THE DECAY OF THE AFFECTIVE LIFE 423
Law of Decay: its formula, and its general application in
psychology—Difficulties where the affective life is
concerned—Successive disappearance of the disinterested
emotions (the æsthetic and intellectual), of the
altruistic (moral and social), the ego-altruistic
(religious feeling, ambition, etc.), and lastly, the
egoistic—Converse proof: cases of arrested
development—Theory of degeneration—Its relation to decay.
CONCLUSION 438
The place of the feelings in psychic life—They come
first—Physiological proofs—Psychological proofs.
INTRODUCTION.
THE EVOLUTION OF THE AFFECTIVE LIFE.
_In all affective manifestations there are two elements: the motor
states or impulses, which are primary; the agreeable or painful
states, which are secondary—Unconscious organic protoplasmic
sensibility; microorganisms—Chemical interpretation;
psychological interpretation—Are there pure states of
feeling?—Affirmative facts—The period of needs, the instinct of
conservation—The period of primitive emotions—How they may be
determined; the genetic or chronological method—Fear, anger,
affection, the self-feeling, sexual emotion—Are joy and grief
emotions?—The abstract emotions and their conditions—The
passions are the equivalent in feeling of an intellectual
obsession._
At the outset it may be useful to sketch in rough outline the
general evolution of the life of feeling from its humble origin in
organic sensibility to its highest and most complex forms.
Afterwards we shall present the corresponding and inverse picture,
that of its dissolution.
If we take at random, in the form in which daily experience gives
them to us, the states known under the vague names of “sentiments,”
“emotions,” “passions”: joy and sorrow, a toothache, a pleasurable
perfume, love or anger, fear or ambition, æsthetic enjoyment or
religious emotion, the rage of gambling or benevolence, the shudder
of the sublime or the discomfort of disgust, and so on, for they are
innumerable, one first observation is obvious even on a superficial
examination: all these states, whatever they may be, offer a double
aspect, objective or external, subjective or internal.
We note in the first place the _motor_ manifestations: movements,
gestures, and attitude of the body, a modification in the voice,
blushing or pallor, tremors, changes in the secretions or
excretions, and other bodily phenomena, varying in different cases.
We may observe them in ourselves, in our fellows, and in animals.
Although they may not always be motor in the strict sense, we may so
call them, since they are all the result of a centrifugal action.
We note also, in ourselves directly and by the evidence of
consciousness, in others indirectly and by induction, the existence
of certain states which are agreeable, painful, or mixed, with their
modes or shades, extremely variable in quality and in intensity.
Of these two groups—the motor manifestations on one side, the
pleasures, pains, and their compounds on the other side—which is
fundamental? Can we put them on the same level, and if we cannot,
which is that which supports the other?
My reply to this question is clear: it is the motor manifestations
which are essential. In other words, what are called agreeable or
painful states only constitute the superficial part of the life of
feeling, of which the deep element consists in tendencies,
appetites, needs, desires, translated into movements. Most classical
treatises (and even some others) say that sensibility is the faculty
of experiencing pleasure and pain. I should say, using the same
terminology, that sensibility is the faculty of tending or desiring,
and _consequently_ of experiencing pleasure and pain. There is
nothing mysterious in the tendency; it is a movement or an arrest of
movement in the nascent stage. I employ this word “tendency” as
synonymous with needs, appetites, instincts, inclinations, desires;
it is the generic term of which the others are varieties; it has the
advantage over them of embracing at the same time both the
psychological and physiological aspects of the phenomenon. All the
tendencies suppose a motor innervation; they translate the needs of
the individual, whatever they may be, physical or mental; the basis,
the root of the affective life is in them, not in the consciousness
of pleasure and pain which accompanies them according as they are
satisfied or opposed. These agreeable or painful states are only
signs and indications; and just as symptoms reveal to us the
existence of a disease, and not its essential nature, which must be
sought in the hidden lesions of the tissues, organs, and functions,
so pleasure and pain are only _effects_ which must guide us in the
search and determination of causes hidden in the region of the
instincts. If the contrary opinion has generally prevailed, and
priority been accorded to the study of agreeable and painful
manifestations considered as the essential element in the emotional
life and serving to define it, that is the result of a bad method,
of an exclusive faith in the evidence of consciousness, of a common
illusion which consists in believing that the conscious portion of
an event is its principal portion, but especially the consequence of
the radically false idea that the bodily phenomena which accompany
all states of feeling are factors that are negligible and external,
foreign to psychology, and without interest for it.
For the present what has just been said is only an affirmation; the
proofs will come later, and will occupy the whole of this book; at
the outset it is only necessary to indicate clearly the position
taken up. We may now follow the evolution of the life of feeling in
its chief stages, which are—pre-conscious sensibility, the
appearance of the primitive emotions, their transformation either
into complex and abstract emotions or into that stable and chronic
state which constitutes the passions.
I.
The first period is that of protoplasmic, vital, organic
pre-conscious sensibility. We know that the organism has its memory;
it preserves certain impressions, certain normal or morbid
modifications; it is capable of adaptation: this point has been well
established by Bering (who had been preceded by Laycock and Jessen).
It is the outline of the superior form of psychic conscious memory.
In the same way there exists an inferior unconscious form—organic
sensibility—which is the preparation and the outline of superior
conscious emotional life. Vital sensibility is to conscious feeling
what organic memory is to memory in the ordinary sense of the word.
This vital sensibility is the capacity to receive stimuli and to
re-act to them. In a well-known memoir, now of ancient date,[2]
Claude Bernard wrote: “Philosophers generally only know and admit
conscious sensibility, that which their ego bears witness to. It is
for them the psychic modification, pleasure or pain, determined by
external modifications.... Physiologists necessarily place
themselves at another point of view. They have to study the
phenomenon objectively, under all the forms which it puts on. They
observe that at the moment when a modifying agent acts on man, it
not only provokes pleasure and pain, it not only affects the soul:
it affects the body, it determines other re-actions besides the
psychic re-actions, and these automatic re-actions, far from being
an accessory part of the phenomenon, are on the contrary its
essential element.” Then he showed experimentally that the
employment of anæsthetics, pushed to an extreme, first abolished
conscious sensibility, then the unconscious sensibility of the
intestines and glands, then muscular irritability, finally the
lively movements of the epithelial tissue. In the same way among
plants: under the influence of ether the sensitive plant loses its
singular properties, seeds cease to germinate, yeast to ferment,
etc. Whence follows the conclusion that sensibility resides, not in
the organs or tissues, but in their anatomical elements.
-----
Footnote 2:
“La sensibilité dans le règne animal et le règne végétal”, (1876,
in _Science expérimentale_, pp. 218 _et seq._).
-----
Since then these investigations into protoplasmic sensibility have
been pursued with much ardour among micro-organisms. These beings,
sometimes animal, sometimes vegetable, are simple masses of
protoplasm, generally monocellular, appearing homogeneous, without
differentiation of tissues. Now very varied _tendencies_ have been
found among these organisms. Some seek light, others flee from it
persistently. The protoplasmic mass of myxomycetes which live in the
bark of the oak, if placed in a watch-glass full of water, remain
there in repose; but if sawdust is placed around them they
immediately emigrate towards it as if seized by home-sickness. The
actynophrys acts in the same way with regard to starch. Bacteria can
discover even the trillionth part of a milligram of oxygen in a
neighbouring body. Certain sedentary ciliated creatures appear to
choose their food. Some also have thought that they detected an
elective tendency in the movement which draws the male ovule towards
the female ovule. I have only recalled a few of the many facts which
have been enumerated.
If it is necessary to mention other examples, I may refer to the
case studied in our own days under the name of “phagocytosis.” The
struggle for life goes on, not only among individuals, but also
among the anatomical elements which constitute the individual. Every
tissue—muscular, connective, adipose, etc.—possesses phagocytes
(devouring cells), of which the duty consists in devouring and
destroying old or enfeebled cells of the same kind. Besides these
special phagocytes there are general phagocytes, such as the white
corpuscles of the blood, which come to the help of the others when
they are not equal to their task. They stand against the pathogenic
microbes, waging upon them an internal struggle, and opposing the
invasion of infectious germs. This apparently teleological property
seems at first very surprising. Later investigations have shown that
the phagocytes are endowed with a sensibility (called chemiotaxic),
owing to which they are able to distinguish the chemical composition
of their environment and to approach it or leave it accordingly;
deteriorated tissues attract certain of them which incorporate the
feeble or dead cells, while the healthy and vigorous elements are
perhaps able to defend themselves by secreting some substance which
preserves them from phagocytosis.
These facts, taken from among many others to which I shall again
have to refer when dealing with the sexual instinct, have been
interpreted in two very different ways: one psychological, the other
chemical.
For some there is in all these phenomena a rudiment of
consciousness. Since the movements are adapted and appropriate,
varying according to circumstances, there must be choice they say,
and choice involves a psychic element; the mobility is the
revelation of an obscure “psyche” endowed with attractive and
repulsive tendencies.
For the others (whose opinion I adopt), the whole may be explained
on physico-chemical grounds. No doubt there is affinity, attraction
and repulsion, but only in the scientific sense; these words are
metaphors derived from the language of consciousness which should be
purged of all anthropomorphic elements. Several authors have shown
by numerous observations and experiments the chemical conditions
which determine or prevent this pretended choice (Sachs, Verworn,
Löb, Maupas, Bastian, etc.).
On this point, as on all questions of origin, we must decide
according to probabilities, and the probabilities appear to be all
in favour of the chemical hypothesis. In any case, this matter has
only a secondary interest for us here. If we admit conscious
tendencies, then the origin of the emotional life coincides with the
very origin of physiological life. If we eliminate all psychology,
there still remains the physiological tendency, that is to say the
motor element, which in some degree, from the lowest to the highest,
is never quite wanting.
This excursion into the pre-conscious period—since we so regard
it—puts us in possession of one result. At the end of this
investigation we find two well-defined tendencies, physico-chemical
and organic—the one of attraction, the other of repulsion; these are
the two poles of the life of feeling. What is attraction in this
sense? Simply assimilation; it blends with nutrition. With sexual
attraction, however, we must note that we already reach a higher
grade; the phenomenon is more complex, the monocellular being no
longer acts to preserve itself but to maintain the species. As to
repulsion, we may remark that it is manifested in two ways. On one
side it is the opposite of assimilation: the cell or the tissue
rejects what does not suit it. On another side, at a somewhat
superior stage, it is in some degree already defensive.
We have thus gained a basis for our subject by finding that beneath
the conscious life of feeling there exists a very low and obscure
region, that of vital or organic sensibility, which is an embryonic
form of conscious sensibility and supports it.
II.
We now pass from darkness to light, from the vital to the psychic.
But before entering into the conscious period of the life of feeling
and following it in the progress of its evolution, this is perhaps
the place to examine a sufficiently important question which has
usually been wrongly answered in the negative: Are there _pure_
states of feeling—that is to say, states empty of any intellectual
element, of every representative content, not connected either with
perceptions or images or concepts, simply subjective, agreeable,
disagreeable, or mixed? If we reply in the negative, it follows that
without exception no kind of feeling can ever exist by itself; it
always requires a support; it is never more than an accompaniment.
