Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/591

 578 A. BAIN I ON FEELING AS INDIFFERENCE. disturbance, agitation, conscious intensity ; its opposite is quies- cence or calmness. It seizes possession of the consciousness ; excludes rival claims to notice ; governs the thoughts and, through them, the actions. All this happens without taking into account either pain or pleasure, which may or may not be a con- trolling factor. Take, again, the excitement that prevents sleep. This, by the very fact, is a formidable mode of consciousness. There may be a mixture of pleasure or pain, but certainly not co-extensive with the mental disturbance. If it were pleasurable in the whole extent of the awakened consciousness, we should not wish to part with it ; if it were painful in its whole extent, like the instances of acute pain formerly given, we should use in describ- ing it language very different from what usually contents us. These two examples are as good as a number : the same terms are equally applicable to the generality of instances of what we understand by excitement. It is the absence of reference to so important a region of our mental life that makes Eeid's elucida- tion of indifferent feelings radically defective. Even without the class of cases that he fastens upon, it is strictly true that the Indifferent modes of feeling, including the indifferent element in mixed feelings, far outnumber and outmeasure the pleasurable and the painful in everybody's life. In saying this I am willing to discount not merely the intellectual sensations, but the pecu- liar species of indifference under the attitude of pursuit, when we are so engrossed with action as to be scarcely conscious at all, in the full sense of consciousness, as feeling. Intense objectivity of regards, as in a race or an engrossing operation, is not, strictly speaking, unconsciousness, but it is the maximum of energy with the minimum of consciousness. It might be treated as a mode of indifference, but it has a character of its own, and is better kept distinct from feeling as excitement. It readily becomes excite- ment ; but whenever the objective tension is remitted, we relapse into subjectivity, and the consciousness is then sufficiently intense and may be called excitement in the true meaning, while liable to be at the same time pleasurable or painful, under the qualification already given. I have always contended for the continuity of neutral excite- ment and feeling (in Keid's view) as discriminative sensation. This I consider necessary to complete the characters of neutral or indifferent feeling, and also to constitute the transition between Feeling and Intellect. I do not dwell 011 this topic at present, but content myself with noticing the serious inadvertence of regarding the genus ' Feeling ' as made up exclusively of pleasure and pain. It would be an immense advantage to coin a word that included this all-important couple and excluded everything else. But to apply the word ' Feeling ' to this purpose is to carry on an unequal fight with inveterate use. It is not even as if that word were commonly limited to the trio of pleasure and pain and excitement