Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/377

 364 F. H. BEADLEY : simple and wants no machinery, I am afraid I must pass on, until my objector shows at least that he is not barbarous but has some acquaintance with the question at issue. There are then no several sensations for the early mind, and, whatever efficacy we may assign to relation and to change (a point which I omit), there is no change and no relation which comes as such to that mind. For itself it is not discrete, and hence also it is not explicitly continuous. If now, turning from this point, we ask what is presented, that inquiry may have a good many senses. Do special sensations exist, and, if so, in what sense and how many ? How do quantity and quality stand one to the other, and can we say that either, as such and specifically, makes itself felt ? I intend to pass by these questions, and glance rather at the doubt as to pleasure and pain. Do these exist from the first, or must we say they come later ? I do not know any way of deciding this problem. In the first place I am not sure if sensations are now ever entirely indifferent if, that is, they are ever more than relatively neutral ; and, if so, whether they are neutral as being wholly bare, or as having in them a resultant both of pleasure and pain. Again, if we suppose that some sensations are to us now indifferent, either in normal or again in pathological condi- tions, can we go from that to the conclusion that it ever was so when the mind was a simpler whole ? Is there in short any good argument for the absence (partial or total) of pleasure and pain (or one of them) from the earliest soul- life ? If I had that knowledge about pleasure and pain which some psychologists possess, I might perhaps settle these questions, but, as it is, I must conclude that it is safer not to suppose that at first pleasure and pain may be absent from sensation, or for the mind are attached to parts of the whole ; and so I shall assume their presence. How then will these two sides stand to one another ? In the first place a pleasure or a pain is not anything by itself. It is always- something painful or pleasant, and that something is sensa- tion (or sensations). 1 And in reply to the possible objection that pleasure and pain are not given at all, I must point to- the facts. If we take " given " or " presented," not as 1 This is the place to take up the question of reproduction by pleasure and pain. Are they exceptions to the law that all elements move towards redintegration 1 In the first place, though I cannot show that they do act merely as pleasure or pain (because I do not know how to make the abstrac- tion required), yet, on the other hand, I do not see how to deny that a mere difference in bare pleasure (supposing that to happen) might make the- essence of revival as against no revival. It seems probable that pleasure in