a latent perception, determines a dynamic effect just as much as a conscious impression. Suggested hallucinations, agreeable or the reverse, are equally accompanied by an increase or diminution of pressure on the dynamometer.

If the formula, “diminution of vital energy,” of which we have found that melancholia is an extreme instance, can give rise to no ambiguity, this is not the case with the opposite formula; and certain authors have, for this reason, thought—and rightly so—that it ought to be stated in precise terms. Pleasure corresponds to an increase of activity; but if we understand by this expression a large quantity of work done, the pleasure would result from a diminution of the potential energy of the organism, as Léon Dumont has pointed out—i.e., from an impoverishment, which is contradicted by experience. We must therefore understand this increase of activity in the sense that the work done does not expend more energy than the nutritive actions; or, to employ Grant Allen’s formula, “Pleasure is the concomitant of the healthy action of any or all of the organs or members supplied with afferent cerebro-spinal nerves, to an extent not exceeding the ordinary powers of reparation possessed by the system.”[^[62]]

Finally, we must remark that, if every external or internal sensation, whatever its nature, is a transmission of movements coming from without, a new acquisition for the nervous system and the brain, every sensation ought at first to produce at least a momentary increase of energy. Féré, who has foreseen the possibility of this objection, admits in all cases a primary excitement. “If there appear to be cases in which phenomena of depression arise suddenly and subsist by themselves, it is only because they have been insufficiently observed.”[^[63]] There would then be a very short phase of increase, immediately masked, according to him, by the phase of diminution. The physiologists, as we have seen, are always inclined to explain pain by intensity of sensation; but, if we take into account its nature, its quality, and the susceptibility of the nervous system to certain modes of motion received, nothing prevents the loss being immediate.

Meynert, in his Psychiatrie, is the only writer who has attempted to advance any nearer to an explanation, and to determine the mechanism which produces pleasure and pain. His hypothesis, in its principal points, is as follows:—

As far as pain is concerned, his theory may be summed up as an arrestive action of two categories of reflex movements, motor and vascular. The painful state is the translation into consciousness of this physiological mechanism.

1. Motor reflexes.—Let us suppose the head of a sleeping child to be slightly tickled. As the child’s sleep is sound, and there is no pain, nothing takes place but a slight withdrawal of the hand. If we suppose a slight prick, there will be few movements, and these limited to a small part of the body. But if we suppose some severe pain, such as the extraction of a tooth, or a burn extending over a large portion of the skin, the result will be prolonged and terrible reflex movements in all parts of the body, which (in our opinion) may be considered as defensive. So much for external facts; what is taking place internally?

We know that vibrations are conducted slowly in the grey matter (twelve times as slowly, according to Helmholtz, as in the white). When an excitation increases, as we have seen, the number of muscular groups set in motion, resistance to transmission increases in the same proportion. “The sensation of pain presupposes a reflex movement and an arrest of nervous conduction in the grey substance of the spinal marrow.” It is this process of inhibition, in varying degrees, which is felt by the consciousness as pain.

2. Vascular reflexes.—Peripheral excitation also has reflex effects on the vaso-motor system; it produces contraction of the spinal arteries, of the carotids, and of the cerebral arteries. Hence the syncope which frequently accompanies acute pain, and the sleep (the result of anæmia) which has more than once been recorded in the case of prisoners undergoing torture. This constriction of the arteries produces a chemical change, a deficit of oxygen and nutritive elements in the cells of the cortex; the respiration of the tissues is interfered with, and the distressed state of the organism is psychologically rendered by pain.

Conversely, the excitations contributing to the wellbeing of the individual are accompanied by a free transmission of nervous force, by vaso-motor dilatation, by hyperæmia of the nervous centres, and, in the motor series, by “aggressive movements,” such as the singing of birds, the joyous barking of dogs, and other analogous manifestations in the human subject.

Meynert—vaguely enough, and relying for support on the association of ideas—has applied his explanation to the case of moral pain. It would not be difficult to adapt this hypothesis to the different forms of vexation and sadness; but with a more complicated mechanism. The point of departure is no longer a perception, but a representation. The phenomenon is no longer of peripheral, but of central origin; so that it starts from the brain and returns to it, or, in psychological terms, begins in a purely intellectual state of consciousness and ends in a state that is primarily one of feeling. If, reading by chance a list of deaths in a newspaper, I find, with no possible opening for doubt, the name of a friend, what takes place in me is this: the other unknown names pass through my consciousness like empty words, or a simple visual percept; suddenly everything is changed; the reflex and vascular movements above described are produced, then the arrest of the medullary and cerebral centres, whose expression in consciousness will be grief. But these reflex actions are only possible if the word read suggests the recollection of former deaths, that is to say, of a sum of privations, negations, and checked desires, the result of a mass of accumulated experiences rising up together and acting, whether consciously, subconsciously, or unconsciously.

