The addition of feeling to our perceptions and images, because of the peculiarities just mentioned, brings about great complications in the make-up of our mental states and increases enormously the task of classifying and comprehending our states of consciousness. The feelings accompanying images are originally the same as those which accompanied the perceptions in question. The memory image of the pain of flogging is unpleasant because the original pain was unpleasant. But the manifold connections of the images often result in unexpected feelings. The memory of an unpleasant experience may become a source of pleasure through the additional thought that the experience was the result of some folly of which one is no longer capable. The feeling accompanying a perception can change in a similar manner. A saturated green, as the color of a pasture or of an ornament, is pleasant; as the color of a girl’s cheek it would be highly unpleasant.
Not only are perceptions and images themselves sources of pleasantness and unpleasantness, but also their relations, spatial, temporal, and conceptual. The pleasure which we derive from looking at a picture or a landscape illustrates the dependence on spatial relations. The pleasure of a symphony or dramatic performance depends largely on temporal relations. Jokes and puzzles please us chiefly because of their conceptual, logical relations. It is plain, then, that every complex of sensations, supplemented by a large number of images, must become a stage, so to speak, on which countless scores of feelings play their parts. In so far as their perceptual and ideational bases may be kept apart, we may count as many of these feelings as we distinguish percepts or ideas. In so far as all these feelings are either pleasantness or unpleasantness, we may speak of the feelings as being only two in number. This may explain to us why such mental states as love, pride, sentimentality, the joy of the audience in a theater, the interest of the reader of a biography, appear at once simple enough, unitary enough, and yet inexhaustibly replete with contents and difficult of comprehension. This also explains the opposite views of so many writers, of whom some assert that the number of feelings is infinitely large, others that there are only two, pleasantness and unpleasantness, which may accompany an infinite number of sensation complexes. The difference between these writers is much less than appears from their words.
QUESTIONS
77. How are pleasantness and unpleasantness related to sensational states of consciousness?
78. How are pleasantness and unpleasantness related to objective conditions?
79. How does the repetition of an experience influence its pleasantness or unpleasantness?
80. What is the general subjective condition of pleasantness and unpleasantness?
81. Is feeling a prophet of the future?
82. What difficulties does the existence of feeling cause the psychologist?
83. Are there more than two feelings?