Believers in the pleasure-and-pain theory must thus, if they are candid, make large exceptions in the application of their creed. Action from 'fixed ideas' is accordingly a terrible stumbling-block to the candid Professor Bain. Ideas have in his psychology no impulsive but only a 'guiding' function, whilst
"The proper stimulus of the will, namely, some variety of pleasure and pain, is needed to give the impetus.... The intellectual link is not sufficient for causing the deed to rise at the beck of the idea (except in case of an 'idée fixe');" but "should any pleasure spring up or be continued, by performing an action that we clearly conceive, the causation is then complete; both the directing and the moving powers are present."[480]
Pleasures and pains are for Professor Bain the 'genuine impulses of the will.'[481]
"Without an antecedent of pleasurable or painful feeling—actual or ideal, primary or derivative—the will cannot be stimulated. Through all the disguises that wrap up what we call motives, something of one or other of these two grand conditions can be detected."[482]
Accordingly, where Professor Bain finds an exception to this rule, he refuses to call the phenomenon a 'genuinely voluntary impulse.' The exceptions, he admits, 'are those furnished by never-dying spontaneity, habits, and fixed ideas.'[483] Fixed ideas 'traverse the proper course of volition.'[484]
"Disinterested impulses are wholly distinct from the attainment of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.... The theory of disinterested action, in the only form that I can conceive it, supposes that the action of the will and the attainment of happiness do not square throughout."[485]
Sympathy "has this in common with the Fixed Idea, that it clashes with the regular outgoings of the will in favor, of our pleasures."[486]
Prof. Bain thus admits all the essential facts. Pleasure and pain are motives of only part of our activity. But he prefers to give to that part of the activity exclusively which these feelings prompt the name of 'regular outgoings' and 'genuine impulses' of the will,[487] and to treat all the rest as mere paradoxes and anomalies, of which nothing rational can be said. This amounts to taking one species of a genus, calling it alone by the generic name, and ordering the other co-ordinate species to find what names they may. At bottom this is only verbal play. How much more conducive to clearness and insight it is to take the genus 'springs of action' and treat it as a whole; and then to distinguish within it the species 'pleasure and pain' from whatever other species may be found!
There is, it is true, a complication in the relation of pleasure to action, which partly excuses those who make it the exclusive spur. This complication deserves some notice at our hands.