An English alienist, Clouston, who has published a critical analysis of this hypothesis of Meynert’s, considers it as the best in the present state of the science of nervous physiology, although full of lacunæ, and, after all, rather theoretical than experimental. It is not in accordance with several facts; e.g., in anger, which is a painful state, there is an afflux of blood, combined with aggressive movements.[^[64]] On the other hand, it harmonises with a great number of manifestations observed in mental disease; thus, at the third stage of general paralysis, a puncture causes a painless reflex action, because the grey substance, being disorganised, no longer has any inhibitive power. In the evolution of melancholia, the patients sometimes at first suffer from purely physical pains (neuralgia, headache, etc.), which disappear to make way for the melancholic state, which, in its turn, disappears with the return of the physical pain. Everyday experience shows that physical and moral pain cannot coexist in any degree of intensity; a burn may for a time arrest the progress of melancholy, and we all know what happens to many persons as soon as they arrive at the dentist’s. It seems as though the organism had but a limited capacity for either pleasure or pain, and that neither feeling can exist at the same time in its double (physical and moral) form.

II.

Much has been written on the finality of pleasure and pain, though two entirely distinct methods of procedure have been adopted.

The first, that of theologians and moralists, is an extrinsic explanation; pleasure is an attraction, the charm of life; pain is a vigilant monitor warning us of our disorganisation. They exist in us by the beneficent grace of Providence or Nature; they have a transcendental cause.

The second, which has only found complete expression in the evolutionist school, is an intrinsic explanation. It keeps to the analysis of facts, and shows that pleasure and pain have their why in the animal’s conditions of existence, and that consequently their causality is immanent. Thus understood, the problem of why is pretty nearly identical with that of how, mechanism and finality being very nearly confounded.

Herbert Spencer (followed by Grant Allen, Schneider, and others) has clearly shown that the connection between pleasure and utility, pain and injury, is an almost necessary relation, having its root in the nature of things, and that it has been an important factor in the survival of the fittest. Every animal as a rule persists in actions which cause it pleasure—that is, in a mode of activity which tends to its preservation; while it usually avoids what causes it pain, that being the correlative of injurious actions. The animal has thus two useful guides in the course of its life, to enable it to survive and perpetuate its species.

If this rule were without exception,—if pleasure universally accompanied utility, and vice versâ,—it would be sufficient to state the law of the conditions of existence and nothing more. But the exceptions to the rule are numerous, and require critical study. Some can be explained, others seem to me irreducible to any law.

1. Herbert Spencer relieves us of a large number of exceptions, which are, in fact, only the result of civilisation. Prehistoric man, according to this author, was well adapted to his environment and to a predatory life; but when, under pressure of want, the transition to a sedentary and civilised existence took place, the human being found itself ill-adapted to its surroundings. The conditions of social existence have been superposed on those of natural existence, constituting a new milieu, and requiring other forms of activity. In consequence of this, frequent discordances have arisen which he has enumerated at great length: the survival of predatory tendencies difficult to satisfy, the necessity of repugnant and monotonous labour, excess of labour compensated for by excess of pleasure, as so frequently happens in great cities, etc.[^[65]] All these interversions are the work of man, the result of his irrational struggle against nature, of his will, of his artificial activities. “In the case of mankind, there has arisen, and must long continue, a deep and involved derangement of the natural connections between pleasures and beneficial actions, and between pains and detrimental actions—a derangement which so obscures their natural connections that even the reverse connections are supposed to obtain.” Spencer thinks that a readjustment will take place in the long run; I leave this consolation—without sharing it—to the optimists.

2. Besides these exceptions, due to the intercurrence of social causes, there are others of an individual character, which also can be explained. Certain poisons are agreeable to the taste, and cause death; a surgical operation is painful, but beneficial; many persons intensely enjoy a far niente which leads them to ruin; it is pleasant to live in the world of pure fancy, but the reaction leaves one enervated and unable to fulfil one’s daily task. Many other cases of this kind may be met with in ordinary life. All these exceptions to the rule are only apparent ones. Consciousness reveals only the momentary phenomenon, and, within these limits, its verdict is accurate; it expresses the processes actually going on in the organism at the moment, as we have seen in the euphoria of the dying; it cannot tell us what will follow. The explanation reduces itself to Grant Allen’s saying, “Neither pleasure nor pain is prophetic.”[^[66]]

3. There are other facts which the partisans of final causes prudently pass over in silence, and which certain evolutionists have attempted to explain.