This proposition is held by the majority; it has naturally been
adopted by the intellectualists, and Lehmann has recently maintained
it in its most radical form; a state of emotional consciousness is
never met with; pleasure and pain are always connected with
intellectual states.[3] If we reply in the affirmative, then the
state of feeling is considered as having at least sometimes an
independent existence of its own and not as condemned to play for
ever the part of acolyte or parasite.
-----
Footnote 3:
“Ein rein emotionneller Bewusstseinszustand kommt nicht vor; Lust
und Unlust sind stets an intellektuelle Zustände geknüpft,” _Die
Hauptgesetze der menschlichen Gefühlslebens_ (1892), p. 16.
-----
This is a question of fact, and observation alone can settle it.
Although there are other reasons to give in favour of the autonomous
and even primordial character of the life of feeling, I reserve them
for the conclusion of this book, to remain at present in the region
of pure and simple experience. There can be no doubt that, as a
rule, emotional states accompany intellectual states, but I deny
that it can never be otherwise, and that perceptions and
representations are the necessary condition of existence, absolutely
and without exception, of every manifestation of feeling.
There is a first class of facts which I only refer to in order not
to ignore them. Although they have been invoked they seem to me to
carry little weight. I refer to the emotions which suddenly break
out in animals and are not explicable by any anterior experience.
Gratiolet having presented to a very young puppy a fragment of
wolf’s skin so worn that it resembled parchment, the animal on
smelling it was seized with extreme fright. Kröner, in his book on
cœnæsthesia,[4] has collected similar facts. It is, however, so
difficult to know what passes in the consciousness of an animal, and
to ascertain the part of instinct and of hereditary transmission,
that I do not insist. Moreover, in all these cases the emotion is
excited by an _external_ sensation which touches a spring and sets
the mechanism of instinct at work; so that it might be argued that
we are not here concerned with a pure and independent state of
feeling. To remove all doubt, we require cases in which the state of
feeling precedes the intellectual state, not being provoked by, but,
on the contrary, provoking it.
-----
Footnote 4:
_Das Körperliche Gefühl_ (1887), pp. 80, 81.
-----
The child at the beginning can only possess a purely affective life.
During the intra-uterine period he neither hears nor sees nor
touches; even after birth it is some weeks before he learns to
localise his sensations. His psychic life, however rudimentary it
may be, must consist in a vague state of pleasure and pain analogous
to ours. He cannot connect them with perceptions, because he is
still unable to perceive. It is a widely accredited opinion that the
infant enters into life by pain; Preyer has questioned this; we
shall see later on what grounds. At present we need not insist upon
these facts, since we cannot interpret them except by induction.
Adults will furnish us with unquestionable and abundant evidence.
As a general rule, every deep change in the _internal_ sensations is
translated in an equivalent fashion into the cœnæsthesia and
modifies the tone of feeling. Now the internal sensations are not
representative, and this factor, of capital importance, has been
forgotten by the intellectualists. Of this purely organic state,
which afterwards becomes a state of feeling, and then an
intellectual state, we shall later on find numerous examples in
studying the genesis of the emotions; it is enough for the moment to
note a few of them. Under the influence of haschisch, says Moreau
(de Tours), who has studied it so well, “the feeling which is
experienced is one of happiness. I mean by this a state which has
nothing in common with purely sensual pleasure. It is not the
pleasure of the glutton or the drunkard, but is much more comparable
to the joy of the miser or that caused by good news.” I once knew
well a man who for ten years constantly took haschisch in large
doses; he withstood the drug better than might be expected, and
finally died insane. I received his oral and written confidences,
often to a greater extent than I desired. During this long period I
have often noted his feeling of inexhaustible satisfaction,
translated now and again into strange inventions or commonplace
reflections, but in his opinion invaluable. At the epoch of puberty,
when it follows its normal development, we know that there is a
profound metamorphosis. Certain conditions, known or unknown, act on
the organism and modify its state (first moment); translated into
consciousness, these organic conditions give birth to a particular
tone of feeling (second moment); this state of feeling produces
corresponding representations (third moment). The representative
element appears in the last place. Similar phenomena are produced
under other conditions, in which the cœnæsthesia is modified by the
state of the sexual organs (menstruation, pregnancy). The emotional
state is produced first, the intellectual state afterwards. But the
most abundant source from which we may draw examples at will is
certainly the period of incubation which precedes the appearance of
mental diseases. In most cases it is a state of vague sadness.
Sadness without a cause, it is commonly said, and rightly, if by
that is meant that it is produced neither by an accident nor by bad
news nor by ordinary causes; but not causeless, if we take into
consideration the internal sensations which in such a case play a
part which is unperceived but not the less effective. This
inclination to melancholy is also the rule in the neuroses.
Sometimes it happens that the state of feeling, instead of being a
slow incubation, is an _aura_ of emotional character and short
duration (a few minutes to at most a few hours). Some patients, by
repeated experience, are aware of this; they know by the change that
the attack is approaching. Féré (_Les Epilepsies_) gives several
examples; among others, that of a young man who under these
circumstances became totally changed in character, which he
expressed in an original manner by saying, “I feel that my heart
changes.” That is because _in the last stage_ this state of feeling
takes form and becomes fixed in an idea, as may best be seen in
persecutional insanity.
Without insisting, as would be easy, on any further enumeration of
facts, we may reduce these pure states of feeling to four principal
types:
1. Agreeable state (pleasure, joy): that of haschisch and similar
drugs, certain stages of general paralysis of the insane, the sense
of well-being experienced by the consumptive and the dying; many
people who have escaped a death which they considered certain have
felt themselves overwhelmed on its approach by a feeling of
beatitude, without further definition, which is perhaps only the
absence of all suffering.[5]
-----
Footnote 5:
For observations relative to this point see _Revue Philosophique_,
March 1896.
-----
2. Painful state (sadness, annoyance): the incubation period of most
diseases, the melancholy of menstrual periods.
3. State of fear: without reason, without apparent causes, without
justification, without object; fear of everything and of nothing: a
fairly frequent state, which we shall examine in detail when we come
to the _phobias_.
4. State of excitability: connected with anger, frequent in
neurosis; it is an unstable and explosive state of being which, at
first vague and undetermined, ends by taking form, attaching itself
to a representation, and discharging itself on an object.
Finally, there are mixed states, formed by the co-existence or
alternation of simple states.
From all which goes before it results that there is a pure and
autonomous life of feeling, independent of the intellectual life and
having its cause below, in the variations of the cœnæsthesia, which
is itself the resultant and concert of vital actions. In the
psychology of feeling the part played by external sensations is very
scanty compared to that played by internal sensations, and certainly
one must be unable to see beyond the first to set up as a rule “that
there is no emotional state unconnected with an intellectual state.”
Having made this point clear, we may return to our general picture
of the evolution.
1. Above organic sensibility we find the stage of needs—that is to
say, of purely vital or physiological tendencies with consciousness
added. In man this period only exists at the beginning of life, and
is translated by internal sensations (hunger, thirst, need of sleep,
fatigue, etc.). It is constituted by a bundle of tendencies
essentially physiological in character, and these tendencies have
nothing added or external; they are life in action. Each anatomical
element, each tissue, each organ has but one end, to exercise its
activity; and the physiological individual is nothing but the
convergent expression of all these tendencies. They may present
themselves under a double form. In the one case they express a lack,
a deficiency; the anatomical element, the tissue, the organism has
need of something. In this form the tendency is imperious and
irresistible; such is the hunger of the carnivorous animal, which
swallows its prey alive. In the other case they translate an excess,
a superfluity: such are, a gland which needs to secrete, a
well-nourished animal which needs to move: this is the embryonic
form of the luxurious emotions.
All these needs have a point of convergence—the preservation of the
individual; to use the current expression, we see in them the
exercise of the _instinct of preservation_. On the subject of this
instinct there have recently been discussions which seem to me
sufficiently idle. Is the instinct of preservation primitive? is it
derived? Some authors are for the first hypothesis; others
(especially James and Sergi) lean towards the second. According to
the point of view each of these two solutions is admissible and
true. From the synthetic point of view the instinct of preservation
is primordial, since it is nothing else but the resultant and sum of
all the particular tendencies of each essential organ; it is only a
collective formula. From the analytic point of view, it is
secondary, since it presupposes all the particular tendencies into
which it is dissolved, since each of its elements is simple, and
since it adds nothing and is nothing but their translation into
consciousness. One might ask in the same way if a sensation of sound
is simple or compound, and here also, according to the point of
view, the answer would vary. For consciousness the event is one,
simple and irreducible; for objective analysis the event is
compound, reducible to a definite number of vibrations. In the
various regions of psychology we might find many problems of the
same kind. The important point is to understand that the instinct of
preservation is not an entity, but an abbreviated expression
indicating a group of tendencies.
2. Emerging from the period of needs, which are thus reducible to
tendencies of physiological order accompanied by physical pleasures
or pains, we now enter the period of _primitive emotions_.
We cannot at the present point determine rigorously and in detail
what is meant by an emotion (see Part I., Chap. vii.); it is enough
to give a rough but comprehensible definition. From our standpoint,
_emotion is in the order of feeling the equivalent of perception in
the intellectual order_, a complex synthetic state essentially made
up of produced or arrested movements, of organic modifications (in
circulation, respiration, etc.), of an agreeable or painful or mixed
state of consciousness peculiar to each emotion. It is a phenomenon
of sudden appearance and limited duration; it is always related to
the preservation of the individual or the species—directly as
regards primitive emotions, indirectly as regards derived emotions.
Emotion then, even while we keep to its primitive forms, introduces
us into a higher region of the affective life in which its
manifestations become complex. But how can we determine these
primitive forms—the simple irreducible emotions—for this is our
principal aim? Many neglect this determination, or leave it to
arbitrary chance. The old authors seem at this point to have
followed a method of abstraction and generalisation which could only
lead them to entities. It was an accredited doctrine among them that
all the “passions” can finally be reduced to love and hate; we meet
this thesis throughout. To reach this conclusion they seem to have
brought together and compared the different passions, disengaged the
resemblances, eliminated the differences, and by continued
reductions abstracted from this multiplicity its most general
characters.[6]
-----
Footnote 6:
Descartes is a brilliant exception to this method of procedure;
later on we shall have to consider his method (Part II., Chapter
vii.).
-----
If by love and hate we are to understand the movements of attraction
or repulsion which lie at the bottom of the emotions, there is
nothing to be said; but we are only given abstractions and
theoretical concepts; such a determination is illusory and without
practical utility. If we understand love (what love? for nothing is
vaguer than this word) and hate in a more concrete sense, and
pretend to consider them as the primitive source from which to
derive all the other emotions, that is a purely mental opinion, an
assertion which nothing justifies.
The determination of the primitive emotions must be made not by
abstraction and generalisation, but by _verification_. To attain
this I can see but one method to follow—the method of observation,
which teaches us the order and the date of appearance of the various
emotions, and gives us their genealogical and chronological list. We
may count as primitive all those which cannot be reduced to previous
manifestations, all those which appear as a new manifestation, and
those alone; all the others are secondary and derived.
The materials for this investigation can only be sought in the
psychology of animals and in that of children. The first will give
us but little help. No doubt special and authoritative treatises
enumerate the emotions of animals, but without any distinction
between the simple and the compound, and with no precise indication
as to the order of their appearance. It is not the same with
infantile psychology; the numerous studies published on this subject
during the last thirty years have rendered possible an attempt which
could not be made before.
