Man is a substance, he knows not what, feeling, he knows not how, a rest
and unrest that he can only in part distinguish. He is a substance
feeling equilibrium or want of equilibrium; that is to say, he is a
substance in a statical or dynamical condition and feeling the passage
from one state into the other.
Feeling is an art and, like any other art, can be acquired by taking
pains. The analogy between feelings and words is very close. Both have
their foundation in volition and deal largely in convention; as we should
not be word-ridden so neither should we be feeling-ridden; feelings can
deceive us; they can lie; they can be used in a non-natural, artificial
sense; they can be forced; they can carry us away; they can be
restrained.
When the surroundings are familiar, we know the right feeling and feel it
accordingly, or if “we” (that is the central government of our
personality) do not feel it, the subordinate departmental personality,
whose business it is, feels it in the usual way and then goes on to
something else. When the surroundings are less familiar and the
departmental personality cannot deal with them, the position is reported
through the nervous system to the central government which is frequently
at a loss to know what feeling to apply. Sometimes it happens to discern
the right feeling and apply it, sometimes it hits upon an inappropriate
one and is thus induced to proceed from solecism to solecism till the
consequences lead to a crisis from which we recover and which, then
becoming a leading case, forms one of the decisions on which our future
action is based. Sometimes it applies a feeling that is too
inappropriate, as when the position is too horribly novel for us to have
had any experience that can guide the central government in knowing how
to feel about it, and this results in a cessation of the effort involved
in trying to feel. Hence we may hope that the most horrible apparent
suffering is not felt beyond a certain point, but is passed through
unconsciously under a natural, automatic anæsthetic—the unconsciousness,
in extreme cases, leading to death.
It is generally held that animals feel; it will soon be generally held
that plants feel; after that it will be held that stones also can feel.
For, as no matter is so organic that there is not some of the inorganic
in it, so, also, no matter is so inorganic that there is not some of the
organic in it. We know that we have nerves and that we feel, it does not
follow that other things do not feel because they have no nerves—it only
follows that they do not feel as we do. The difference between the
organic and the inorganic kingdoms will some day be seen to lie in the
greater power of discriminating its feelings which is possessed by the
former. Both are made of the same universal substance but, in the case
of the organic world, this substance is able to feel more fully and
discreetly and to show us that it feels.
Animals and plants, as they advance in the scale of life differentiate
their feelings more and more highly; they record them better and
recognise them more readily. They get to know what they are doing and
feeling, not step by step only, nor sentence by sentence, but in long
flights, forming chapters and whole books of action and sensation. The
difference as regards feeling between man and the lower animals is one of
degree and not of kind. The inorganic is less expert in differentiating
its feelings, therefore its memory of them must be less enduring; it
cannot recognise what it could scarcely cognise. One might as well for
some purposes, perhaps, say at once, as indeed people generally do for
most purposes, that the inorganic does not feel; nevertheless the
somewhat periphrastic way of putting it, by saying that the inorganic
feels but does not know, or knows only very slightly, how to
differentiate its feelings, has the advantage of expressing the fact that
feeling depends upon differentiation and sense of relation _inter se_ of
the things differentiated—a fact which, if never expressed, is apt to be
lost sight of.
As, therefore, human discrimination is to that of the lower animals, so
the discrimination of the lower animals and plants is to that of
inorganic things. In each case it is greater discriminating power (and
this is mental power) that underlies the differentiation, but in no case
can there be a denial of mental power altogether.