I.
Beginning with pleasure, I shall first examine a typical case studied by several physiologists, who have not furnished any, to me, satisfactory explanation. I mean the special state which has been called “the luxury of pity” (Spencer), pleasure in pain (Bouillier), and which it would be more accurate to call “the pleasure of pain.” It consists in being pleased with one’s own suffering and tasting it like a pleasure.
This disposition of the mind is not, as one might think, peculiar to blasé persons and to epochs of refined civilisation; it seems inherent in humanity the moment it emerges from barbarism. Bouillier[[42]] has quoted from the ancient writers passages referring to it, not only in Lucretius, Seneca, and other moralists, but in the Homeric poems, which reflect a very primitive civilisation, yet in which a man “rejoices in his tears.” Parallel passages might have been found in the Bible, and also, I suppose, in the epics of ancient India. We have not, therefore, to deal with a rare phenomenon, though it becomes more frequent as we advance in civilisation.
A few examples will be of greater value than any opinions I could cite. They may be found of all sorts—pleasure in physical pain, and pleasure in moral pain. Certain patients find intense enjoyment in irritating their sores. Mantegazza[[43]] says: “I knew an old man who acknowledged to me that he found an extraordinary pleasure, and one which seemed to him equal to any other, in scratching the inflamed surfaces surrounding a senile sore in his leg from which he had suffered for some years.”
A celebrated man of the Renaissance, Cardan, says in his autobiography that “he could not do without suffering, and when this happened to him, he felt such an impulse arise in him, that every other pain seemed a relief.” When in this state, he was in the habit of torturing his own body till forced to shed tears by the pain.[[44]] I might enumerate a long series of these pleasures of physical pain. Of the pleasures of moral pain I will give but one example: melancholy in the ordinary, non-medical sense-the melancholy of lovers, poets, artists, etc. This state may be considered as typical of the deliberate enjoyment of sadness. Any one may be sad, but melancholy is not to be attained by every one. I may mention also, in passing, the pleasures of ugliness in æsthetics, and the taste for sanguinary spectacles and tortures which we shall have to consider in another place.
If we leave the facts and come to the explanations proposed, we shall find that they are not numerous. Bouillier (op. cit.) seems to adopt the opinion of a Cartesian, who said, “If the soul, in all movements of the passions, even the most painful, is in some measure tickled by a secret feeling of pleasure, if it takes pleasure in pain, and does not wish to be consoled, it is because of a consciousness that the state in which it finds itself is the state of heart and mind best suited to its situation.” I fail to understand this pretended explanation. I prefer that of Hamilton, who places the principal cause in the increased activity imparted to our whole being by the sense of our own sufferings. This, at least, is logical, since pleasure is connected with its habitual correlative—an increase of activity. Spencer has examined the problem at greater length.[[45]] "Here I will draw attention only to another egoistic sentiment, and I do this because of its mysterious nature. It is a pleasurably painful sentiment, of which it is difficult to identify the nature, and still more difficult to trace the genesis. I refer to what is sometimes called ‘the luxury of grief.’... It seems possible that this sentiment, which makes a sufferer wish to be alone with his grief, and makes him resist all distraction from it, may arise from dwelling on the contrast between his own worth, as he estimates it, and the treatment he has received—either from his fellow-beings or from a power which he is prone to think of anthropomorphically. If he feels that he has deserved much while he has received little, and still more if instead of good there has come evil, the consciousness of this evil is qualified by the consciousness of worth, made pleasurably dominant by the contrast.... There is an idea of much withheld, and a feeling of implied superiority to those who withhold it.... That this explanation is the true one I feel by no means clear. I throw it out simply as a suggestion, confessing that this peculiar emotion is one which neither analysis nor synthesis enables me clearly to understand."
This explanation seems to me only a partial one, and not applicable to all cases. In my opinion, no efforts of this kind can be successful, because the authors remain on the ground of normal psychology. This class of facts ought to be treated by the pathological method. It may be said that this is only the substitution of one word for another. By no means, as we shall see by the result.
The mistake lies in attacking, in the first instance, phenomena of too delicate a nature, and considering them as isolated facts. We must proceed, not by synthesis or analysis, but by the cumulative method—i.e., we must establish a chain of facts, of which the last links, being of overwhelming importance, shall throw light on the first. I indicate the principal stages of this gradation thus—Æsthetic melancholy (transitory and intermittent); spleen, melancholia (in the medical sense);[[46]] then, advancing a step further, suicidal tendencies, and finally, suicide. This last term makes all the others comprehensible. The first stages are only embryonic, abortive, or modified forms of the tendency to self-destruction, of the desire which makes it seem agreeable. The weaker forms—checked in an immense majority of cases—approximate more or less to destruction, and can only be explained if compared with the extreme case.
The evolutionists have stated the hypothesis that there must have existed certain animals so constituted that, in them, pleasure was connected with destructive acts, pain with useful ones, and that, as every animal seeks pleasure and shuns pain, they must have perished in virtue of their very constitution, since they sought the destructive and shunned the preservative influences. There is nothing chimerical in this supposition, for we see men find pleasure in acts which, as they very well know, will speedily result in their deaths. A being thus constituted is abnormal, illogical; he contains within himself a contradiction of which he will perish.
But, one may say, if pain and hurtful acts on the one hand, pleasure and serviceable acts on the other, form indissoluble pairs, of such a kind that the painful state in consciousness is the equivalent of destructive acts in the organism, and inversely, we should here have an interversion—pleasure would express disorganisation; pain, reorganisation. This hypothesis is not a very probable one, and scarcely seems necessary. If we admit, as has been said in the preceding chapter, that there always exist two simultaneous and opposite processes whose difference is all that is perceptible to the consciousness, it is sufficient for one of the processes to be accelerated or the other retarded, in an abnormal manner, in order to change the difference in favour of one or the other. No doubt the final result contradicts the rule, since in the above cases the surplus which ought to be negative (pain) is positive (pleasure). But this is a new proof that we are confronted with a deviation, an anomaly, a pathological case to be treated as such.