Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/590

 ON FEELING AS INDIFFERENCE. 577 modes of mind that may have the smallest possible intellectual value, so that there would be a want of propriety in attaching it to the domain of intelligence. It is, however, questioned by many " whether any feeling as such can be indifferent " (Sully). To this I would say that I can agree to regard no feeling as indifferent, in the same way that I can admit that there is no such thing as a perfectly straight line or an exact circle. I would not affirm absolutely of any mode of consciousness, call it feeling or anything else, that it is wholly devoid of either pleasure or pain in an infinitesimal degree. But psychology, like law, refuses to deal with minima or in- finitesimals : we must have factors of such an amount as to be a felt influence on our mental doings. In this view I contend for the existence of neutral states in the greatest plenty ; not merely Eeid's comparatively tranquil intellectual sensations, but out- bursts of voluminous emotion that agitate and engross the whole man as only feelings strictly so called can do. Nevertheless, in order to do full justice to the proofs of this position, I must make an important admission as to the frequently mixed character of states of excitement. My meaning is this. When we are what we call excited, it very often happens that we have a certain amount of either pleasurable or painful consciousness, or we may be passing rapidly from one to the other. But here is the point. Is the degree of conscious pleasure or pain necessarily and always equal to the degree of the excitement ? To this I think the answer must be in the negative. Our power of introspective discrimination and mensuration is quite adequate to prove to us that the pleasure or pain is one thing and the mental agitation or excitement another thing : the two do not rise or fall together. A contrasting illustration will be of service here. Take a few smarting pains such as the sharpening of a saw, the pricking of the skin, the odour of assafoetida, the taste of salts and senna, a scald with boiling water. In those cases we are undoubtedly excited. But excitement is not the word we use ; we prefer the term ' pain,' pure and simple. The entire consciousness is pain and nothing but pain : as is the excitement, so is the pain ; the coupled facts, which are usually present and distinguishable in consciousness, are here one fact ; the two modes are coincident ; the excitement does not overlap the pain. All this of course is most strictly applicable to the first moments in each case. Now, instead of such pains as the sharpening of a saw or the squealing of parrots, let us take a voluminous noise, say the dis- charge of a heavy gun, the rattle of thunder, the din of a London street, the noise of a mill-flat. These effects are rousing or exciting: they are not necessarily painful, although apt to be so. la certain states of the nerves, they may even give pleasure for a time. Yet the excitement is the main fact; the pain or the pleasure is but a chance incident. The state is one of mental