The question is then to determine in accordance with facts the order
in which the emotions appear, only taking into account those which
seem primitive—that is to say, not reducible to other emotions. I
limit myself to their simple enumeration, with an indication of
their chief characters; each of them will be the object of a special
study in the second part of this book.
1. Fear is the first in date, according to unanimous observations.
Preyer finds that it is manifested from the second day. At the same
time the fact which he records seems to me to agree with surprise
rather than with fear properly so called. In any case, according to
the same author, it is easy to note it after twenty-four hours.
Darwin thought he could only observe it at the end of four months,
Perez at two months. The last is inclined to believe that this
emotion is first aroused by auditory sensations, and then by visual
sensations. The precocity of its appearance has been attributed to
hereditary transmission, an assertion which we shall have to
examine.
2. After the defensive emotion, the offensive emotion appears in the
form of anger. Perez notes it between two and three months; Preyer
and Darwin at ten months; they mean real anger, marked by the
contraction of the eyebrows and other clear symptoms (to throw
itself about, crying, etc.). Naturally the dates indicated for each
emotion are not rigorously fixed; they must vary according to the
child’s temperament and circumstances.
3. Then comes affection. Some authors use the word sympathy, which
seems to me too vague. It shows itself by its fundamental method of
expression, the movement of attraction, the seeking for contact.
Darwin, who has well described it, remarks that it probably appears
very early in life, judging by the infant’s smile, in the second
month, but that he had no clear proof that the child recognised any
one before the fourth month; at the fifth month he showed a wish to
go towards his nurse, but only at twelve months did he show
affection spontaneously and by plain gestures. Darwin adds that
sympathy (?) was manifested exactly at ten months, eleven days, when
the child’s nurse pretended to cry.[7] According to Perez, it
appears towards ten months.[8] It is from this source that complex
forms of great importance must later on be derived—the social and
moral emotions.
-----
Footnote 7:
Darwin, “Biographical Sketch of an Infant,” _Mind_, ii. p. 285.
Footnote 8:
It is probable that the dates assigned for the first appearance
of emotional manifestations by Darwin, Preyer, Perez, etc., are
mostly too late, as they were not the outcome of continuous
observation. Mrs. Kathleen Carter Moore, in her recent elaborate
monograph dealing with the early mental development of her own
baby, whom she regards as an average infant, observed the tear
secretion first on the tenth day, though it was not fully
established until the sixteenth week; a smile when comfortable
was seen on the sixth day; the child smiled several times
consecutively at his father on the seventh day with movements of
excitement, and by the twentieth day smiling at persons had
become more frequent and more intelligent. (See K. C. Moore,
“The Mental Development of a Child,” Monograph Supplement to the
_Psychological Review_, 1896).—ED.
-----
With fear, anger, and affection we remain in the region of the
emotions which man shares with animals; for even affection is met
with very low in the animal series, at all events in the form of
maternal love. These three emotions have therefore a very clear
character of universality. We now make a step which introduces us
into a purely human region.
4. This stage is marked by the appearance of emotions connected with
the personality, the ego. Hitherto we have had an individual, a
living being with more or less vague consciousness of his life; but
the child, usually towards the age of at least three years, becomes
conscious of himself as a person. Then appear new emotional
manifestations, of which the source may be called for lack of a
better term the self-feeling or egoistic emotion (_selbstgefühl_,
_amour propre_), and which may translate itself in two forms: in a
negative form as a feeling of powerlessness and debility, and in a
positive form as a feeling of strength and audacity. This feeling of
plenitude and exuberance is the source from which later numerous
emotional forms are derived (pride, vanity, ambition). Perhaps also
we must connect with it all those which express a superfluity of
life: the need of physical exercise, play in all its forms,
curiosity or the desire for knowledge, the need of creation by
imagination or action.
5. There remains the sexual emotion; it is the last in chronological
order and the moment of its appearance is easy to fix, since it has
objective physiological marks. It is an error to suppose that it can
be derived from affection, or that affection can be derived from it,
as has sometimes been maintained. The observation of facts
completely condemns this thesis, and shows that they cannot be
reduced one to the other. Later on we shall meet with evident
proofs.
Now we meet with one of those embarrassing questions with which our
subject is full. Must we here conclude our list of primitive
emotions, or must we add two others: joy and grief? It is possible
to incline to the latter view. Thus Lange has included joy and grief
among the four or five simple “emotions” which he has chosen as
types of his descriptions. The following reasons, in my opinion, are
against this solution. No doubt joy and grief present all the
characters which constitute an emotion: movements or arrest of
movements, changes in the organic life, and a state of consciousness
_sui generis_. But in that case physical pleasure and physical pain
must also be included among the emotions, for they both present the
characters above enumerated; moreover, there is an identity of
nature between physical pleasure and joy on one side, physical pain
and grief on the other side, as I hope to prove later on; the only
difference is that the physical form is preceded by a state of the
organism, the moral form (joy, grief) by a representation. In other
words, we should have to class pleasure and pain (without
qualification or restriction) among the primitive emotions. Now
these two alleged emotions present, with reference to the five
already named, an evident and capital difference: their character of
generality. Fear is quite distinct from anger, affection from
self-feeling, and sexual emotion from the other four by its specific
mark. Each of them is a complex state, distinct and impenetrable;
just as vision is in relation to hearing, or touch to smell. Each
expresses a particular tendency (defensive, offensive, attraction to
the like, etc.), and is adapted to a particular end. Pleasure and
pain, on the contrary, express general conditions of being; they are
diffused everywhere and penetrate everywhere. There is pain in fear,
in certain moments of anger and of the self-feeling; there is
pleasure in sexual emotion, in certain moments of anger and of the
self-feeling. These two states have no domain of their own. Emotion,
by its nature, particularises; pleasure and pain by their nature
universalise; they are the general marks of the affective life, and
if they coincide like the emotions with motor, vaso-motor, and other
phenomena, that is because no form of feeling can exist without its
physiological conditions.
Such are the reasons for which I refuse to class the agreeable and
painful states among primitive emotions, and to consider them as of
the same nature. As to the moment of their appearance, physical pain
is held to co-exist with the very beginning of extra-uterine life;
physical pleasure resulting from satisfied appetite, the sensation
of warmth, etc., must begin almost at the same period. Joy and grief
are later. According to Preyer, the smile and brightness of the eyes
indicate joy; “from the second month an infant takes pleasure in
hearing singing and the piano.” I am not sure that this example is
very decisive; I prefer to see here the pleasure that is mostly
physical. Darwin observed it towards the fourth month, perhaps
before, but very clearly towards twelve months on the return of an
absent person. Grief may manifest itself, according to Preyer,
towards the fourth month (tears before the fourth week). Darwin, in
the observation already quoted, makes the first appearance at six
months. On the whole, the observations are few and wanting in
harmony, because of the great difficulty at this moment of life in
distinguishing with certainty between the two forms of pleasure and
the two forms of pain.
At the root of each of the primitive emotions there is a tendency,
an instinct; but I do not claim that this list exhausts the human
instincts; later on we shall have to return to this point (Part II.,
Introduction). Let us admit as a provisional hypothesis that these
five emotions alone are irreducible, and all the others derived from
them. In the sequel I shall try to indicate how these secondary
emotions are the result of a complete evolution, of an arrest of
development, or of a mixture and combination (Part II., Chapter
vii.).
III.
Above these emotions, which, though composed of several elements,
are simple as emotions, and may be called innate since they are
furnished by the organism itself, there are numerous forms of
feeling manifested in the course of life, aroused by representations
of the past or the future, by the construction of images, by
concepts, by an ideal. As each primitive emotion will be studied in
its total development, from its lower to its most highly
intellectualised forms, it is useless now to attempt a sketch of
this ascending march, which, when reduced to generalities, would be
vague and confused. It reaches its last stage in the loftiest
regions of science, art, religion, and morals.
One may assert without risk that these higher forms are unattainable
by the great majority of men. Perhaps scarcely one person in a
hundred thousand or a million reaches them; the others know them
not, or only suspect them approximately and by hearsay. They are a
promised land only entered by a few of the elect.
To reach the higher sentiments, in fact, two conditions are needed:
(1) one must be capable of conceiving and understanding general
ideas; (2) these ideas must not remain simple intellectual forms,
but must be able to arouse certain feelings, certain approximate
tendencies. If one or other condition is wanting, the emotion is not
produced.
The formula of the evolution during this period is very simple; the
order of development of the emotions depends strictly on the order
of development of general ideas; it is the evolution of ideas which
rules that of feelings. Here we are in perfect agreement with the
intellectualist theory.
The faculty of abstraction and generalisation is very unequally
apportioned. It depends on the race, the age, the individual. Some
never pass the level of generic images which are only concrete
images simplified and condensed. Some reach those medium forms of
abstraction in which the word plays the part of substitute for the
reality, but requires, in order to be understood, that the
qualities of the thing which it represents should be figured by a
vague scheme, the concomitant of the word. Some reach the stage of
complete substitution, in which the word takes the place of the
whole, and has need of no auxiliary to insure the mental
operation. Each of these degrees (which include sub-divisions I do
not indicate) has its possible echo in feeling. Thus every one,
according to the range of his intelligence, may reach some or all
these stages, and according to his temperament experience or not
experience at each of them an emotional state. The emotions which
are susceptible of a complete evolution will furnish the proofs. A
very simple example may be found in the sexual impulse, which may
in turn be physiological, psycho-physiological, chiefly
psychological, and finally intellectual. At its lowest stage (in
the micro-organisms and similar beings) we find facts of a purely
vital and organic order, in my opinion unconscious; then
consciousness appears, but the sexual emotion manifests itself in
a purely specific shape without individual choice; it is simply an
instinct, “the genius of the race making use of the individual to
reach its own ends.” Later on individuality becomes marked; we
find choice; the tender emotions, not found in the early stage,
are superadded. Then comes the moment of equilibrium between the
organic elements and the psychic elements, as usually found in the
normal average man. This state is very complex, resulting from the
fusion or convergence of numerous tendencies, hence its power of
attraction. Then comes a rupture of equilibrium, a period of
interversion; the physiological element is slowly effaced, the
psychic element gains in intensity; it is a repetition of the
primitive period, but in the opposite direction. This is the
intellectual phase of love; the idea appears first, the
physiological phenomena come afterwards. At a more elevated stage
of refinement the concrete personal image is replaced by a vague
impersonal representation, an ideal, a concept; this is pure
platonic mystical love, the organic accompaniment of which is so
feeble that it is usually denied.
These subtle and refined forms which the intellectualists regard as
superior are really only an impoverishment of feeling. They are
besides rare, and except in a few cases ineffective; for it is a
rule that every feeling loses its strength in the measure that it
becomes intellectualised. The blind faith in “the power of ideas” is
in practice an inexhaustible source of illusions and errors. An idea
which is only an idea, a simple fact of knowledge, produces nothing
and does nothing; it only acts if it is _felt_, if it is accompanied
by an affective state, if it awakes tendencies, that is to say,
motor elements. One may have thoroughly studied Kant’s _Practical
Reason_, have penetrated all its depths, covered it with glosses and
luminous commentaries, without adding one iota to one’s practical
morality; that comes from another source, and it is one of the most
unfortunate results of intellectualist influence in the psychology
of the feelings that it has led us to ignore so evident a truth.
IV.
It may be remarked that in contemporary treatises the word
_passion_ has almost entirely disappeared, or is only met with
incidentally.[9] Yet it has a long past which would be interesting
to trace, if I had not forbidden myself all historical digressions.