Spencer remarks (loc. cit., § 127) that, “while the individual is young and not yet fertile, its welfare and the welfare of the race go together; but when the reproductive age is reached, the welfare of the individual and of the race cease to be the same, and may be diametrically opposed.... Very frequently, among invertebrate animals, the death of the parents is a normal result of propagation. In the great class Insects, the species of which outnumber all other animal species, the rule is that the male lives only until a new generation has been begotten, and that the female dies as soon as the eggs are deposited.” There is, therefore, says the English author, a qualification to be made.

Schneider, in his interesting work Freud und Leid, inspired by the transformist hypothesis and the ideas of Spencer, gets rid of the difficulty by connecting pleasure and pain with the conditions of existence, not of the individual, but of the species: pleasure corresponding to specific utility and pain to specific injury. This statement of the problem is ingenious, but arbitrary. Pleasure and pain are essentially subjective, individual states. They can only assume a specific character by means of generalisation—i.e., as a conception of our minds, which has no reality or value, except so far as abstracted from particular cases.

Restricting our attention to man, and not occupying ourselves with the antagonism between the individual and the race, we shall find that there are cases very difficult to bring under the law. A grain of sand in the eye, an attack of dental neuralgia cause a degree of pain enormously out of proportion with the amount of organic injury sustained. On the other hand, the dissolution of certain organs essential to life is frequently almost painless. The brain may be cut and cauterised almost without suffering; a cavity may be formed in the lung, a cancer in the liver, without the slightest warning of danger. Pain, that “vigilant sentinel” of the advocates of final causes, remains dumb, or only warns us when the evil is already of long standing and irremediable. Nay, more, it often misleads us as to the actual seat of the disease. Examples of false localisation abound; an irritation in the nose is due to intestinal worms, a headache to a morbid condition of the stomach, a pain in the right shoulder to liver complaint. Many other instances of this kind have been studied by physicians under the names of painful synæsthesia, or synalgia.

Schneider is, I believe, the only one who has attempted to explain these deviations from the generally admitted formula,[^[67]] by reducing the problem to the two following questions:—First, whether the development of an acute sensibility of the internal organs—i.e., a relation of causality between their lesions and the feeling of pain—is, in general, possible; secondly, whether, such development having taken place, this faculty of feeling, as pain, any lesion of the internal organs could be a means of protection, as it is found to be in the case of the skin. The internal organs are only in contact with an interior surface, which is tolerably uniform; if an opposite state of things arises, i.e., if they are laid bare by some profound lesion, death ordinarily ensues, at least in animals and in primitive man. Only the slow progress of surgery has made it possible to remedy such accidents. If, through spontaneous variation, a case of sensibility of the internal organs had ever occurred, it would be useless; it could neither become permanent nor be transmitted to descendants, since the lesion, resulting in death, would render the further evolution of this quality impossible. Besides, had this sensitive faculty of the internal organs existed, it must have remained useless, since it could only become efficacious when combined with protective and retractile movements of the organs, which, by the very constitution of the animal, cannot take place. In fact, the whole of the sensibility has been concentrated in the exterior parts of the body, which, by protecting themselves, also protect, in the degree to which this is possible, the internal organs.

I have insisted on the exceptions (certainly they are not without a cause, whether we accept that alleged by Schneider, or prefer those of other authorities), because they are only too readily forgotten. The connection of pleasure and utility, pain and injury, is a formula which originated with the philosophers—that is, with intellects which always, and before all things, demand unity. Psychology must proceed otherwise, must incessantly confront the formula with facts, check it by experience, note the exceptions; it is content with empirical laws, embracing the generality, but never the totality of cases.

CHAPTER VII.
THE NATURE OF EMOTION.

Analogy between perception and emotion—Constituent elements of emotion—Summary of the theory of James and Lange—Application of this theory to the higher emotions (religious, moral, æsthetic, intellectual)—Illegitimate confusion between the quality and intensity of emotion—Examination of a typical case: musical emotion—The most emotional of all the arts is the most dependent on physiological conditions—Proofs: its action on animals, on primitive man, on civilised man; its therapeutic action—Why certain sensations, images, and ideas awaken organic and motor states, and, consequently, emotion—They are connected either with natural or social conditions of existence—Differences and resemblances between the two cases—Antecedents of the physiological theory of emotion—Dualist position, or that of the relation between cause and effect—Unitary position; its advantages.