If we understood Death, we should no longer care for Life.
II. The Inseparable Connection of Pleasure and Pain.
The hard and strange lesson that I would teach in this chapter is, that dreams of unalloyed bliss are not merely fanciful, they are impossible of realization under any known conditions of life; that pleasure requires pain, joy demands sorrow, as the very condition of its existence; and that these pairs are inseparable twins, the presence of one being bound up in that of the other.
I here promulgate no new discovery in the science of mind, though it has been much overlooked by physiologists, and quite put one side by sanguine optimists in their rosy paintings of the future perfectibility and universal happiness of the human race. More than two thousand years ago Socrates dwelt upon this same uncanny blending of contraries. The jailer, as we are told in the “Phædo,” of Plato, removed the galling iron fetters from the philosopher’s ankles shortly before the cup of hemlock was handed him; and in this brief interval his friends gathered around him for the last farewell.
“And Socrates, sitting on the side of the bed, bent his leg and rubbed it with his hand, and in doing so said,—'How strange a thing, my friends, is that which is called
Pleasure! and how oddly it is connected with what is called Pain! Pleasure and Pain do not come to man together; but if a person runs after the one and catches it, he almost immediately catches the other too, as if they were fastened together at one end. I think if Æsop had noticed this he would have compiled a fable to this effect: That the gods tried to reconcile these two opposites, and not being able to do this, fastened their extremities together so that when you take hold of one it pulls after it the other. And so it happens to me now; there was pain in my leg when the chain bound it, and now comes pleasure following the pain.’”
A law of physiology, a law of the whole universe, underlies these homely reflections of the ancient Greek.
On the one side, pleasure and pain are states of feeling totally opposed to each other both in sensation and in physical effect, pleasure being concomitant with an increase, pain with a decrease, of the vital functions; and yet, on the other, there is a unity, or, at any rate, a close analogy of action, under these contrary conditions of mental life. Each is a stimulus to new forms of mental change and biotic motion, though in the one instance the tendency of the new activity is toward a higher concentration of the individual life, and, in the other, toward its diminution or its disaggregation into other and lower forms.
A feeling of pleasure is an exaltation of sensation in some special set of nerves. These are stimulated to an unwonted exercise of their functions; but they can provide this disproportionate