At present the term emotion is preferred to designate the chief
manifestations of the affective life; it is a generic expression;
passion is only a mode of it. Ordinary language rightly preserves
the word, since it answers to a reality; and passion is an event of
too much practical importance for us to dispense with speaking of
it, explaining how it differs from emotion, what its nature is, and
under what conditions it appears.
-----
Footnote 9:
Höffding, _Psychologie_, pp. 392-394, second German edition. J.
Sully, _The Human Mind_, vol. ii. p. 56, considers emotion as a
genus of which affection and passion are the species: affection is
a fixed emotional disposition; passion is the violent form of the
emotion. Nothing can be vaguer and more uncertain than the
terminology of our subject, and yet, as Wundt says in his
_Essays_, it has made a very appreciable progress when compared to
the confusion which existed at the beginning of the century.
-----
There is a fairly general agreement as to its definition; and
beneath different formulas, according as they emanate from a
moralist, a theologian, a philosopher, or a biologist, we always
find the same essential characters: “it is an intemperate want;” “it
is an inclination or liking carried to excess;” “it is a violent and
sustained desire which dominates the whole cerebral being,” etc.;
the terminology alone varies.[10]
-----
Footnote 10:
Letourneau, _Physiologie des Passions_, liv. i. Chap. I.
-----
If we seek the special mark of passion and its characteristics among
the phenomena of the affective life, we must distinguish it from
emotion on one side and insanity on the other; for it is situated
midway between the two.
It is difficult to express with clearness and precision the
difference between emotion and passion. Is it a difference of
nature? No, for emotion is the source whence passion flows. Is it a
difference of degree? This distinction is precarious, for while
there are calm emotions and violent passions, the contrary may also
be met with. A third difference remains, duration. It is generally
said that passion is an enduring state; emotion is the acute form,
passion the chronic form. Violence and duration are the characters
usually assigned to it; but we may further define its essential
nature. _Passion is in the affective order what an imperative idea
(idée fixe) is in the intellectual order_; we might add what a
contraction is in the motor order. It is the affective equivalent of
the imperative idea. This needs some explanation.
The normal intellectual state is a plurality of states of
consciousness determined by the mechanism of association. If at a
given moment a perception or representation arises and occupies
alone the chief field of consciousness, ruling as a sovereign,
making a space around it, and only permitting associations which are
in direct relation with itself, we have a state of attention. This
“monoideïsm” is by its nature exceptional and transitory. If it does
not change its object, persisting or repeating itself constantly, we
have the fixed idea, which may be called permanent attention. It is
not necessarily morbid, as Newton’s celebrated phrase and other
evidence show; but the latent or actual sovereignty of the fixed
idea is absolute and tyrannical.
In the same way the normal state of feeling is the succession of
pleasures, troubles, desires, whims, etc., which in their temperate
form, and often dulled by repetition, constitute the prosaic round
of ordinary life. At a given moment some circumstance causes a
shock; that is emotion. Some tendency annihilates all the others,
momentarily confiscating the whole activity to its profit; that is
the equivalent of attention. Usually this passage of movements in a
single direction is not enduring; but if, instead of disappearing,
the emotion remains fixed, or repeats itself incessantly, always the
same, with the slight modifications involved in passing from the
acute to the chronic stage—that is passion, which is permanent
emotion. In spite of apparent eclipses, it is always ready to
appear, absolute and tyrannical.
Concerning the origin of passion, moralists and novelists have
remarked that it comes into being in two different ways—by a
thunderbolt or by “crystallisation,” by sudden action or by slow
actions. This double origin denotes predominance either of the
affective life or of the intellectual life. When passion is born
suddenly it issues directly from emotion itself and retains a
certain violence of nature, so much at least as its metamorphosis
into a permanent disposition admits. In the other case the
initiative is taken by the intellectual states (images, ideas), and
the passion is slowly constituted as the result of association which
itself is only an _effect_, for it obeys a latent influence, a
hidden factor, an unconscious activity only revealed by its work.
Representations only attract each other and associate by reason of
their affective similitude, of the emotional tone which is common to
them, and by successive additions these little streams form a river.
This form of passion, on account of its origin, has less ardour and
more tenacity.
After distinguishing passion from emotion, it is still necessary to
separate it from insanity, its other neighbour. Certain authors have
at once classed all passions with insanity; I cannot accept this
proposition. It may suit the moralist, by no means the psychologist.
But the task of separation is very delicate, and cannot be attempted
in this Introduction. The distinction between the normal and the
morbid, always difficult, is especially so in the case of the
psychology of the feelings. I shall endeavour elsewhere (Part I.,
Chap. iv.) to find the indications which enable us to establish this
separation legitimately, and the task which we now put aside in its
general form will come before us later on in the case of each
particular emotion.
PART I.
GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY.
CHAPTER I.
PHYSICAL PAIN.
_Its anatomical and physiological conditions; pain nerves,
transmission to the centres—Modifications of the organism
accompanying physical pain: circulation, respiration,
nutrition, movements—Are they the effects of paint?—Pain
is only a sign—The analgesias: unconsciousness of pain and
intellectual consciousness—Retardation of pain after
sensation—Hyperalgesia—Nature of pain: theory that it is a
sensation; theory that it is a quality of sensation—Pain
may result from the quality or the intensity of the
stimulus—Hypotheses regarding its ultimate cause: it
depends on a form of movement, a chemical modification._
Many definitions of pain have, very unnecessarily, been offered.
Some are even tautological, others imply a hypothesis as to its
nature by relating it to strong stimulations.[11] Let us regard it
as an internal state which every one knows by experience, and of
which consciousness reveals innumerable modes, but which by its
generality and its multiplicity of aspect escapes definition.
-----
Footnote 11:
“Pain is a powerful and prolonged vibration of the conscious
nervous centres, resulting from a strong peripheral excitation,
and consequently of a sudden change of condition in the nervous
centres” (Richet). “It is the most violent stimulation of certain
sensorial regions—a stimulation to which contribute the more
extended stimulations of other regions” (Wundt).
-----
In its primitive form pain is always physical, that is to say,
connected with external or internal sensations. Sufficiently precise
as regards superficial parts of the body, especially the skin, its
localisation is vaguer when it is seated in the deeper parts, the
viscera, the instruments of organic life. In the last case, when the
pain is of internal and non-peripheral origin, coming from the great
sympathetic or the related vagus nerve, it is accompanied by a state
of anxiety, of depression, or of anguish, which we shall often
encounter, and which frequently causes it to be said that “it seems
to the patient that the workings of nature within him are
suspended.” For the present, without distinguishing between these
two origins, external and internal, we will study the _objective_
characters of physical pain taken in general: first its anatomical
and physiological conditions, then the bodily modifications which
accompany it and in popular language are called its effects.
I.
The transmission of painful impressions from the periphery to the
cortical centres is far from being determined in all the stages of
its course.
The nerve terminations, from their outpost position, receive the
first shock; but what part do they play? It is known that the nerves
of the deep organs and the filaments of the great sympathetic have
no specially constructed terminations. The nerves of special sense,
on the contrary,—vision, hearing, smell, and taste,—possess special
peripheral apparatus (retina, organ of Corti, etc.) of very complex
anatomy; it is known that their _rôle_ is specially sensorial; they
are above all instruments of knowledge, seldom directly of pain or
pleasure. So that the question of nerve terminations in relation to
pain may chiefly be confined to the nerves of the tactile apparatus,
taking the word in its largest sense. The extreme difficulty of
isolating the purely peripheral impression from that which reaches
the nerve itself renders almost insoluble the question as to the
part played by these peripheral apparatus. Beaunis,[12] relying on
the cases of localised anæsthesia in which the patient no longer
feels pain but still perceives contact, thinks that analgesia would
reach the nerves before acting on their terminations, shut up in
more or less resistant capsules.
-----
Footnote 12:
_Sensations internes_, Chap. xx., may be read for details on this
point.
-----
Are there special nerves for the transmission of pain? Goldscheider,
well known for his researches on cold and heat points on the skin,
at first maintained that there are.[13] According to him, the
pain-bearing nerve filaments are interlaced with the sensorial
nerves, more numerously with the nerves of general sensation (touch,
heat, cold), less numerously with those of special sense. If the
existence of these special pain nerves were well established, it
would have as great an importance for our subject as the discoveries
of Sachs and others, on the nervous filaments peculiar to the
muscles, have had for the study of the kinæsthetic sense. But this
physiologist has since repudiated his first assertion, and
maintained that it was misunderstood; he admits pain points (points
sensible to pain), but not a specific organ for pain nor special
nerves to transmit it.[14] Frey, on the other hand, professes to
have proved experimentally both pain nerves and appropriate terminal
organs. His observations have been rejected as inaccurate. At the
present time there is nothing to establish the existence of pain
nerves, and most authors have given strong reasons against the
probability of such a discovery. Rejecting this hypothesis, we may
admit that an impression of pain, like any other impression, is
transmitted by the nerves of general or special sensibility. When it
has entered the spinal cord at the posterior roots, the road it
follows to reach the higher centres has given rise to much
investigation and discussion. According to Schiff, transmission
takes place through the grey substance, tactile impressions passing
by the posterior fibres; there would thus be two distinct paths, one
for the feeling, the other for the sensation properly so-called.
Brown-Séquard also admits distinct paths, but through the grey
substance alone; the anterior region is devoted to touch, the median
to temperature, the posterior to pain. According to Wundt,
impressions of touch and temperature have a primary path through the
white substance when stimulation is moderate, a secondary path
through the grey substance acting as a surplus channel when
stimulation is violent. The hypothesis of separate paths, whatever
they may be, has the advantage of harmonising with the well-known
fact, to which we shall return, that the transmission of pain is
slower than sensorial transmission. Lehmann, who takes up a rigidly
intellectualist position, cannot admit that the element of feeling
has a certain independence in relation to the element of sensation,
existing by itself. He believes that the delay is explained by the
fact that “pain requires a stronger excitation in the sensorial
region than sensation without pain, and that consequently pain is
only produced after sensation, as the excitation increases in
intensity.”[15] This explanation may be accepted, but it assumes
that pain always depends on intensity of stimulus, which is not
proved.
-----
Footnote 13:
_Archiv für Anatomie und Physiol._, 1885.
Footnote 14:
Goldscheider, _Ueber den Schmerz_, Berlin, 1894.
-----
From the spinal cord we reach the medulla, to which some authors
assign the chief part. The latest, Sergi, in his book _Dolore e
Piacere_ (Milan, 1894), makes it the seat of the affective phenomena
in general (pains, pleasures, emotions). What in his opinion
testifies to the importance of the medulla in the affective life is
the number and nature of the nervous centres situated between the
protuberance and the floor of the small ventricle, centres which act
on the heart, the vessels, the lungs, the secretions, the intestinal
movements. “The vital knot of Flourens is the vital centre and must
also be the centre of pleasure and pain, which are merely
alterations in the functions of organic life.”[16] In his opinion
(which is mine also) the part played by the brain in the genesis of
states of feeling has been exaggerated; it only acts in two ways—by
rendering the disturbances of organic life, the physical basis of
the feelings, apparent to consciousness, and as a cause of
stimulation by means of ideas.
