To adjust rightly this intricate mutual activity requires consciousness, and consciousness involves pleasure and pain. The whole field of distinctively human activities is under this law. We have a vast fund of energy, a vast field of exercise, and a constantly increasing consciousness of this exercise. Meanwhile the income of man, as a separate animal, remains the same. He has, as before, the pleasure of the intake, the attainment of the means to his separate welfare. He has, beyond that, his share of pleasure in the larger collective intake also, the gratification of his social desires; but he has, pre-eminently, the pleasure of action; of the conscious expression of energy.
This is the largest field of human delight, but has not been so recognised. We still commonly associate pleasure with impression, with things we are to get, to have. Whereas, in fact, our pleasure depends far more largely upon what we do.
Closely derived from this basic assumption is our general theory of return as an incentive; what we may call the Pay concept. This was one of man’s earliest generalisations. He observed the excito-motory action of the individual beast; under the influence of hunger or fear he acts; not influenced, he does not act, sleeps in the sun, and accumulates energy for the next jump.
The beast, seeing his dinner running before him, ran after it; having caught his dinner, he ceased to run. Seeing his enemy running behind him, he ran away from it; having escaped from his enemy, he ceased to run.
“Aha!” cries that astute observer, Early Man, “Exertion depends on pleasure before you or pain behind you!” and he forthwith produced his grand primeval generalisation of Reward and Punishment.
This is still exclusively held by almost all of us. We have used it to account for all human actions, with the bitter conclusion that “every man has his price.” We have spread and lengthened and deepened it to cover our waxing field of action, till out of its logical extremes we have built both Heaven and Hell.
It was a tremendous concept for the early brain to achieve, and it was true—as far as it went. These two forces do modify action. They were very strong upon individual animals, and they act upon us yet—to a degree. That is, there are still some of us so near the plane of individualism as to be readily and strongly influenced by these agents.
The error of early man lay in not observing other forces even then operative; and the error of modern man lies in not observing that these others have grown continually, and the primal ones have dwindled in proportion.
Right beside our rashly generalising ancestor laboured the primeval squaw, working patiently, working eagerly, working most efficiently, out of the overflowing energy of the mother instinct, with the power of recreative love. Not because of anything to gain or anything to fear, but because energy must have expression; and the expression is in proportion to the energy, not in proportion to the return. Later, in the fall of the matriarchate and the inception of our dramatic androcentric period, the woman was made a slave and her labour became slave labour, not to its improvement. Later again men were made slaves; their activity was coerced by these two primitive stimuli, the fear of punishment, the hope of reward; mainly the former.
In that first period of co-ordinate activity among men, the irreconcilable male energy was forced into service by the immediate pressure of pain and fear. Slavery was one step short of slaughter, as such accepted, as such hated. All that deep-rooted aversion to labour—sense of scorn for it, shame in it, honour in being free of it—was superimposed upon humanity at this period, and has never been fully outgrown. This terrible period, its wrong, its shame, its agony, its hopelessness, deeply impressed the growing brain of man, and, as this period was of great duration, it made possible to our minds the prodigious concepts of eternal torture.