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?