-----
Footnote 15:
Lehmann, _Die Hauptgesetze des menschlichen Gefühlslebens_, pp. 46
_et seq._
Footnote 16:
In his preface Sergi briefly indicates the “antecedents of his
theory.” He finds it in the English anatomist Todd, in Hack Tuke,
Laycock, Herbert Spencer, Brown-Séquard, etc. I may point out that
Vulpian, relying on experiments of doubtful interpretation,
localised the emotions exclusively in the medulla, _Leçons sur
l’Anatomie du système nerveux_, xxiv.
-----
However disposed we may be to restrict the part played by the
brain—that is to say the cortical layer—it remains a predominant
factor and the final terminus in the process of transmission. Here
we plunge into darkness. Researches into cerebral localisation teach
us on this subject nothing which is generally admitted. During the
first period of such studies, which may be called that of
circumscribed localisation _à outrance_, Ferrier placed the seat of
the emotions in the occipital lobes, because, in his opinion, that
region of the cortex receives the visceral sensations, because the
sexual instinct is dependent upon them, and finally, because these
lobes are more developed in women than in men. It is needless to
bring forward the numerous criticisms of this thesis. During the
second and present period of localisation, which may be called that
of disseminated localisation, functional rather than anatomical,
authors are little inclined to admit a particular centre for the
affective life in general, and still less for pain. All the sensory
centres, and even all the motor centres (perhaps there are
fundamentally only sensori-motor centres with preponderance of one
or the other element), may under certain conditions of activity
produce in consciousness a feeling of pleasure or pain.
The hypothesis of a cortical centre is not, therefore, probable; I
shall return to this point in discussing the emotions.
II.
The modifications of the organism which accompany physical pain have
been so often described that it is enough to trace a slight outline
of them. They may be reduced to a single formula: pain is associated
with diminution and disorganisation of the vital functions.
1. It acts on the movements of the heart, generally decreasing its
frequency; in extreme cases the slackening may go so far as to
produce syncope. In animals submitted for experiment in the
laboratory, even after removal of the encephalon, painful
impressions diminish the cardiac contractions. In man, though the
frequency of the pulse is sometimes increased in one form or
another, there is always a modification of the rhythm appreciable by
the sphygmograph. Bichat was right when he said: “If you wish to
know whether pain is real, examine the pulse.”
2. The influence on respiration is more irregular and more unstable;
the rhythm becomes abnormal, sometimes rapid, sometimes slow; the
inspirations are successively short and deep. But the final result
is a notable diminution in the carbonic acid exhaled—that is to say
a real slackening of combustion. The temperature is lowered. “I had
imagined,” says Mantegazza, “that pain would be accompanied by an
increase of heat, muscular action being very intense under the
influence of great suffering. Experiment on animals and on myself
proved the contrary.”[17] Heidenhain and Mantegazza have in fact
noted an average diminution of two degrees centigrade, which,
according to the latter, may last an hour and a half or more; it
would be due to the contraction of the peripheral blood-vessels.
-----
Footnote 17:
Mantegazza, _Fisiologia del Dolore_, chap. iii.
-----
3. The action of pain on digestion is well known, and shows itself
by retardation or disturbance: loss of appetite, arrest of
secretions, indigestion, vomiting, diarrhœa, etc. If permanent it
acts on the general nutrition, and shows itself in modifications of
the urinary secretion, and lasting discoloration of the skin or
hair. It is not infrequent to find blanching of the hair, the beard
or eyebrows in a few days under the influence of great pain.[18]
-----
Footnote 18:
For historical and other cases, see Hack Tuke, _Influence of the
Mind upon the Body_, chap. iii.
-----
4. The motor functions translate pain in two opposite ways: the
passive form of depression, arrest, or total suppression of
movements, in which the patient seems overcome; the active form,
marked by agitation, contortions, convulsions, and cries. The latter
case seems to contradict the general formula connecting pain with
diminished activity, and seems to me to have been misinterpreted by
some authors. This violent excitement, indeed, is an expenditure
which quickly makes itself felt and soon leaves the individual
enfeebled. It does not flow, as in joy or play, from a surplus of
activity; it is weakening, irregular and spasmodic. It seems to me
to originate in the instinctive expression of the emotions. The
wounded animal shakes the painful part of his body, his paw or his
head, as if trying to expel the suffering. All these disorderly and
violent motor reactions are a defence of the organism, a useless and
often hurtful defence, but resulting from acts which, formerly or
under other circumstances, were adapted to their end.
Lehmann experimented on five persons, submitting them in turn to
agreeable and disagreeable impressions, in both cases registering
the changes in respiration and in the volume of the arm with the
help of Mosso’s plethysmograph.[19] His experiments led him to the
following conclusions:—
-----
Footnote 19:
For details of the experiments see _Hauptgesetze_, etc., pp. 77
_et seq._, with the accompanying graphic traces.
-----
Every agreeable impression produces an increase in the volume of the
arm and in the height of the pulse, with increased depth of the
respiratory cavity.
A disagreeable impression, when weak, immediately produces a
diminution in the volume of the arm and the height of the pulse; but
almost at once the volume begins to increase, notwithstanding the
diminished pulse, and usually passes beyond its normal state, even
when the pulse has returned to its first condition. If the
impression is strong but not painful these changes are accentuated,
and from the first are accompanied by deep inspirations. Finally, if
the impression is painful, not only considerable changes of volume,
but powerful respiratory movements and disturbance of the voluntary
muscles are produced.
Disagreeable stimulation produces at first a spasm of the
superficial vessels, relaxation of the deep vessels, and decreased
fulness of the heart’s contractions. The first two factors together
produce a sudden and strong diminution in the volume of the limbs.
The last two factors together produce a diminished height of pulse,
and in consequence of the enfeebled cardiac contractions there is a
stasis of the venous blood showing itself in the increased volume of
the limb.
These bodily modifications, of which I have summarised the chief
features, are commonly regarded as the effects of pain, and this
opinion seems even to be accepted in many works on psychology. The
opinion cannot, however, be accepted. Pain considered as a psychic
event, an internal fact, a pure state of consciousness, is not a
cause but a symptom. The cause is the stimulation (of whatever
nature) which, coming from the exterior environment, acts on the
external senses, or coming from the interior environment, acts on
the organic life. It is shown in two ways: on the one hand in the
state of consciousness which we call pain, on the other by the
physical phenomena above enumerated. The consciousness expresses in
one way what the organism expresses in another way. This is not a
mere opinion, for experiment shows that circulatory, respiratory,
and motor modifications are produced when consciousness is probably
defective. Mantegazza has shown that if an intact animal is
subjected to pricks, cuts, and burns, cardiac troubles follow; but
that the same phenomena are produced after the removal of the
encephalon. François-Franck, investigating the effects of painful
stimulation on the heart, found that the anæsthesia of chloroform
suppresses troubles of the heart, while, on the contrary, removal of
the cerebral hemispheres fails to abolish them. Formerly, Longet and
Vulpian maintained that in animals reduced to the medulla and lower
parts of the cerebro-spinal axis the cries and movements that occur
when they are pinched are purely reflex; this interpretation has
been contested by Brown-Séquard. In human anencephalic (or headless)
monsters, cries, movements of suction and the like have been
observed during the few days they are able to live. We must then
admit either that the state of consciousness we call pain can be
produced in the absence of the brain, or else that the physical
phenomena can exist alone without their psychic concomitant.
Pain (as a state of consciousness) is only a sign, an index, an
internal event revealing to the individual his own disorganisation.
The only case in which pain is a cause is when, being firmly fixed
in consciousness and completely filling it, it becomes an agent of
destruction, but then it is only a secondary cause. That is one of
those cases, so frequent in the sciences of life, in which what is
primarily an effect becomes in turn a cause. It is therefore an
error, though common to most psychologists, to consider pain and
pleasure as fundamental elements of the affective life; they are
only marks, the foundation is elsewhere. What would be said of a
doctor who confused the symptoms of a disease with its essential
nature?
We touch here a point so important that it needs emphasis. The
thesis that pain is only a symptom, and altogether, in spite of the
sovereign part it plays in human life, a superficial phenomenon in
relation to the tendencies which lie at the basis of the affective
life, finds support in the facts of _analgesia_, the disappearance
of capacity to feel pain. This insensibility presents itself under
two forms: spontaneous and artificial.
Spontaneous analgesia is the rule in hysteria; it may vary in
degree, position, and extent. The demonologists of the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance knew these migrations of insensibility to
various parts of the body, and they sought with care for the
_stigmata diaboli_, that is, the regions insensible to pain. Some
authors assign to it a purely psychic cause: painful impressions
cannot be felt because they are outside the field of consciousness,
which in these patients is in an almost permanently disassociated,
scattered, and destroyed state.[20] It is, on the contrary, certain
that an intense fixed idea, profound concentration of attention,
fanatical exaltation, can produce temporary or permanent analgesia.
Many soldiers, in the heat of battle, have not felt their wounds.
Pascal, plunged in his problems, escaped his neuralgias. The
Aïssaouas, the fakirs, certain Lamas of Thibet tear and cut
themselves, secured against pain by delirium, and one may well
believe that many martyrs, in the midst of their torture, have only
experienced a sense of rapture. In certain forms of insanity
(maniacal excitement, melancholia, idiocy, etc.) this spontaneous
analgesia is frequent, and takes on extraordinary forms. Numerous
examples may be found in special treatises.[21] One crushes glass in
his mouth for half-an-hour without feeling any pain. Another breaks
his leg in a struggle, and a fragment of the tibia projects through
the torn skin, yet he continues to pursue the object of his rage,
and then sits down to eat without the least sign of pain on his
face. There are many who, intentionally or by accident, plunge their
arms into boiling water or place them on a red-hot stove, until the
skin falls off in shreds, without appearing to be disturbed. An
endless series of such facts might be narrated.[22]
-----
Footnote 20:
Pierre Janet, _État Mental des Hystériques_.
Footnote 21:
See especially Morel, _Traité des Maladies Mentales_ (pp. 324 _et
seq._), for a summary of many curious facts.
Footnote 22:
Weir Mitchell (_Medical Record_, 24th December 1892, quoted by
Strong, _Psychological Review_, 1895, vol. ii. p. 332) reports the
following extraordinary case of natural analgesia: Man who died at
age of fifty-six, cheerful and corpulent, weighing some 250
pounds; intelligent, and vigorous both in body and mind, with a
considerable reputation as a lawyer and politician. Having a
finger wounded in a crush during a political campaign, he removed
it himself by biting it off and spitting it on to the ground. He
had an ulcer on the toe which resisted treatment for three years
without ever causing him the slightest pain. He also had an
abscess in the hand which spread to the fore-arm and arm, causing
enormous swelling and endangering his life; the lancet was used
without precaution, and throughout he felt no pain. It was the
same with an operation for cataract on both eyes; he remained
motionless as a statue. It was only during his last illness that
he complained of some pain, but that quickly passed away, and he
had returned to his state of natural insensibility before he died.
-----
The artificial analgesias, produced by chloroform and the various
anæsthetics employed in surgical operations, are more instructive.
