Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/454

438 is akin, was merely pain which knew not itself nor its relation to other states, nor its relation to the external world, but was a wholly central subjective fact, and so was expressed only in wild and blind general movements. The very lowest types of psychic life which we can interpret seem to feel and nothing more. They do not feel at anything, and do not feel because they know, nor do they have definite kinds of feeling.

Pure feeling as bare pain and as undifferentiated pleasure is certainly far removed from our ordinary conscious experience, yet it may sometimes appear in a survival form, especially in sluggish states, in waking from sleep, and in recovering from anæsthetics. We are sometimes awakened by a dull pain which was evidently in its inception mere bare pain without differentiation. But in all such cases the pure pain or pure pleasure is but momentary and is quickly swallowed up in a flood of manifold sensations. Many objects by many modes of sense at once invade and possess consciousness, and the early indefinite mode vanishes so quickly that we very rarely have time to note it by reflective consciousness.

But it is not merely in exceptional states of developed consciousness that we may trace the elementary form of feeling, but we may believe it to be fundamental to consciousness in general. It is natural for us who are so pervaded and dominated by sense of objectivity to see in it the causal element in mentality; feeling and will seem consequent to it, and we apprehend and feel accordingly. But the order of evolution was not from knowledge in any form to feeling, but the reverse, and we may suspect that in the completest analysis consciousness will still be found to obey its original law. If the rise of knowledge was at the instance of feeling, it is certainly unlikely that a fundamental order should be more than apparently reversed.

The order of consciousness is really the reverse of the order conceived by the objectifying consciousness, and this is a point where cognition by its very nature as objective may be said to obscure itself. To apprehend is to bring into relation, and the relation is very easily attributed to what is purely unrelated, to