reports of the results can be conscious is a question upon which no conclusive evidence would seem to be yet available. The incoming reports of some at least of these disturbances certainly can become conscious. A lump in the throat, a yearning of the bowels, horripilation, breathlessness, these are their coarser and more obvious forms. Usually, they are less salient and fuse with the whole mass of internal sensations to form the canesthesia, the whole bodily consciousness, tinging it, altering its general character in some one of perhaps a thousand different ways. It has been much disputed whether pleasureunpleasure is a quality of general bodily or organic consciousness, of some part of it perhaps, or whether it is something quite different from any quality of any sensation or set of sensations. As we have seen, it is not a quality of an auditory sensation in the sense in which its loudness, for instance, is a quality. There seem to be similar objections to making it a quality of any sensation of any kind. A sensation is what an impulse at a certain stage in its development feels like, and its sensory qualities are characters' of the impulse at that stage. The pleasure-unpleasure attaching to the impulse may be no character of the impulse itself, but of its fate, its success or failure in restoring equilibrium to the system to which it belongs. This is perhaps as good a guess at what pleasure and unpleasure are as can yet be made, pleasure being successful activity of some kind, not necessarily of a biologically useful kind, and unpleasure being frustrated, chaotic, mal-successful activity. We shall consider this theory again at a later stage (cf. Chapter XXIV). The point to be 1 Into conjectures as to what these are, it seems as yet not profitable to enter. made here is that pleasure and unpleasure are complicated matters arising in the course of activities which are directed to other ends. The old controversies as to whether pleasure is the goal of all striving or whether avoidance of unpleasure the starting-point, are thus escaped. As Ribot pointed out1 the exclusive quest of pleasure for itself, plaisir-passion, is a morbid form of activity and self-destructive. Pleasure on this view is originally an effect signifying that certain positive or negative tendencies have instinctively attained their aim and are satisfied. Later through experience it becomes a cause. Instructed by experience man and animal alike place themselves in circumstances which will arouse desire and so through satisfaction lead to pleasure. The gourmet, the libertine, the æsthete, the mystic do so alike. But when the pleasure which is the result of satisfying the tendency becomes the end pursued rather than the satisfying of the tendency itself, then an inversion of the psychological mechanism' comes about. In the one case the activity is propagated from below upwards, in the other from above downwards, from the brain to the organic functions. The result is often an exhaustion of the tendency, 'disillusionment' and the blasé, world-wearied attitude. The evil results, as Ribot remarks, are largely confined to those individuals in whom the quest for pleasure has the force of an obsession. But on the view of pleasure which we have indicated above, it is clear that all those doctrines, very common in critical literature, which set up pleasure as the goal of activity, are mistaken. Every activity has its own specific goal. Pleasure very probably ensues in most cases when this goal is reached, but that is a different matter. To read a poem for the sake of the pleasure which will ensue if it is successfully 1 Problèmes de Psychologie affective, pp. 141-144. read is to approach it in an inadequate attitude. Obviously it is the poem in which we should be interested, not in a by-product of having managed successfully to read it. The orientation of attention is wrong if we put the pleasure in the forefront. Such a mistake is perhaps not common among instructed persons, but to judge by many remarks which appear in reviews and dramatic notices the percentage of instructed persons among reviewers and theatre-goers does not seem high. This error, a legacy in part from the criticism of an age which had a still poorer psychological vocabulary' than our own, is one reason why Tragedy, for example, is so often misapproached. It is no less absurd to suppose that a competent reader sits down to read for the sake of pleasure, than to suppose that a mathematician sets out to solve an equation with a view to the pleasure its solution will afford him. The pleasure in both cases may, of course, be very great. But the pleasure, however great it may be, is no more the aim of the activity in the course of which it arises, than, for example, the noise made by a motor-cycle-useful though it is as an indication of the way the machine is running-is the reason in the normal case for its having been started. This very common mistake noted, the significance of pleasure and unpleasure may be insisted upon without misgiving. They are our most delicate signs of how our activities are thriving. But since even the most intense delight may indicate only a local success and the activity be generally detrimental, they are signs which need a very wary interpretation. 1 It is probable that Wordsworth and certain that Coleridge if writing to-day would use quite other terms in place of pleasure for describing poetic values. G CHAPTER XIII EMOTION AND THE CENESTHESIA They are the silent griefs that cut the heart-strings. IN alluding to the cœnesthesia we came very near to giving an account of emotion as an ingredient of consciousness. Stimulating situations give rise to widespread ordered repercussions throughout the body, felt as clearly marked colourings of consciousness. These patterns in organic response are fear, grief, joy, anger and the other emotional states. They arise for the most part when permanent or periodical tendencies of the individual are suddenly either facilitated or frustrated. Thus they depend far less upon the nature of the external stimulus than upon the general internal circumstances of the individual's life at the time the stimulus occurs. These emotional states, with pleasure and unpleasure, are customarily distinguished under the head of feeling from sensations, which are, as we have seen, very closely dependent for their character upon their stimulus. Thus sensations are ranked together as cognitive elements, concerned, that is, with our knowledge of things rather than with our attitude or behaviour towards them, or our emotion about them. Pleasure, however, and emotion have, on our view, also a cognitive The fashion in which the term 'feeling' shifts about in psychology is notorious as a source of confusion. It would be convenient if it could be kept for pleasure-unpleasure, and used no longer as a synonym for 'emotion', since emotions can much more easily be regarded as built up from organic sensations. aspect. They give us knowledge; in the case of pleasure, of how our activities are going on, successfully or otherwise; in the case of emotion, knowledge primarily of our attitudes. But emotion may give us further knowledge. It is a remarkable fact that persons with exceptional colour sense apparently judge most accurately whether two colours are the same, for example, or whether they have or have not some definite harmonic relation to one another, not by attentive optical comparison or examination, but by the general emotional or organic reaction which the colours evoke when simply glanced at. This is an indirect way of becoming aware of the specific nature of the external world, but none the less a very valuable way. A similar method is probably involved in those apparently immediate judgments of the moral character of persons met with for the first time which many people make so readily and successfully. They may be quite unable to mention any definite feature of the person upon which their judgment could be based. It is none the less often extraordinarily just and discriminating. The remarkable sensitiveness to its mother's expression which the infant shows is a striking example. The part played by this kind of judgment in all æsthetic appreciation need not be insisted upon. It is notable that artists are often pre-eminently adepts at such judgments. The topic is usually discussed under the wide and vague heading of intuition; a rubric which completely obscures and befogs the issues. For such judgments are not a simpler and more direct way of taking cognisance of things, but a more indirect and more complex way. It is not thereby shown to be a less primitive process. On the contrary, simplified ways of thinking are commonly advanced products. The 'intuitive' person uses his cœnesthesia as a chemist uses his reagents |