Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/452

436 evolution of pleasure as a problem which is yet to be dealt with in full. However, that it is not original element in mind is easily seen from this. As we ascend the grades of psychic life the pleasure-pain gamut lengthens, and as we descend, it shortens, with pleasure always as the intermediate factor. Thus if we can represent it by a line,

Any single element which can affect psychic life, as temperature, moves through a highest pain intensity, an intermediate region, then to pain again as effects in a range from a very high temperature to very low, or vice versa. Now, this gamut in a human being, from the intensest agony from heat to the greatest suffering from cold, consists of very many notes, but the step to unconsciousness is always at one end of the scale. In lower psychic life it shortens, but always at the intermediate points where pain merges into pleasure and pleasure into pain, and thus in the lowest form the original element of consciousness as feeling is seen when only the two extremes remain, primitive consciousness as pain reaction. As the step from feeling consciousness to unconsciousness is through a pain, this certainly points to pain as the original feeling, and the first element in consciousness. We must suppose then that the first organism which attained consciousness felt pain, that if this came from temperature, for example, that intense heat and intense cold would both produce a pain one and the same in nature, bare pain, not sensation of heat or cold. And this pain-consciousness response came at first only at the application of these critical temperatures, all other degrees not bringing any response. If consciousness like other functions originated as an infinitesimal germ at some crisis in life, it must have been with pain. The pleasure function unlike the pain does not originate in life and death crises.

The origin of pleasure is then, I think, to be traced as an intermediary feeling between pain as produced by excess, and pain from lack as differentiated form. Pain as original and