Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/473

 472 A. BAIX : psychical or mental life that receptive states lead through feeling to active states, and that presentations yielding neither pleasure nor pain meet with no responsive action, we are led to inquire whether the contrast of pleasure and pain has any corresponding contrast in the causes of feeling, on the one hand, and in the manifestations or effects on the other. To begin with the causes. In the presentations them- selves, or outward agencies of pleasure and pain respectively, we find no common characters ; the peculiarities must therefore be in relation to the conscious subject. Now one prominent circumstance in relation is, that pleasure furthers life, and pain impedes or destroys it : the so-called law of Self-conservation. Mr. Ward admits that the law is con- formable to facts, but rejects it as being too teleological for application. I doubt if he is right here. The teleology need not be introduced into the inquiry at all, while the law possesses the very condition that he insists on, namely, to assign a mark present in all pleasurable presentations and wanting in all painful. If self-conservation stops short of this condition, it is because no single principle will explain the whole of the phenomena. Indeed, any different principle must be continually liable to qualification according to the general state of vitality of the system ; and, in point of fact, Mr. Ward is unable to exclude it in the exemplification of his own theory. With a view to the inquiry, he gives a five-fold classifica- tion of Feelings. The first comprises the simple sensati- and movements ; the former more particularly. In these sensations, the pleasurable or painful effect varies with intensity, quality, frequency and duration. The leading fact is, however, intensity, into which quality may probably be resolved. With regard to movements, it is evident that pleasure depends solely upon intensity ; a certain amount of exertion being always agreeable, and excess disagreeable. Of some of our sensations, as light and sound, the same can be said : they are always agreeable up to a certain point of intensity. When we pass to taste and smell, we encounter such cases as sweet and bitter tastes, which are pleasant or painful in all degrees. Mr. Ward would resolve these into hereditary associations with intensity. A bitter sensation may be the trace of organic pains originally accompanying a too violent stimulation of the taste, and a sweet the opposi The hypothesis is admissible enough, but one would think it should have been preceded by a discussion of the organic pains and pleasures themselves. Instead of accepting as a