Page:Conservationofen00stew.djvu/235

 accession of pleasure or of pain, corresponding to a rise of temperature in the air of 10°, 20°, or 30°. And so with regard to every other agent operating upon the human sensibility: there is, in each set of circumstances, a sensational equivalent of alcohol, of odors, of music, of spectacle.

It is this definite relation between outward agents and the human feelings that renders it possible to discuss human interests from the objective side, the only accessible side. We cannot read the feelings of our fellows; we merely presume that like agents will affect them all in nearly the same way. It is thus that we measure men's fortunes and felicity by the numerical amount of certain agents, as money, and by the absence or low degree of certain other agents, the causes of pain and the depressors of vitality. And, although the estimate is somewhat rough, this is not owing to the indefiniteness of the sensational equivalent, but to the complications of the human system, and chiefly to the narrowness of the line that everywhere divides the wholesome from the unwholesome degrees of all stimulants.

Let us next represent the equivalence under vital or physiological action. The chief organ concerned is the brain; of which we know that it is a system of myriads of connecting threads, ramifying, uniting, and crossing at innumerable points; that these threads are actuated or made alive with a current influence called the nerve