It has been asked if the movements, objurgations, and cries of some
patients do not prove that the analgesia is not complete, even when
it seems so. Richet has expressed the opinion that it is not
consciousness but recollection which is defective; he regards the
pain as so rapid that it is only a mathematical movement and leaves
no echo behind it, there being a series of evanescent states of
consciousness. It is quite possible to maintain this hypothesis; but
the most important fact recorded by this author seems to me to be
that, when pain has disappeared, a certain degree of knowledge of it
remains. In other words, there is a process of scission: the feeling
man has disappeared, the _intellectual_ man remains. In many simple
operations the contact of the instrument is often felt, but not the
pain. But there are more complex cases. "In an operation for fissure
of the anus with fistula, the patient felt the contact of the
scissors and easily distinguished four incisions; she could not
speak, but felt no suffering. In the course of a similar operation I
asked the patient, ‘How old are you?’ She replied that she was
forty-one, but when restored to consciousness she could recall no
sensation of wound or burn and complained that the operation had not
taken place. I asked another during the operation, ‘How are you
getting on?’ the reply was, ‘Not badly.’ At the same moment I
pricked her vigorously; she felt nothing. Again, in another case
when I introduced a forceps into the mouth to hold the tongue the
patient said, ‘Take away that cigarette.’ On awaking he could
remember nothing. Another when a quill was passed beneath his nose
said, ‘Do not tickle me’ at the moment when the large arteries were
being tied, the most painful part of the operation. Finally, a man
under chloroform, while his spermatic cord was being tied, heard the
clock strike and tranquilly remarked, ‘Half-past eleven,’ recalling
nothing when he awoke."[23]
-----
Footnote 23:
Richet, _Recherches expérimentales et cliniques sur la
Sensibilité_, pp. 258, 259.
-----
I have quoted these facts to show the extent to which pain, as a
state of consciousness, is _separable_, how it can be added or cast
off, and to what extent it presents the character of an
epiphenomenon.
This relative independence of the pain-phenomenon, against which the
intellectualists have always rebelled,[24] seems to me corroborated
by the retardation which I have already noted in passing. If we
strike a corn while walking, we feel the shock before the pain; the
cold of the knife is felt before the pain of the incision. Beau
estimates that pain is delayed seven-tenths of a second behind the
tactile impression. Burckhardt, by precise investigation, fixes the
rapidity of transmission in the cord at 12 m. 9 per second for
painful impressions, and 43 m. 3 for the others. In certain diseases
like tabes dorsalis the pain may be separated from the needle-prick
which causes it by from one to two seconds. Many other facts may be
quoted. If a fold of the skin is seized in a pressure forceps,
stopping at the moment when the pressure is sufficient, pain, not
felt at first, gradually appears, coming in waves, and being at last
unbearable. A man whose thumb was seized in a machine only knew of
his injury by feeling his arm drawn, and only began to suffer a
quarter of an hour afterwards. It has also been remarked that the
syncope produced by violent shocks and traumatism does not appear at
once; between the accident and the fainting several minutes may
elapse.[25]
-----
Footnote 24:
See on this point Lehmann’s embarrassed explanation,
_Hauptgesetze_, etc., pp. 51 _et seq._
Footnote 25:
Richet (_op. cit._, pp. 289, 290 and 315, 316) gives many
illustrations.
-----
Pain is the result of a sum of impulses. Naunyn has shown that, in
tabes, a mechanical stimulus (like a hair on the cutaneous surface
of the foot), which is below the threshold of consciousness both as
contact and as pain, if repeated from 60 to 600 times a second, is
perceived at the end of from six to twenty seconds, and soon becomes
an intolerable pain to the patient.
Although excessive sensibility to pain (hyperalgesia) belongs to the
pathology of our subject, which will be dealt with in a later
chapter, it is necessary to say a few words about it in contrasting
it with analgesia, especially in view of the conclusions here
reached. This condition is more difficult to observe than
insensibility, because here there is only a difference of degree,
not the difference between being and not being. But in some cases
there is so great a disproportion between the stimulus and the
subject’s reaction that we may say without hesitation that
sensibility is no longer normal.
It has been observed, in a general manner, that the lower races are
not very sensitive to pain. Thus Negroes in Egypt endure, almost
without suffering, the most extensive surgical operations (Pruner
Bey), and Mantegazza (_op. cit._, chap. xxvi.) reports a large
number of examples. In the peasant sensibility is usually less keen
than in the town-dweller, and it may be admitted without hesitation
that susceptibility to pain increases with civilisation; what is
called stoicism should often be called a feeble degree of
sensibility. Hyperalgesia is best seen in cases of extreme nervous
over-excitement. In some it is generalised, constituting the
“supplicium neuricum,” and the patient says that he is the prey of
unspeakable torments. It is less frequent in the case of the special
nerves, but is sometimes met. One suffers from the slightest noise,
and cannot tolerate the least smell. Pitres quotes the case of a
person who shut herself up in a dark room, only coming out at night
with a thick shade against the rays of the stars. Those who entered
her dark room during the day had to wear sombre clothes, completely
concealing the shirt-collar, of which the white reflection was
horribly disagreeable to her.[26] Cutaneous hyperalgesia is very
common, sometimes extending over the whole body, sometimes
disseminated in patches. Weir Mitchell, in his book on injuries of
the nerves, reports numerous examples; among others, a wounded
soldier to whom the mere crumpling of paper caused atrocious pain.
Opium-smokers, when they interrupt their habits, feel the least
breath of air as icy cold, and complain of intolerable pains in all
parts of the body. Hyperalgesia of the deep tissues is also frequent
among the hysterical and hypochondriacal.
-----
Footnote 26:
Pitres, _Leçons Cliniques sur l’Hystérie_, i. p. 182.
-----
It must be remarked in passing that just as insensibility to pain
(analgesia) is independent of incapacity to receive sensorial
impressions (anæsthesia), so hyperalgesia is distinct from
hyperæsthesia. The latter is a power of perception much surpassing
the average; it is known that certain races and individuals possess
extraordinary visual, auditory, or olfactive acuteness; the tactile
hyperæsthesia of the blind is also known, and in hypnotised subjects
the delicacy of the senses has sometimes seemed miraculous.
Hyperalgesia then, like analgesia, shows that pain is relatively
independent of the sensations which arouse it.
III.
We may conclude, from what goes before, that though physical pain
(of which alone I am speaking at present) is always bound to an
internal or external sensation, and forms part of a psychic
complexus, it may be separated and disjoined. It has then its own
conditions of existence, and we may, in advance, say as much for
pleasure.
What are these conditions of existence? or, more simply, what is
pain in its nature? At the present time there are two distinct
doctrines on this point: one, which counts few adherents, regards
physical pain as properly a _sensation_; the other, more generally
admitted, regards it as a _quality_ of sensation, or more correctly,
as an accompaniment, a concomitant.[27]
-----
Footnote 27:
The debates on this subject have chiefly been carried on by
American psychologists. See Rutgers Marshall, _Pain, Pleasure, and
Æsthetics_ (1895); Nichols, “Origin of Pleasure and of Pain”
(_Philosophical Review_, i. pp. 403 and 518); Strong, “Psychology
of Pain” (_Psychological Review_, July 1895, and for criticisms
and replies, Sept. and Nov. 1895, Jan. 1896); Luckey, “Some Recent
Studies of Pain” (_Am. Journal of Psychology_, Oct. 1895).
-----
The first, though recent in its complete form, is not without
antecedents. It found a momentary support in the supposed
discovery of pain-bearing nerves. Nichols, one of the promoters of
this hypothesis, has developed it in this direction; but the
attempt has proved futile. Strong, one of its warmest partisans,
supported himself on other grounds. In his opinion the difficulty
arises from the ambiguity of the word pain, which may mean two
things—displeasure (_Unlust_), or physical pain in the positive
sense. He reduces the latter to cuts, pricks, burns—in short, to
those pains that affect the skin. It is, in his opinion, strictly
a sensation like blue or red—not an attribute, but a substantive.
The pain of a burn, for instance, is a mixture of two sensations,
heat and pain. General sensibility is composed of four kinds of
sensibility: touch, heat, cold, and pain. Each can be abolished
separately. Cocaine and chloroform suppress pain, not touch;
saponine suppresses touch, not pain; syringomyelia destroys
sensibility to pain and heat, not touch; in some forms of neuritis
there is suppression of touch without analgesia. These various
facts are invoked as the chief arguments in favour of the
hypothesis of pain-sensation, though they may all be explained
also by the other doctrine.
This hypothesis is full of difficulties. First, there is the absence
of anatomical basis, of special organs and nerves. It will be
necessary to return to this important point when dealing with
pleasure (Chap. iii.). Nichols tells us that there is nothing to
prove that nerves of pain do not exist, though they have not been
experimentally established—which is indeed something; that
histological research could not determine in the peripheral
apparatus what belongs to touch and what belongs to pain; and that
proof must be deduced from cases of tactile sensation without pain
and _vice versâ_—which fails to constitute any degree of proof.
Moreover, the distinction set up between displeasure (moral pain?)
and physical pain is arbitrary, factitious, wholly unjustified.
There is, however, a still less admissible distinction. Strong
expressly declares that he limits himself to pains localised on the
cutaneous surface. Now by what right can we cut off the group of
physical—strictly physical—pains, the states of torture originating
in the internal organs, the multiple neuralgias as intolerable as
any external pain, without speaking of discomfort, prostration,
exhaustion? Are these also sensations, or something else? We are not
told. Finally—and Strong himself has stated the objection—it must be
acknowledged that we should here have a strange kind of sensations
which do not externalise themselves. While other impressions,
visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, olfactive, are referred to
causes which provoke them, the pains of a prick, a cut, a burn
remain strictly subjective and are not located in the needle, the
knife, the burning coal, as we locate a sound in the bell, a bitter
taste in absinth. The only possible reply (which the partisans of
pain-sensation have not made) would be that this phenomenon has a
character of its own; it always remains a sensation, and never
becomes a perception, whence the absence of externalisation. But
then why assimilate it to blue or red? Moreover, pain-sensation, as
it exists in the adult, approaches so closely to the affective
state, that what is essential in the doctrine of pain-sensation
vanishes. Whatever may be thought of the probability of some future
discovery of terminal organs for physical pain, as Rutgers Marshall
remarks, it must be agreed that there is no proof of the existence
in the environment of a special stimulus to which physical pain
specially corresponds, and for that reason also it would be a great
mistake to place in the well-determined class “sensation,” a mental
state which lacks one of the most marked characteristics of
sensation in general. That conclusion is mine also.
The opposite doctrine, which has of late been called the
_quale_-theory, is often maintained in an unsatisfactory form,
because in fact it reduces itself to an affirmation of _quantity_.
The pain which accompanies sensation may depend either on its
intensity or on its quality alone.
It is needless to insist on the first case, since many old authors
never cease repeating that the painful impression is the result of a
stimulation which is strong, intense, violent, prolonged.
On the contrary, it is necessary to remark that this exclusive
affirmation cannot be applied everywhere and always. This evidently
appears in the cases of hyperalgesia, which is the reason why I
brought them forward. The very disagreeable sensation which is
caused by a knife against the skin certainly comes from the nature
rather than the intensity of the stimulus. Beaunis remarks that
certain odours, tastes, and contacts are painful at once, and do not
need to be intense. Did the contact of the quill which threw Weir
Mitchell’s patient into a state of anguish act by its intensity? No
doubt we must recognise that hyperalgesias constitute a group apart,
not strictly comparable with ordinary cases; they are pathological
forms, variable in degree; but the pathological is merely an
exaggeration of the normal. The error of those who refer pain solely
to intensity of stimulation is in considering _objective_ conditions
only; they forget the part played by the sentient subjects. Pains
which depend on the quality of the stimulus are especially of
_subjective_ origin, because the degree of excitability in the
patient’s nervous elements is the essential ruling factor.
