Then they measured very carefully; and they found, as nearly as they could measure, the routines which sprang up as the routine A B died away were equal in sensation to the loss in the routine A B, A B. And from this they concluded that the amount of sensation or feeling was constant. They called it living force, and said that it must transmit itself and, wherever it appeared, be equal in its total amount to what it was at first. But after a time, with more delicate measurements and more patient thought, they found that some of the sensation was still unaccounted for.
For consider any routine consisting of the acts A, B; A, B; A, B. In order to make any pair of acts A, B worth while, the king bore a certain amount of pain. Referring to the numbers which we took before, if there were 1000 of pleasure in A there would only be 998 of pain in B. Thus the sensation was not equal in the two acts A and B. Some of the sensations had gone, and the portion of sensation we are now considering—the portion by which B was less than A—had not gone in starting other routines. This loss could not be accounted for as they accounted for the difference in sensation between the first action A B and the second action, consisting of the acts A and B in the routine. There was a loss of sensation which was counterbalanced by the gain in sensation in other routines.
But besides this there was a further loss. Some sensation went off, not to be recovered in any routine they knew.
Now it was the bearing on the part of the king which produced the appearance of the passing away of sensation altogether, so that the act B was less in amount of sensation than the act A. But the inhabitants—at least the wise ones—were firmly convinced that sensation could not be annihilated or lessened. So they came to the conclusion that sensation was passing off into a form from which it never reappeared, so that it could affect them. They conceived it still to exist, but to be irrecoverably gone from the life of the inhabitants of the valley.
Taking the numbers we have taken, and the simple instances we have supposed, this course of reasoning appears straightforward enough. But in reality so complicated was the state of things in the valley, and the proportion of pain which the king bore in each single action so minute, that to have arrived at this result implied powers of investigation of no mean order.
It is interesting to mention the names which these investigators gave in the valley. In the performance of the pleasant act A, they said that the being acquired greater animation. In going through the painful act B, they said that he passed into a position of advantage. They used the term advantage because, having completed the painful act B, he was ready to begin the pleasant part of the action A over again. And in this part he manifested more animation.
And now although acts of greater animation and greater advantage succeeded one another, and although the new total of the sensation in the act of a being was very nearly equalled by that in a subsequent act, still there was not—they had to confess there was not—a complete equality. Some of the sensation had certainly gone from the sphere in which the inhabitants could feel it.
We see that this sensation which was gone was in reality the pain-bearing of the king, which set all their life going.
But they knew nothing of this, and formed a very different conclusion. They said: “If some of the sensation is continually going and disappearing from the life of the inhabitants of the valley—if this is the case, although the sensation may not be destroyed, it is certainly lost to us.”
And then they thought: “Surely the amount of sensation must be always the same; if some of it continually goes off into a form in which we cannot feel it, that portion which is left behind, and which we feel, must be continually growing less.”