Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/52

Rh 40 PSYCHOLOGY attempt, by means of phrases such as consciousness or the unity of consciousness, to dispense with the recognition of a conscious subject. Feeling. We might now proceed to inquire more closely into the character and relations of the three states, modes, or acts 1 of this subject, which are commonly held to be the invari- able constituents of psychical life and broadly distinguished as cognitions, feelings, and conations. But we should be at once confronted by a doctrine much in vogue at present, which, strictly taken, amounts almost to a denial of this tripartite classification of the facts of mind the doctrine, viz., that feeling alone is primordial, and invariably present wherever there is consciousness at all. Every living crea- ture, it is said, feels, though it may never do any more ; only the higher animals, and these only after a time, learn to discriminate and identify and to act with a purpose. This doctrine, as might be expected, derives its plausibility partly from the vagueness of psychological terminology, and partly from the intimate connexion that undoubtedly exists between feeling and cognition on the one hand and feeling and volition on the other. As to the meaning of the term, it is plain that further definition is requisite for a word that may mean (a) a touch, as feeling of roughness; (6) an organic sensation, as feeling of hunger ; (c) an emo- tion, as feeling of anger ; (d) feeling proper, as _ pleasure or pain. But, even taking feeling in the last, its strict sense, it has been maintained that all the more complex forms of consciousness are resolvable into, or at least have been developed from, feelings of pleasure and pain. The only proof of such position, since we cannot directly observe the beginnings of conscious life, must consist of considera- tions such as the following. So far as we can judge, we find feeling everywhere ; but, as we work downwards from higher to lower forms of life, the possible variety and the definiteness of sense -impressions both steadily diminish. Moreover, we can directly observe in our own organic sensa- tions, which seem to come nearest to the whole content of infantile and molluscous experience, an almost entire absence of any assignable quale. Finally, in our sense- experience generally, we find the element of feeling at a maximum in the lower senses and the intellectual element at a maximum in the higher. But the so-called intellectual senses are the most used, and use we know blunts feeling and favours intellection, as we see in chemists, who sort the most filthy mixtures by smell and taste without discomfort. If, then, feeling predominates more and more as we approach the beginning of consciousness, may we not say that it is the only sine qua non of consciousness 1 Considerations of this kind, however impressive when exhibited at length, are always liable to be overturned by some apparently un- important fact which may easily be overlooked. Two lines, e.g., may get nearer and nearer and yet will never meet, if the rate of approach is simply proportional to the distance. A triangle may be diminished indefinitely and yet we can- not "infer that it becomes eventually all angles, though the angles get no less and the sides do. Now, before we decide that pleasure or pain alone may constitute a complete state of mind, it may be well to inquire : What is the connexion between feelings of pleasure and pain and the two remain- ing possible constituents of consciousness, as we can observe them now? And this is an inquiry which will help us towards an answer to our main question, namely, that concerning the nature and connexions of what are commonly regarded as the three ultimate facts of mind. Kelation Broadly speaking, in any state of mind that we can of feeling directly observe, what we find is (1) that we are aware of tionand~ a certain change in our sensations, thoughts, or circum- conation. 1 It is useless at this point attempting to decide on the comparative appropriateness of these and similar terms, such as "faculties," "capacities," "functions," &c. stances, (2) that we are pleased or pained with the change, and (3) that we act accordingly. We never find that feeling directly alters i.e., without the intervention of the action to which it prompts either our sensations or situation, but that regularly these latter with remarkable promptness and certainty alter it. We have not first a change of feeling, and then a change in our sensations, perceptions, and ideas; but, these changing, change of feel- ing follows. In short, feeling appears frequently to be an effect, which therefore cannot exist without its cause, though in different circumstances the same cause may pro- duce a different amount or even a different state of feeling. Turning from what we may call the receptive phase of con- sciousness to the active or appetitive phase, we find in like manner that feeling is certainly not, in such cases as we can clearly observe, the whole of consciousness at any moment. True, in common speech we talk of liking pleasure and disliking pain ; but this is either tautology, equivalent to saying, we are pleased when we are pleased and pained when we are pained, or else it is an allowable abbrevia- tion, and means that we like pleasurable objects and dislike painful objects, as when we say, we like feeling warm and dislike feeling hungry. And feeling warm or feeling hungry, we must remember, is not pure feeling in the strict sense of the word. Such states admit, if not of description, yet at least of identification and distinction as truly as colours and sounds do. Within the limits of our observation, then, we find that feeling accompanies some more or less definite presentation which for the sake of it becomes the object of appetite or aversion ; in other words, feeling implies a relation to a pleasurable or pain- ful presentation, that, as cause of feeling and end of the action to which feeling prompts, is doubly distinguished from it. Thus the very facts that lead us to distinguish feeling from cognition and conation make against the hypothesis that consciousness can ever be all feeling. But, as already said, the plausibility of this hypothesis Feeling is in good part due to a laxity in the use of terms. Most and psychologists before Kant, and English psychologists even to the present day, speak of pleasure and pain as sensa- tions. But it is plain that pleasure and pain are not simple ideas, as Locke called them, in the sense in which touches and tastes are, that is to say, they are never like these localized or projected, nor elaborated in conjunction with other sensations and movements into percepts or intui- tions of the external. This confusion of feeling with sensa- tions is largely consequent on the use of one word pain for certain organic sensations and for the purely subjective state. But, to say nothing of the fact that such pains are always more or less definitely localized, which of itself is so far cognition, they are also distinguished as shooting, burning, gnawing, &c. &c., all which symptoms indicate a certain objective quality. Accordingly all the more recent psychologists have been driven by one means or another to recognize two "aspects " (Bain), or "properties" (Wundt), in what they call a sensation, the one a " sensible or intellectual" or "qualitative," the other an "affective" or "emotive," aspect or property. The term "aspect" is figurative and obviously inaccurate ; even to describe pleasure and pain as properties of sensation is a matter open to much question. But the point which at present concerns us is simply that when feeling is said to be the primordial element in consciousness more is usually in- cluded under feeling than pure pleasure and pain, viz., some characteristic or quality by which one pleasurable or painful sensation is distinguishable from another. No doubt, as we go downwards in the chain of life the quali- tative or objective elements in the so-called sensations become less and less definite ; and at the same time organ- isms with well-developed sense-organs give place to others