Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/66

 PSYCHOLOGICAL PEINCIPLES. (ill.) 53 impelled or guided, who selects and controls, we must insist on being told the psychological equivalent of " vitality in general " or " the collective forces of the system ". But it will be best to scrutinise a little further the terms which Prof. Bain uses in speaking of feelings and move- ments ; to do this will be tantamount to examining the ter- minology he uses of his first class of mental facts. The same confusing change of ' dimensions ' and standpoints meets us here again. First of all we are told that Feelings (Fj) divide into primary or Sensations (with muscular feel- ings) and secondary or Emotions, in which sensations have coalesced with one another and with ideas. But again we are told that " Feeling (F 2 ) comprehends pleasures and pains and states of excitement that are neither " (p. 215). Now what connexion is there between these quite distinct classifications? Pleasures, pains and states of neutral excitement cannot be sensations, for then they would have to be referred to a definite sense-organ, according to the definition we have had of sensation ; and they would not then cover emotions, for in these " the simple elements cease to be apparent ". Moreover it seems possible to talk of " the pleasures and pains of sensations" and of "the feelings connected with emotions," and generally of " the emotional character of feeling ". Thus a feeling being a conscious state, a feeling of a feeling must be a conscious state of a conscious state. It is a familiar law in symbolic logic that x n =x, square square is square, the red of red is red, &c. ; but this law of simplicity will not hold of relations generally. A reader entirely ignorant of the subject-matter might then reason- ably suspect that F! and F 2 refer to different things, and are not merely a different statement of the same. This differ- ence would clearly appear on a careful comparison of (1) passages in which Prof. Bain speaks of Pleasure, Pain or Indifference or the state of pleasure, the state of pain, &c., with (2) passages in which he speaks of a pleasure, a pain or of pleasurable and painful sensations and emotions, &c. But we have no space for so much detail. What it comes to is simply this : FI answers to presentations which a subject may be conscious of or attend to, while F 2 is the state or mode of excitement of this subject that results : FI is what the subject cognises, F 2 is how he feels. It is only with reference to FI that Prof. Bain can talk of " the intellectual character of feeling," and only with reference to F 2 that he can talk of " the volitional character of feeling ". This brings us to the other class of presentations, " mus- cular feelings," as to which, under cover of the unanalysed