Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/475

 474 A. BAIN : regarding pleasure, the contrast of the higher and the lower pleasures. He solves this psychologically, by urging that to advance to the level of life wherein greater pleasure on the whole is attainable, is a real rise from a lower to a higher state. This of course will not satisfy the parties to the ethical controversy, but it is not the less just from the point of view of pure psychology. The phrase for the difference is not ' dignity,' but economy or efficiency. Great as are the subtleties connected with Feeling, greater remain in the nature and growth of the Will treated under the head of " Emotional and Conative Action ". I must here take into account the earlier treatment of Motor Presenta- tions (p. 42), where the linking of action with feeling is con- sidered. For an absolute commencement of the bond that unites feeling with purposive movements, we must set aside both reflex action and sensori-motor action, as being results of some prior arrangements more typical of the will itself. The real starting-point, our author thinks, is the wave of emo- tional diffusion ; the spontaneity of isolated movements he rejects as having no sufficient evidence, and as making move- ment precede feeling instead of following it, which he considers an absurdity. Without stopping to debate these positions, I must look at the author's attempt to define the primary emotional wave. He is aware that the diffusion arising under our developed emotions, such as anger, includes Darwin's ' serviceable associated habits,' and therefore grew out of will, instead of preceding it ; thus the combative atti- tude is a clear volitional after-growth. Darwin's third principle of emotional expression is the nearest approach to a primitive outburst namely, certain actions that are the direct result of the constitution of the nervous system, under which he would include the movements expressive of joy and grief, which in some form or other are the simplest of conceivable states of emotion. Proceeding on this basis, Mr. Ward enumerates, as primitive movements of joy, dancing, clapping the hands and meaningless laughter ; such actions not only belong to the pleasurable wave, but increase the pleasure. This is something. Again, oil the side of pain, there is a variety of contorted and violent movements, in themselves painful, but operating to diminish the original pain more than they add to it, being, on the whole, soothing and salutary. But now, as regards our volitional progress, there is this great difference between the tvo opposite modes of feeling. The movements under plea- sure are mere exuberance, or the overflow of good spirits, and are, so to speak, playful and purposeless. Pain, on the