I.

As many writers show a common tendency to reduce the whole of the affective life to pleasures and pains, considered as essential and fundamental phenomena, it is natural that one category of classifications should have been based upon these.

“In the science of pleasure and pain,” says Léon Dumont, “we no longer find ourselves, as in other sciences, in presence of separate organs and functions; for pleasure, like pain, belongs to all organs and all functions. Thus, we think that to recapitulate in this science the classification of the perceptive and intelligent faculties, and of the will, is to give way to a psychological tautology, which, though it causes no serious inconvenience, in any case throws little light on the analysis” (op. cit., Pt. II., p. 1). No more could be said than this. Yet, to classify, we require a directing principle, and where shall we find it? “This basis is supplied to us by our own definition of pleasure and pain: pleasure being the augmentation of force in the whole of the conscious individuality, pain its diminution.” Thence, Dumont deduces the divisions found in many authors: pain is positive when it results from an increased expenditure, negative when it depends on absence of excitement; pleasure is positive when there is increased excitement, negative when the expenditure is diminished. In other terms, if we compare the total “force” to a continually renewed capital, we have, in the one case, either more expenditure or less receipts, in the other either more receipts or less expenditure.

But Dumont does not stop there; he passes on to details; he insists on classifying the species under those four generic headings, and thus we have—Positive pains: effort, fatigue, the ugly, the hideous, the immoral, the false. Negative pains: weakness, exhaustion, inanition, physical pain properly so called, ennui, perplexity, doubt, impatience, expectation, sorrow, fear, sadness, pity. Negative pleasures: rest, cheerfulness. Positive pleasures: those of the senses, those of activity, such as games, dreaming, amusements, æsthetic and intellectual pleasures, sublimity, admiration, beauty, and their varieties.

I have transcribed this classification as Dumont gives it. I shall raise no objection, either to a division so arbitrary as to include physical pains among the negative pains, or to the abuse of a vague word, “force,” which he shows a marked inclination to take in a transcendental sense. I will only consider one point, the transition which is surreptitiously made from a classification of pleasures and pains to a classification of the emotions or something analogous. The writer does not keep his promise of not classing “the perceptive and intelligent faculties, and the will;” and it is not in his power to keep it. In fact, what he has followed is the old classic division (pleasures and pains of the senses, the heart, the mind), which may possibly serve for a didactic exposition, but for no other purpose.

Beaunis has proposed a classification of pleasures and pains which also has as its basis a single principle: the various modes of motion. He discriminates three classes of pains: the nervous centres may be inactive through insufficiency of motion; their activity may be in excess through exaggerated motion; or their activity may be suddenly checked by arrest of motion. The same classification is adopted for pleasures: inaction, activity, arrest. I am inclined to think this division preferable to the other. He has also attempted a detailed classification of physical (p. 176) and moral (p. 235) pains; but he gives none for pleasures.[[91]]

For my part, I am inclined to believe that a classification (in the exact sense of the word) of pleasures and pains is an impossible task. As these characters are very general, one can only establish exceedingly general divisions. As soon as we go beyond this, we are, in reality, classing internal or external sensations, percepts, images, concepts, modes of action, accompanied by a pleasurable or painful state, positive or negative, due to activity, overactivity, or arrest; but the modalities of the pleasurable and painful, which, besides, are infinite, are not classed in and for themselves. The varieties of physical pain, the simplest, commonest, and best studied kind, the easiest to isolate, and the most free from concomitant representation, have never yet been subject to a fixed classification, from Hahnemann, who reckoned them as 73 in number, to Beaunis, who enumerates 83.

In short, the “science of pleasure and pain,” as L. Dumont somewhat emphatically calls it, belongs to the category of sciences which do not proceed by way of classification, since they do not as yet possess the material. We can only lay down extremely general divisions, and then proceed by incomplete enumeration.

II.

The emotions, at least the simplest and best defined, present themselves as psychic states having their own specific characteristics. They differ among themselves, not as one mode of pleasure or pain differs from another mode, but as one thing differs from another thing; in this way, they appear as objects susceptible to classification. We have already said that two methods have been adopted.