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THE object of this paper is to indicate briefly the nature of Pleasure and Pain, Desire and Volition. Its limits and its methods are those, I hope, of strict empirical psychology,1 but within these limits it will be understood that I cannot even touch upon all parts of the subject. And for this reason I must give to points of disagreement a space out of due proportion. Those who know the subject will know both the amount of substantial agreement among psychologists, and again how very little in what follows is specially mine. I must first very rapidly sketch the main features of Pleasure and Pain, then go on to Desire, and in conclusion try to seize the essence of Volition. And I am forced to warn the reader that my present limits compel me to count

I have tried to define these in MIND xii. 354. There are two main errors to be avoided. The first makes the soul a mere serial collection of states. The second treats it as a thing somehow outside psychical phenomena, which can be acted on and can react. The second mistake

becomes aggravated when this thing is called the Ego. I will use this opportunity to thank Mr. Ward for the space which (in MIND No. 48) he has given to a refutation of my views. I regret that inability to identify myself with the doctrines which he has criticised has deprived me throughout of any profit from his labours.

upon a greater effort from him than I ought, perhaps, to expect.

To say that what we call sensations in every case must be coloured by pain or pleasure is to go beyond our knowledge; but without sensation we never have pleasure or pain. Not a pleasure, but something pleasant is what we experience, and the actual fact is an event which, together with duration, has quality and tone, and an intensity of each. If we like to apply the term aspect, or side, or moment, these are all open to objection, as metaphors must be. But what they try to say is that, as a sensation is not, as a matter of fact, a thing given separate from its psychical context, so pain and pleasure do not exist apart from sensation, any more than duration or intensity are ever discovered by themselves. They are all alike presentations,1 as being elements within the presented whole. They are all of them distinctions, and we might call them, all alike, the creatures of our attention. Indeed pains and pleasures have no qualities of their own. It is the quality of the sensations, or arrangements of sensations, which we place to their credit. The kinds of pain which have been urged in disproof of the above, the feelings that shoot or that burn or gnaw, are each due to the special sort of sensation, or again to the temporal and the spatial orders of sensations, together with the rhythm of intensity in the pain. Thus pain and pleasure are mere aspects of mere psychical fact. They exist and they say nothing. Like sensations they are at first neither objective nor subjective. If I say that they are given simply, a subtle critic may object that given means sent to an Ego with another Ego's compliments, and that, if I were capable of knowing what I meant, I should inevitably mean this. Still I shall use the word, and for myself must decline the interpretation. That pleasure or pain, as they come first, have, in any sense whatever, a reference to the Ego is a fundamental error. It takes the products of development and places them at the starting-point, where no Ego (conscious or unconscious, whether for the soul or for the observer) exists except in false theory. In addition I would remark that even now there is no reference to the subject in

1 I know of no argument for refusing this name to pleasure and pain which does not rest upon some dogmatic preconception. Suppose (e.g.) that they are not essential to presentation, does that go to show-when their (physical or psychical) conditions produce them-that they are not presented? Are warmth and cold not presented?

some of our æsthetic pains and pleasures, and that there may never have been one. I would add further that in moments of agony (as happens too before unconsciousness in swooning and under anaesthetics) it is most doubtful if Ego or non-Ego exists. Of course the phrases we must use imply what exists at our phrase-making level, but these implications are no argument against the existence of lower levels. To say 'I felt myself all one pain' is perhaps an attempt to deny the self which it asserts; as in

"First 'twas fire in her breast and brain,

And then scarce hers but the whole world's pain,
As she gave one shriek and sank again".

In short, of themselves pleasure and pain merely are; they have no meaning and no reference; they are at first certainly mere aspects of sensible quality, just as sensible quality, where their conditions exist, is a mere aspect of them.1

If we go on to ask for their physical conditions, they are taken to be connected one with physical benefit and one with injury. Whether they should be called accompaniments or results I shall not inquire; but whether the connexion is without exceptions must be considered. First, however, there are mistakes which we must place on one side. Pain and pleasure are not the feelings of anything at all, in the sense that they report it or in any way convey it (MIND xi. 419). Again, they clearly cannot go always with a general heightening and lowering of our vital forces, actual or even potential. Nor, further, is it possible to connect them with the general advantage or the general injury of the creature which feels them, unless that connexion is subject to most serious exceptions. We have to ask, then, if in any sense pleasure always goes with benefit and pain with injury. Lotze has pointed out a way of answering in the affirmative. If the advantage and the harm are momentary and local, the exceptions might disappear. For example, a sweet poison does not injure by its sweetness, it rather locally so far benefits; and thus contrariwise with pains. And Feeling, like the thermometer, tells what is now and not what will be hereafter. If this is true, then the law would be valid universally. What would remain unexplained would be the want of correspondence in some cases between the quantities of pleasure and benefit, and so again with pain. But

I include uneasiness under the head of pain. As to the Ego, cp. MIND Xii. 365-6.

1 Med. Psych., 1852, pp. 237-9.

I must leave this matter as it stands; and, again, the possible genetic derivation and development of the law cannot here be discussed.'

Can pleasure and pain (at least with regard to mere sensations) be connected simply with the quantity of the stimulus? Certainly too much of anything might always be painful, but whether with everything there is a too-much is far from certain, nor is it certain that the painful, if one only could have less of it, would always become pleasant before it wholly ceased to be. And, without discussing views which I have no room to state, I will say simply that (so far as our knowledge goes at present, and without prejudice to the future) we cannot avoid connecting pleasure with sensible quality.

If we pass now to the psychical conditions of pleasure, all the result which so far we are able to take with us, is the connexion of pain with damage and of pleasure with the opposite. We must see if on the psychical side more is visible. Can we say that pleasure is the result or the attendant of activity, and does pain again go with a hindered energy? First, I must remark that I do not know, and that I still am not ashamed of not knowing, what "activity means; but, speaking subject to that ignorance, I find the assertion not verifiable. There are surely pleasures and pains where to find what we should commonly call psychical activity is out of the question. And if the faculty of Apperception or Attention, or again the Ego, is appealed to, I cannot say that I am shaken. Such a thoroughly retrograde step will hardly take us to anything beyond baseless assertions and illusory explanations (MIND xii. 366). But if we are to keep to what we observe, and take an instance where we pass suddenly from a pleasant warmth to a painful heat, we cannot see that the hindrance of psychical activity makes the transition to pain. The pain appears to come given to us by a physical cause; there seems neither to have been nor to be a particular psychical activity in the case; and to take the activity as general (if there is general activity) would not account for the special seat of the pain.

1 Mr. Spencer appears not to be acquainted with Lotze's view. understand Mr. Spencer to hold that pleasure may attend that which is in no other sense whatever good for the individual. He seems also to deny the existence of an intrinsic connexion between advantage and pleasure, and to believe only in a conjunction made by circumstances. If so, I think he much underrates the amount and kind of evidence wanted for such a conclusion.

2 On this see Wundt. Horwicz (Psychol. Analyses), seems to me to have shown Wundt's failure, but to have also failed himself.

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