Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/420

404 would be noteworthy if the one main view regarding our subject, which has received consent and guided consideration from the beginning, should prove to be the one which is radically in error, and which has led to misconception and confusion from the outset. That such is the case is my conviction, and in hope of rectifying this fundamental and important error, this discussion is presented. I trust that the generosity of my readers will discover that the tone of dogmatism assumed throughout is adopted for brevity and explicitness of exposition.

If we open almost any modern text-book of psychology, we shall find mind divided into 'Intellect, Feeling, and Will'; and we shall be told that these are 'three aspects of mind' — that the 'Feelings' are qualia of other mental contents and inseparable from them. We dissent from this view, and hope to substantiate our rejection of it by considering mental phenomena in connection with our biological origin and neurological development. We place pleasure and pain on common footing with our other senses as fundamental elements of mind, and as being based upon separate specific neural activities or 'energies.' And under both aspects, psychic and physical, we hold pleasure and pain to be as separate from each other and from other sense elements as are the latter from one another.

Neural activity in general is of two chief kinds: conscious and unconscious. The conscious activities all display two modes of appearance or intensity: one mode we call 'original sensations' and the other we term 'images,' 'copies,' or 'ideas' of such. Sensations proper result from stimulation of afferent nerves, while images immediately involve only central processes. Here also we place pleasure and pain precisely on a footing with the other senses. All bodily pleasures and pains we shall conceive to be due to separate currents, rising like other sensory nervous activities at their proper nerve terminals in the body, and running thence through their appropriate paths and centres to the cortex. All the 'fainter' forms of pleasure and pain, — those which constitute the agreeable or disagreeable element in all our judgments, emotions, desires, and passions, whether 'sensual,' aesthetic, moral, or religious,