If we admit that these two conditions—intensity and quality—act one
upon the other, what afterwards happens? What is the intimate nature
of the pain-producing process? The hypothesis which is most natural
and simple, and in agreement with the mechanical conceptions
predominant in the biological sciences, would be founded on the
admission that pain corresponds to a particular form of movement. On
this supposition, the affective nervous road, from the periphery to
the centres, would be traversed by three different kinds of movement
or of molecular disturbance: the first giving birth to pure
sensation, that is to say a state of knowledge, an intellectual
state; the second, which may or may not be present, giving birth to
pain; the third, also either present or absent, giving birth to
pleasure.
There is another possible hypothesis, quite different from the
others, which I should be willing to accept, but which cannot be
presented as more than a theory. It would consist in attributing the
genesis of pain to _chemical modifications_ in the tissues and
nerves, especially the production of local or general toxins in the
organism. Pain would thus be one of the forms of auto-intoxication.
Oppenheimer alone seems to me to have worked in this direction.[28]
In his opinion, as regards the origin of pain, “the real cause, in
any sensorial or other organ, resides in a change in the tissues,
especially a chemical change, by which either the products of
destruction rise above the normal average, or else modifications
result from the presence of a foreign body in the organism.” The
connection between the peripheral tissues and the centres would be
by the vaso-motor nerves (constrictor or dilator). The tissues would
be the terminal organs of pain, the vaso-motors the paths of
conduction. In organs which only undergo slight changes when active
(tendons, ligaments, bones, etc.) conscious sensibility is almost
absent. “Pain is not, as many believe, the highest degree of
sensation produced in the organs of special sense; it is the most
intense sensation produced in the vaso-motor nerves under the
influence of violent stimulation.”
-----
Footnote 28:
_Schmerz. und Temperaturempfindung_, Berlin, 1893.
-----
This hypothesis will perhaps be justified by the future. I shall
return to it when studying the emotions. We shall then see that
these are accompanied by deep and well-established chemical
modifications in the organism.
Physical pain is a large subject, which, as may be seen, has not
been neglected of late, and concerning which there is still much to
say. It is not possible, however, to deal further with it here,
since it only occupies a limited area in the psychology of the
emotions.
CHAPTER II.
MORAL PAIN.
_Identity of all the forms of pain—Evolution of moral pain: (1) the
pure result of memory; (2) connected with representations;
positive form, negative form; (3) connected with concepts—Its
external study; physical signs—Therapeutics—Conclusions—A
typical case of hypochondriasis._
In passing from physical pain to moral pain we by no means change
our subject, or enter another world. Languages with their special
terms—“tristesse,” “chagrin,” “sorrow,” “Kummer,” etc.—create an
illusion by which psychologists for the most part seem to have been
duped—the illusion that between these two forms of pain there is a
difference of nature. In any case they do not explain themselves
clearly on the point, and seem to share the common opinion.[29] It
is the object of this chapter to establish that, on the contrary,
there is a fundamental _identity_ between physical and moral pain,
and that they only differ from each other in the point of departure,
the first being connected with a sensation, the second with some
form of representation, an image or an idea.
-----
Footnote 29:
Hartmann alone, so far as I am aware, has dealt with this point,
incidentally but very clearly: “When I have pain in my teeth or my
finger or my stomach; when I lose my wife, my friend, or my
situation, if in all these cases we distinguish what is pain and
pain alone, and not to be confounded with perception, idea, or
thought, we shall recognise that this special element is identical
in all the cases.”—_Philosophie des Unbewussten_, vol. i., Part
II., chap. iii.
-----
I.
At first sight it seems paradoxical, and to many even revolting, to
maintain that the pain caused by a corn or a boil, that expressed by
Michelangelo in his sonnets concerning his inability to reach his
ideal, or that felt by a delicate conscience at the sight of crime,
are identical in their nature. I purposely bring together these
extreme cases. Yet there is no call for indignation if we remember
that we are concerned with the pain alone, not with the events which
provoke it, these latter being extra-affective phenomena. The best
method of justifying our thesis, however, is to follow the evolution
of moral pain in its ascending march from its lowest to its highest
point. It will suffice to note the chief stages.
_First Period._—Moral pain is at first connected with an extremely
simple representation, a concrete image—that is to say, the
immediate copy of a perception. It may be defined as the ideal
reproduction of physical pain. It only presupposes a single
condition, memory. The child who has had to swallow an unpleasant
remedy, or who has had a tooth extracted, experiences when the next
occasion approaches a pain which may be called physical, since it is
connected with a simple image, of which it is the weakened copy and
echo. It may be said in the language of mathematicians, that in this
case the moral pain is to the physical pain as the image is to the
perception. This form is so simple as to be found in many animals
not reckoned among the highest. It is not yet moral pain—grief or
sorrow—in the complete and rigorous sense, but it must be noted,
because it corresponds to what naturalists call a transitional form.
_Second Period._—It is connected with complex representations and
forms a very large class, the manifestations of which are the only
ones met with in average human beings. At this stage moral pain
presupposes reflection, or, more explicitly, first the faculty of
reasoning (deductive or inductive), and secondly constructive
imagination. It would be possible to quote a crowd of examples,
taken at random: the news of a death, of an illness, of ruin, of
frustrated ambition, etc. The point of departure is a dry and simple
fact, but the pain attaches itself to all the _perceived_ results
which flow from it. Thus ruin means a series of privations,
wretchednesses, labours begun over again, fatigues, and exhaustions.
It is in this detailed translation, varying according to individuals
and cases, that moral pain lies. It is clear, and is proved by
observation, that the man endowed with an ardent and constructive
imagination will feel intense pain when another, with a poor and
cold imagination, remains indifferent, seeing nothing in his
misfortune but the present actual fact—that is to say, a very little
thing; the sum of pains evoked is proportional to the sum of
representations evoked. The child remains insensible at the news of
death or ruin; if he is moved it is through imitation; there is
nothing in his experience enabling him to deduce what these fatal
words contain, and to represent the future.
Moral pain presents itself under various forms—positive, negative,
or mixed.
In the positive form it is an expenditure of movement, the
representation of an exhaustive labour, of an incessant effort to
begin again what is already felt in consciousness by anticipation.
Such is the case of the candidate who fails at an examination to
which he must go up again.
In the negative form it is an arrest of movement, a lessening, the
consciousness of a deficit, a privation, cravings ceaselessly
arising and ceaselessly disappointed. The death of a beloved person
is the most perfect example.
In the mixed form we may see it in the ruined millionaire, the
dethroned king, who set to work again to reconstruct the past. On
the one hand the representation of the long labour of a new
conquest; on the other, tendencies of all sorts which were formerly
satisfied, and are now inexorably brought to a stop.
A complete study of the second group of moral pains would include
two moments: the egoistic form, the first in date, and the
sympathetic or altruistic form. The latter seems to appear early,
since Darwin noted it at the age of six months and eleven days in
one of his children, who was much affected when his nurse pretended
to be unhappy and cry. Preyer even alleges, as we have seen, that
grief appears at the age of four months. This sympathetic form of
pain is found in certain animals, especially those living in
society. In certain monogamous couples the death of one of the
partners may cause the other to perish. I will not pause here at
present to describe these two great forms of the affective life
which will occupy us so often in the course of this study.
_Third Period._—Grief in this case is connected with pure concepts
or with ideal representations. This is intellectual pain, which is
much rarer, and produces little effect, at all events for any length
of time, on the ordinary man. Such is the pain of the religious
person who feels he is not sufficiently devout, of the metaphysician
tormented by doubt, of the poet and the artist, conscious of an
abortive creation, of the man of science who unsuccessfully pursues
the solution of a problem.
These forms of pain are chiefly negative and secondarily positive.
They consist, first, in unsatisfied needs, privations, lacunæ in
existence; afterwards in effort, expenditure of force, fatigue,
achieving nothing.
II.
Having shown that the pain-phenomenon, in the course of evolution,
attaches itself to representations more and more elevated and
finally to superior conceptions, we will examine moral pain
objectively, _from without_, to show afresh its identity with
physical pain, or, more exactly, to prove that pain is invariable in
its nature, under whatever form it manifests itself.
1. Grief is accompanied by the same modifications in the organism as
physical pain. It is needless to repeat the description: circulatory
disturbance, constriction of the vaso-motors, syncope; decrease of
respiration or constant changes in its rhythm, sudden or prolonged
reverberation on nutrition, loss of appetite, indigestion, arrest or
diminution of secretions, vomiting. I may remark that rapid change
of colour in the hair, already noted, is specially met with in
violent moral shocks (Marie-Antoinette, Ludovico Sforza, etc.). The
voluntary muscles of the larynx, the face, the whole body, undergo
the same influences and express them in the same ways. For moral as
for physical pain, there are silent forms and agitated forms.
2. If we admit the old maxim: “Naturam morborum medicationes
ostendunt,” as we see every day the same general therapeutics
applied to both forms of pain, we have here evidence in favour of
their identity: no doubt there are curative methods proper to each;
for moral pain, consolations, distractions, travel; but are not
opium, sedatives, and tonics employed to relieve both?
3. I brought together at the beginning of this chapter the grossest
forms of physical pain and the most refined forms of moral pain; but
there are composite forms in which sensations and representations
seem to form an equilibrium, so that such painful states might be
entered under either head. This is the case with certain
melancholics of whom I shall have to speak later, but we may take as
a type the hypochondriacal person in whom we find the point of
junction of the two pains. The physical troubles of hypochondriasis
have often been described. There are localised pains, but in
addition a large number of simply represented pains, enlarged as by
a lens, and referred to the lungs, the heart, the liver, the spleen,
the kidneys, the stomach, the intestines. The joints are cracking;
there are conjectures concerning the appearance of the face, the
tongue, the urine, and above all what perpetual anxiety! One of them
said: “I feel better to-day, and that makes me anxious; it is not
natural.” Is this physical pain or moral pain? Sometimes one,
sometimes the other predominates, according to the individual and
the moment. Clouston has observed that in melancholics sadness often
diminishes when physical pain increases. They are so intimately
intertwined that no point of departure can be established between
them. This morbid state is worthy of mention because it also is a
transitional form. We need have no hesitation in generalising, and
saying that there is no physical (that is to say, localised) pain,
however slight, unaccompanied by some fugitive mental irritation,
and no mental irritation unaccompanied by some slight physical
troubles.
The foregoing does not imply that grief is a very refined physical
pain, or that it arises therefrom, as—according to the well-known
formula: _Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu_—it
is supposed that the superior forms of knowledge arise from
sensation alone. That would be a misconstruction. Physical pain is
not a genus of which moral pain is a species. The thesis which I
maintain is that pain is always identical with itself, that it has
its own conditions of existence, that the innumerable modes which it
presents to us in the physical order and in the moral order are
related to the sensorial or intellectual elements which excite and
envelop it.[30]
-----
Footnote 30:
Hahnemann distinguished 73 kinds of physical pain, Georget 38,
Renaudin 12, etc. I give these numbers as curiosities. More
recently Goldscheider (_Ueber den Schmerz_) establishes three
stages in physical pain: (1) true, real (_echte_) pains; they
depend on the nerves of special sensibility, and are caused by
mechanical, thermal, or chemical stimulations, by inflammation and
poisons; (2) indirect pains, pseudo-pains, which consist
especially in a state of discomfort (_Schmerzweh_); in the case of
the head, stomach, etc., they may be as oppressive and cause as
much torture as “real” pains; (3) psychic or ideal (_ideel_)
pains, which are a hyperæsthesia of the sensitive activity; they
are met with in neuroses (neurasthenia, hysteria, hypochondria),
in hallucinations, the hypnotic state, etc. This classification is
perhaps acceptable in physiology. For psychology, every pain, in
virtue of being a fact of consciousness, is “true” and “real.”
