There is no convincing evidence of any qualities of feeling other than pleasant and unpleasant. There is evidence, on the other hand, that the simple feelings form intimate and characteristic blends with sensations, and especially with kinæsthetic and organic sensations; we may call such blends sense-feelings. Every sensory stimulus, even so local and trifling a thing as a tone of moderate intensity, sets up a widespread organic disturbance: a result that is natural, perhaps, in view of the manifold interconnections within the nervous system, but that we are nevertheless likely to overlook. This organic stir brings out kinæsthetic and organic sensations which may form the body of a sense-feeling, developed round about the disturbing tone, and giving it a peculiar tinge of feeling that it would not otherwise possess. The same thing holds of other stimuli. We can distinguish six types or classes of these sense-feelings: the agreeable and disagreeable, the exciting and subduing, and the straining and relaxing. Tastes and smells are preeminently agreeable or disagreeable. Deep tones are solemn and serious, that is, subduing; high tones are cheerful and playful, that is, exciting. The painter’s ‘warm’ colours, red and yellow, are exciting; his ‘cold’ blues are subduing; the gloom of a darkened room is positively depressing. Warmth and cold are themselves exciting and subduing. The straining and relaxing feelings are dependent upon the temporal course and succession of sensations; the interminable pedal-point in E♭ with which Wagner begins the Ring sets up a feeling of tension which is relaxed when the B♭ is added, only to grow again, and again relax when new tones are introduced; and if you follow the strokes of a slow-beating metronome you get a similar alternation of the two sense-feelings. Notice that the six names are all alike class-names; the sense-feelings themselves appear in numberless variety; but any particular sense-feeling may be referred to one or more of the classes. Notice also that the paired names are all opposites: a sense-feeling may be agreeably exciting, or agreeably subduing, but it cannot be excitingly subduing; and so on with the rest. Remember finally that the simple feeling taken alone, and not blended with sensory qualities into a sense-feeling, is always a bare pleasant or unpleasant.
We must next discuss the organic disturbances that accompany feeling itself. We know that feelings ‘express’ themselves in various ways; we blush for shame and pale from fear; we shake with rage, and our ‘heart beats high’ with hope. Now it is possible to measure all these organic changes; to record the rate and height of pulse, for instance, or the variation in the volume of a limb according as blood flows into it or is withdrawn from it; physiology puts the necessary instruments at our disposal. The observer may therefore be harnessed to some such system of recording apparatus, and may be subjected to some pleasant or unpleasant stimulus; he reports what he feels, and the experimenter is able to compare the report with the record from the instrument. The results of work of this sort are summed up in the following table; where a + stands for an increase, and a-for a decrease, of rate or height or volume, as the case may be.
| Pleasant | Unpleasant | |
| Rate of pulse | - | + |
| Height of pulse | + | - |
| Volume of arm | + | - |
| Rate of breathing | + | - |
| Depth of breathing | + | - |
| Depth of breathing | ?— - | ?— + |
The table asserts that, during a pleasant experience, our pulse is slowed and heightened; blood flows from the trunk into the extremities; and our breathing quickens and, perhaps, grows more shallow. During an unpleasant experience, the reverse of all these things takes place.
The pleasant and unpleasant experiences here referred to are, of course, agreeable and disagreeable sense-feelings; and we have the right to correlate the organic changes with pleasant and unpleasant feeling only because they remain the same so long as feeling remains the same, whatever may be the character of the sensory stimulus. There can be no doubt that similar tables may presently be made out for the other sense-feelings; indeed, that must be the case, in so far as the sense-feelings are stable blends of simple feeling with sensations. But it is not easy, in the case of the other pairs, to secure a stable blend, to keep the nature of the ‘excitement’ or the ‘relaxation’ just the same from experiment to experiment; and we shall therefore make no attempt here to list their bodily expressions. We come back to the general subject of expression when we deal with emotion (§ 51).
Can we now say anything definite about the nervous correlate of the simple feelings? Can we say what is going on in the nervous system when we feel pleasantly or unpleasantly? Unfortunately no: we have many theories, but no positive knowledge. There is, however, one view of feeling which has persisted from Aristotle to the present day; and we must say a word about it, if only because you cannot read far in psychology without running against some form of it, and you should not blindly accept it. We may call it the biological theory of feeling. Aristotle said that pleasure (we must now use the old-fashioned terms) accompanies the unimpeded exercise of any faculty, that is, the healthy exercise of any mental faculty upon its appropriate object; and that pain accompanies impeded activity. In more modern language, pleasure is for Aristotle a matter of efficiency. Herbert Spencer puts the same idea into evolutionary language; “pains are the correlatives of actions injurious to the organism, while pleasures are the correlatives of actions conducive to its welfare.” Does this statement really mean, though, that a man’s personal pleasures are always good for him and his personal pains bad for him?—because, if that is meant, it is not difficult to think of any number of cases to the contrary. No, not quite that; Spencer would qualify by saying that nature can only strike an average for the species; she cannot attend in detail to the individual; the sentence means that on the whole, in the long run, pleasures are good and pains are bad for us. We might reply that it is rather a poor average that makes the tearing off of a finger nail so exquisitely painful, though the loss hardly matters, and that allows the ravages of pulmonary tuberculosis to run so long a course before warning is given to the suffering organism. But let us offer a definite objection: a surgical operation is not pleasant; yet it may be the one thing necessary to save life. Spencer has his answer: “special and proximate pleasures and pains must be disregarded out of consideration for remote and diffused pleasures and pains.” In that case, however,—if the feelings are merely witnesses to the state of affairs at the moment, and not prophets of the future,—the correlation does not help us very much; nature’s achievement is less important, even for the species, than it seemed at first. Or take another objection: I am overheated, and I sit in a cooling draught; the result is catarrh or pneumonia; yet the coolness was pleasant. To be sure, says the biologist; and the local effect was good for you; the testimony of the feelings is limited in space as I have just acknowledged it to be limited in time. Again, however, we must rejoin that, in that event, the correlation is of less importance to the race than it was asserted to be; if things that are ‘sweet in the mouth’ are going to be ‘bitter in the belly’ we want to know it; it is small comfort to be told that the organ of taste is benefited by the pleasant sweetness. And so the argument might go on.
There is yet another difficulty. “Every pleasure,” says Spencer, “increases vitality; every pain decreases vitality. Every pleasure raises the tide of life; every pain lowers the tide of life.” Yet we read elsewhere that “pleasures are the incentives to life-supporting acts, and pains the deterrents from life-destroying acts.” Pain, then, is thoroughly bad for us, because it is detrimental to life; but pain at the same time is thoroughly good for us, because it prevents our doing what is detrimental to life. Pain as detrimental ought to have been eliminated by natural selection; pain as warning of what is detrimental has been conserved by natural selection. Can the two points of view be reconciled?
It would be foolish and overhasty to reject outright the biological view of feeling; the very fact that it has lasted through so many centuries and, in some form or other, has appealed to so many psychologists—the quotation which heads this chapter is a case in point!—raises a presumption in its favour. Our conclusion must rather be this: that general formulas, which need to be qualified almost as soon as they are phrased, and which lay themselves open to all kinds of specific objections, cannot help us to a psychology of feeling—or of anything else. When we have found out, by detailed experimental work, what the nervous correlate of simple feeling really is, then we may perhaps advance to some general biological view; but the detailed work must come first.