1. Herbert Spencer relieves us of a large number of exceptions, which are, in fact, only the result of civilisation. Prehistoric man, according to this author, was well adapted to his environment and to a predatory life; but when, under pressure of want, the transition to a sedentary and civilised existence took place, the human being found itself ill-adapted to its surroundings. The conditions of social existence have been superposed on those of natural existence, constituting a new milieu, and requiring other forms of activity. In consequence of this, frequent discordances have arisen which he has enumerated at great length: the survival of predatory tendencies difficult to satisfy, the necessity of repugnant and monotonous labour, excess of labour compensated for by excess of pleasure, as so frequently happens in great cities, etc.[[65]] All these interversions are the work of man, the result of his irrational struggle against nature, of his will, of his artificial activities. “In the case of mankind, there has arisen, and must long continue, a deep and involved derangement of the natural connections between pleasures and beneficial actions, and between pains and detrimental actions—a derangement which so obscures their natural connections that even the reverse connections are supposed to obtain.” Spencer thinks that a readjustment will take place in the long run; I leave this consolation—without sharing it—to the optimists.
2. Besides these exceptions, due to the intercurrence of social causes, there are others of an individual character, which also can be explained. Certain poisons are agreeable to the taste, and cause death; a surgical operation is painful, but beneficial; many persons intensely enjoy a far niente which leads them to ruin; it is pleasant to live in the world of pure fancy, but the reaction leaves one enervated and unable to fulfil one’s daily task. Many other cases of this kind may be met with in ordinary life. All these exceptions to the rule are only apparent ones. Consciousness reveals only the momentary phenomenon, and, within these limits, its verdict is accurate; it expresses the processes actually going on in the organism at the moment, as we have seen in the euphoria of the dying; it cannot tell us what will follow. The explanation reduces itself to Grant Allen’s saying, “Neither pleasure nor pain is prophetic.”[[66]]
3. There are other facts which the partisans of final causes prudently pass over in silence, and which certain evolutionists have attempted to explain.
Spencer remarks (loc. cit., § 127) that, “while the individual is young and not yet fertile, its welfare and the welfare of the race go together; but when the reproductive age is reached, the welfare of the individual and of the race cease to be the same, and may be diametrically opposed.... Very frequently, among invertebrate animals, the death of the parents is a normal result of propagation. In the great class Insects, the species of which outnumber all other animal species, the rule is that the male lives only until a new generation has been begotten, and that the female dies as soon as the eggs are deposited.” There is, therefore, says the English author, a qualification to be made.
Schneider, in his interesting work Freud und Leid, inspired by the transformist hypothesis and the ideas of Spencer, gets rid of the difficulty by connecting pleasure and pain with the conditions of existence, not of the individual, but of the species: pleasure corresponding to specific utility and pain to specific injury. This statement of the problem is ingenious, but arbitrary. Pleasure and pain are essentially subjective, individual states. They can only assume a specific character by means of generalisation—i.e., as a conception of our minds, which has no reality or value, except so far as abstracted from particular cases.
Restricting our attention to man, and not occupying ourselves with the antagonism between the individual and the race, we shall find that there are cases very difficult to bring under the law. A grain of sand in the eye, an attack of dental neuralgia cause a degree of pain enormously out of proportion with the amount of organic injury sustained. On the other hand, the dissolution of certain organs essential to life is frequently almost painless. The brain may be cut and cauterised almost without suffering; a cavity may be formed in the lung, a cancer in the liver, without the slightest warning of danger. Pain, that “vigilant sentinel” of the advocates of final causes, remains dumb, or only warns us when the evil is already of long standing and irremediable. Nay, more, it often misleads us as to the actual seat of the disease. Examples of false localisation abound; an irritation in the nose is due to intestinal worms, a headache to a morbid condition of the stomach, a pain in the right shoulder to liver complaint. Many other instances of this kind have been studied by physicians under the names of painful synæsthesia, or synalgia.
Schneider is, I believe, the only one who has attempted to explain these deviations from the generally admitted formula,[[67]] by reducing the problem to the two following questions:—First, whether the development of an acute sensibility of the internal organs—i.e., a relation of causality between their lesions and the feeling of pain—is, in general, possible; secondly, whether, such development having taken place, this faculty of feeling, as pain, any lesion of the internal organs could be a means of protection, as it is found to be in the case of the skin. The internal organs are only in contact with an interior surface, which is tolerably uniform; if an opposite state of things arises, i.e., if they are laid bare by some profound lesion, death ordinarily ensues, at least in animals and in primitive man. Only the slow progress of surgery has made it possible to remedy such accidents. If, through spontaneous variation, a case of sensibility of the internal organs had ever occurred, it would be useless; it could neither become permanent nor be transmitted to descendants, since the lesion, resulting in death, would render the further evolution of this quality impossible. Besides, had this sensitive faculty of the internal organs existed, it must have remained useless, since it could only become efficacious when combined with protective and retractile movements of the organs, which, by the very constitution of the animal, cannot take place. In fact, the whole of the sensibility has been concentrated in the exterior parts of the body, which, by protecting themselves, also protect, in the degree to which this is possible, the internal organs.
I have insisted on the exceptions (certainly they are not without a cause, whether we accept that alleged by Schneider, or prefer those of other authorities), because they are only too readily forgotten. The connection of pleasure and utility, pain and injury, is a formula which originated with the philosophers—that is, with intellects which always, and before all things, demand unity. Psychology must proceed otherwise, must incessantly confront the formula with facts, check it by experience, note the exceptions; it is content with empirical laws, embracing the generality, but never the totality of cases.
CHAPTER VII.
THE NATURE OF EMOTION.
Analogy between perception and emotion—Constituent elements of emotion—Summary of the theory of James and Lange—Application of this theory to the higher emotions (religious, moral, æsthetic, intellectual)—Illegitimate confusion between the quality and intensity of emotion—Examination of a typical case: musical emotion—The most emotional of all the arts is the most dependent on physiological conditions—Proofs: its action on animals, on primitive man, on civilised man; its therapeutic action—Why certain sensations, images, and ideas awaken organic and motor states, and, consequently, emotion—They are connected either with natural or social conditions of existence—Differences and resemblances between the two cases—Antecedents of the physiological theory of emotion—Dualist position, or that of the relation between cause and effect—Unitary position; its advantages.