If, however, undifferentiated pleasure-pain should at any time occur in human consciousness, might we become immediately and spontaneously aware of it? By its very nature it may escape conscious attentive investigation, but may there not be a direct and simple awareness or apperception of it? We might suppose that one man tells another, “I was very sick, and in state of coma I had pain, merely pain, not any kind of pain or pain anywhere, but just pain, that was all the consciousness I had.” Such an expression is intelligible, and may be a fact. However, it is in the phenomena of lapse and rise of consciousness that we see evidences that undifferentiated feeling probably occurs, and that sometimes in high psychisms. In the following chapter we discuss then this point as a matter of judgment of tendencies, rather than on basis of direct evidence of introspection, though this is not barred out.
CHAPTER II
ON PRIMITIVE CONSCIOUSNESS
Science views the world as an assemblage of objects having mutual relations. In this cosmos of interacting elements certain objects become endowed with mental powers by which they accomplish self-conservation. Just what these objects are and how they attain mental quality is beyond our direct investigation. However, assuming consciousness as a purely biological function, as a mode for securing favourable reactions, we can discuss the probable course of its evolution under the law of self-conservation. Mind, like all other vital function, must originate in some very simple and elementary form as demanded at some critical moment for the preservation of the organism. It is tolerably obvious that this could not be any objective consciousness, any cognitive act, like pure sensation, for this has no immediate value for life. It was not as awareness of object or in any discriminating activity that mind originated, for mere apprehension would not serve the being more than the property of reflection the mirror. The demand of the organism is for that which will accomplish immediate movement to the place of safety. The stone pressed upon by a heavy weight does not react at once to secure itself, but is crushed out of its identity; but the organism reacts at once through pain. It is certainly more consonant with the general law of evolution that mind start thus in pure subjective act rather than in mere objective acts, like bits of presentation or a manifold of sense. We shall now endeavour to elucidate this conception of pure pain as primitive mind, first from the general point of view of the law of self-conservation, and secondly from particular inductive considerations.
It is very difficult to conceive what this bare undifferentiated pain as original conscious act was, it being so foreign to our own mental acts. Our psychoses have a certain connection one with the other, and a connection which is cognized as such, so that the whole of mental life is pervaded by an ego-sense. But primitive consciousness must have been by intermittent and isolated flashes. The primitive pain, moreover, was not a pain in any particular kind, but wholly undifferentiated or bare pain. There was no sense of the painful, but only pure pain. Nor was there any consciousness of the pain, any knowledge or apperception of it. The pain stands alone and entirely by itself, and constituting by itself a genus.
Now to assert that this general pain exists, is not, of course, realism. The pain is a particular act, though it is wholly without particular quality. It is not a pain as one of a kind distinct from other kinds, but it is comparable to a formless, unorganized mass of protoplasm which has in it potency of future development. Pain may exist as such, but not a consciousness or a feeling. It is meaningless to say that the first psychosis may have been a consciousness in general form which was neither a feeling, a will, or a cognition, but the undifferentiated basis of these, nor can a feeling per se exist. The expressions, painful consciousness, and painful feeling are deceptive; there is no consciousness which pains, but consciousness is the pain, and the feeling is not pleasurable or painful, but is the pleasure or pain. “Feeling,” as I have said (Mind, vol. xiii., p. 244), “has no independent being apart from the attributes which in common usage are attached to it, nor is there any general act of consciousness with which these properties are to be connected.”
Further, the law of conservation requires us to associate with this primitive act of blind, formless pain the will act of struggle and effort which is as simple and undifferentiated as the feeling. And these two we must mark as the original elements of all mental life. Strenuousness through and by pain is primal and is simplest force which can conduce to self-preservation. It is thus that active beings with a value in and for themselves are constituted. The earliest conscious response to outward things is purely central and has no cognitive value. The first consciousness was a flash of pain, of small intensity, yet sufficient to awaken struggle and preserve life.
Pleasure, then, we have excluded from playing any rôle in absolutely primitive consciousness. Pleasure and pain could not both be primitive functions, and of the two pain is fundamental in that the earliest function of consciousness must be purely monitory. Pain alone fulfils primitive demands, and secures struggle which ends in the abatement of pain through change of environment or otherwise. Pain lessens, but pleasure does not come, but unconsciousness instead, for no continuous organic psychic life is yet evolved. As long as pain continues there is effort and self-conserving action; when pain ceases, consciousness ceases, because the need for it is gone. Each fit of pain subsides into unconsciousness as struggle succeeds, and there is no room for even the pleasure of relief, which, indeed, must be accounted a tolerably late feeling. As far as the lowest organisms have a conscious life it is a pain life, but they have a Nirvana in a real unconsciousness. The evolution of pleasure must be accounted a distinct problem.
The law of evolution is, that origin of function and all progressive modification arise at critical stages. Thus it is in painful circumstances that the origin of mind is to be traced, and the important steps in its development have been achieved in severest struggle and acutest pain at critical periods. Pleasure is not then the original stimulant of will, but is a secondary form. Pleasure has an obvious utility which is far from the absolutely primitive. The pleasure-mode early enters, however, to sharpen by contrast the pain-mode, and it is only by their interaction that any high grade of psychic life could be built up. The development of pleasure cannot be from pain, but as a polar opposite to it. We cannot bring the development of mind into a perfectly continuous evolution from a single germ, as is the case in biological evolution. In a sense we may say that pleasure and pain are complementary, like positive and negative electricity, but the comparison cannot be pressed. We cannot, indeed, carry it so far as to believe either absolutely essential to the other. We mention, then, the evolution of pleasure as a problem which is yet to be dealt with in full. However, that it is not original element in mind is easily seen from this. As we ascend the grades of psychic life the pleasure-pain gamut lengthens, and as we descend, it shortens, with pleasure always as the intermediate factor. Thus, if we can represent it by a line,
| Pain | Pleasure | Pain |
| ───────────┼───────────┼─────────── | ||
any single element which can affect psychic life, as temperature, moves through a highest pain intensity, an intermediate region, then to pain again as effects in a range from a very high temperature to very low, or vice versâ. Now, this gamut in a human being, from the intensest agony from heat to the greatest suffering from cold, consists of very many notes, but the step to unconsciousness is always at one end of the scale. In lower psychic life it shortens, but always at the intermediate points where pain merges into pleasure and pleasure into pain, and thus in the lowest form the original element of consciousness as feeling is seen when only the two extremes remain, namely, primitive consciousness as pain reaction. As the step from feeling—consciousness to unconsciousness is through a pain, this certainly points to pain as the original feeling, and the first element of consciousness. We must suppose then that the first organism which attained consciousness felt pain, that if this came from temperature, for example, that intense heat and intense cold would both produce a pain one and the same in nature, bare pain, not sensation of heat or cold. And this pain-consciousness response came at first only at the application of these critical temperatures, all other degrees not bringing any response. If consciousness like other functions originated as an infinitesimal germ at some crisis in life, it must have been with pain. The pleasure function, unlike the pain, does not originate in life and death crises.