-----
The question still remains why certain representations have the
unfortunate privilege of arousing pain. This is a question which I
can only touch on, because it belongs to another part of the
subject. For the moment I simply reply that it is because they are
the beginning of mental disorganisation, just as physical pain is
the beginning of physical disorganisation. The sentient being, man
or animal, is a bundle of needs, of appetites, of physical or
psychic tendencies; everything that suppresses or impedes them is
translated into pain. Physical suffering is the blind and
unconscious reaction of the organism to every hurtful action. Grief
is the conscious reaction to every decrease of psychic life. The man
shut in by narrow and commonplace surroundings would certainly feel
no æsthetic pain, because having no need of æsthetic satisfaction he
could not be impoverished or impeded by its absence.
In short, pain under all its forms reveals an identical nature. The
distinction between physical pain and moral pain is practical, not
scientific.
CHAPTER III.
PLEASURE.
_Subject little studied—Is Pleasure a sensation or a quality?—Its
physical concomitants: circulation, respiration,
movements—Pleasure, like pain, is separable: physical and moral
anhedonia—Identity of the different forms of pleasure—The
alleged transformation of pleasure into pain—Common ground of
the two states—Hypothesis of a difference in kind and in
degree—Simultaneity of two opposite processes: what falls under
consciousness is the result of a difference—Physiological facts
in support of the above._
In treating of grief, one is apt to be embarrassed by the abundance
of documents, and the difficulty of being brief; in dealing with
pleasure the contrary is the case. Are we to conclude that this is
because, for centuries past, physicians have been collecting
observations on pain, while there exists no profession having for
its object the observation of pleasure? Or is it because humanity is
so constituted as to suffer more from pain than it can enjoy from
pleasure, and therefore studies everything relating to pain in order
to find deliverance therefrom, while accepting everything agreeable
naturally and without reflection? We cannot, however, accuse
psychologists of having neglected this study, although the
bibliography of Pleasure is very scanty compared with that of Pain.
In general, they have considered these two subjects as complementary
to one another, pleasure and pain being opposed to each other as
contraries, so that the knowledge of the one implies the knowledge
of the other. But this is only a hypothesis—perhaps true, perhaps
false—resting in great part only on the testimony of consciousness,
which is always open to question and never above suspicion. “It may
be,” says Beaunis, very justly, “that pleasure and pain, which seem
to us two opposite and mutually contradictory phenomena, may in the
end be nothing but phenomena of the same nature, only differing in
degree. It is possible that they may be phenomena of different
orders, but incapable of such comparison with one another as would
enable us to declare one contrary to the other. It is possible that
they may depend simply on a difference of excitability in the
nervous centres. Again, it is possible that they may be included,
sometimes in one category, sometimes in the other.”[31]
-----
Footnote 31:
Beaunis, _Sensations internes_, chap. xxiii.
-----
I.
The formulas universally made use of in characterising pleasure
indicate this vague position of the problem: “Agreeable states are
the correlatives of actions which conduce to the well-being or
preservation of the individual.” “Generally speaking, pleasures are
the concomitants of medium activities, where the activities are of
kinds liable to be in excess or in defect” (Herbert Spencer).
“Experience attests that, in all the sensory regions, sensations of
moderate energy are specially accompanied by a feeling of pleasure.
Thus this feeling connects itself with the sensations of tickling
due to cutaneous excitations of slight energy” (Wundt). According to
this writer, the gamut of pleasure is less rich and extensive than
that of pain, and he finds the proof of this assertion in the
language expressive of universal experience. “Language,” he says,
“has created numerous expressions for disagreeable feelings,
emotions, and inclinations, while the joyful moods of the mind are
dismissed with a brief general designation. This phenomenon arises
less from the fact that man observes with especial care and
minuteness his disagreeable or troublesome states, than from the
greater uniformity which pleasurable feelings in reality possess.
This is particularly evident in the case of the sensory feelings
[those connected with the sensations]. Pain has not only numerous
degrees of energy, but numberless gradations according to its seat.”
Mantegazza, when determining the synonyms of pleasure, appears to
uphold the contrary view.[32] For my own part, I am of Wundt’s
opinion.
-----
Footnote 32:
_Fisiologia del piacere_, Part II., chap. ii. He enumerates the
following expressions:—_Gusto_, _diletto_, _compiacenza_,
_soddisfazione_, _conforto_, _contentezza_, _allegria_, _buon
umore_, _gioia_, _giubilo_, _tripudio_, _delizia_, _voluttà_,
_felicità_, _solletico_, _rapimento_, _trasporto_, _ebbrezza_,
_delirio_. Perhaps the Italian language is in this point richer
than the German.
-----
The anatomical and physiological conditions of the genesis and
transmission of pleasure are a _terra incognita_. In cases of
physical pleasure, what takes place at the peripheral terminations,
in the nerves, in the cerebro-spinal axis? Most authors do not even
propound these questions. The physiology of pain, in spite of its
uncertainties, is rich and instructive compared with that of
pleasure.
In recent times it has been maintained that pleasure, as well as
grief, ought to be regarded as a _sensation_, not as the concomitant
of various psychic states; that both are fundamental senses having
their own proper nervous energies distinct from other sensations. In
other words, the expression, “sensations of pleasure and pain,”
ought to be taken in the strict sense borne by the word sensation. I
have already touched on this point in treating of pain, but it may
not be out of place to return to it here; for, apart from its
hypothetical character, I cannot think this assertion a happy one.
In fact, if there is any psychological state clearly delimited and
differentiated from all others, it is sensation.
Sensation is determined and circumscribed by a special organ serving
for this purpose only, as in the case of sight, hearing, etc., or at
least by special nerves and special peripheral terminations, as in
the case of touch, and temperature. Internal sensations, in spite of
the nervous apparatus proper to them, have a vaguer character; hence
some psychologists call them indifferently sensations or feelings.
The kinæsthetic sensations, or those of movement, long included
under the designation of muscular sense (an improper term, gradually
falling out of use), have, though diffused through the organism,
nerves peculiar to themselves; those of the muscular tissue, the
articulations (the periosteum, the ligaments, the synovial
membranes, the tendons). But pleasure and pain have neither special
nerves nor special organs. We have seen the opinion admitted with
regard to the pain-bringing nerves; as for the nerves of pleasure, I
know no author who has hazarded such a hypothesis, however
tentatively. It is true that one of those who admit the existence of
nerves of pain (Frey) gets out of the difficulty very easily by
saying that pleasure, consisting only in the absence of pain,
requires no special nerves. May we not say, then, that it is a
complete falsification of the meaning of words to class among
sensations psychical phenomena answering to none of the required
anatomical or physiological conditions?[33]
-----
Footnote 33:
This thesis has been principally maintained in America by H.
Nichols (_Philosophical Review_, July 1892), and in France by
Bourdon (_Revue Philosophique_, September 1893). The former
applies it to pleasure and pain, considering them fundamental
sensations as distinct from one another as they are from other
sensations. This article contains some ingenious considerations on
the part played by the association of ideas. Bourdon applies it
only to pleasure, and considers pain irreducible. He regards
pleasure as a special sensation, not a common one or an attribute
of all sensations; it is “of the same nature as the special
sensation of tickling.” By adducing the pleasure of tickling (in
which he follows Descartes and others), Bourdon partially escapes
the criticism already advanced. It must be remarked, however, that
tickling is itself a sensation of which the organic conditions are
very vaguely determined. Besides the cutaneous impression, there
are certainly also diffused reflex actions which connect it quite
as much with internal sensibility as with the sense of touch.
-----
The manifestations taking place within the organism are better known
when we are in a condition of pleasure. Let us take as typical the
constant pleasures, putting aside those which, by their exuberance,
as we shall see later on, border on pathological forms. Whether the
point of departure is a physical excitation, a representation, or a
concept, two distinct events take place, as in the case of grief: on
the one hand an internal state of consciousness, which we describe
as agreeable; on the other a bodily external condition, of which the
following are the principal characteristics.
Taken as a whole, they may be opposed, almost point for point, to
the description already given of the physical manifestations of
grief, and betray a heightening of the vital functions. This
contrast is not without importance in favour of the common thesis
which regards pleasure and pain as a pair of opposites.
1. The circulation increases, especially in the brain, as shown by
various symptoms, in particular the increased lustre of the eyes.
The experiments of Lehmann, already quoted (Chapter I.), prove that
physical, as well as æsthetic pleasure, is accompanied by dilatation
of the vessels and an increase of the heart’s contractions.[34]
-----
Footnote 34:
Dr. G. Dumas has made experiments on the condition of the
circulation in states of joy and of sadness. He has attempted an
experimental verification of Lange’s theory by showing that a
definite condition of the circulation always accompanies various
agreeable and painful emotions, and that “joy and sadness may
thus be regarded as the mental reverberation of these
circulatory conditions and their organic consequences.” See
“Recherches expérimentales sur la Joie et la Tristesse,” _Revue
Philosophique_, June-August 1896.—ED.
-----
2. The same thing is to be observed with regard to the respiration,
which becomes more active; in consequence, the temperature of the
body rises, and the nutritive exchanges, becoming more rapid, result
in a rich alimentation of the organs and tissues. “In joy, all parts
of the body receive advantage, and are likely to last longer; the
cheerful and contented man is well nourished and remains young. It
is a truism that people in good health are contented” (Lange). Joy
also tends to make the secretions (lacteal, spermatic, etc.) more
abundant.
3. The innervation of the voluntary muscles expresses itself by
exuberance of movements, by joyful exclamations, laughter, and
singing. Certain cases of extreme and sudden joy have been known to
produce all the effects of alcoholic intoxication. Sir H. Davy
danced in his laboratory after making the discovery of potassium. At
the London International Congress of Psychology (1892), Münsterberg
communicated the following experiments under the title of “The
Psychological Foundation of the Feelings.” A line ten centimetres in
length is drawn with the right hand. When this movement has been
thoroughly practised, it should be repeated with closed eyes,
passing the hand first from right to left, with a movement of
centripetal flexion, then from left to right, with a movement of
centrifugal extension. In such a case mistakes will be made,
sometimes in the one direction, sometimes in the other. Let us
repeat the same experiments under the influence of certain affective
states (sadness, gaiety, anger, etc.), noting all errors and their
direction. Münsterberg has discovered them to be determined by a
very exact law. In vexation, the extensor movements (centrifugal)
are too short (average error, 10 mm.), and the flexor movements
(centripetal) too long, the average excess being 12 mm. In joy, on
the other hand, the centrifugal movements are in excess by (on an
average) 10 mm., and the centripetal movements too short by an
average of 20 mm. From this he concludes that, in pleasure, motion
tends to increase; in pain, to diminish.
The manifestations of joy may be summed up in a single
word—dynamogeny. Joy produces energy.