Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/455

No. 4.] pure subjectivity. Thus here in the interpretation of merely subjective facts knowledge tends to stand in its own way. It is only objectively that the objectifying can appear causative of feeling, subjectively sense of object must always be taken as subsequent to a pleasure-pain psychosis. The object communicates or causes the feeling, but the subjective order is as such of necessity the opposite; the object does not come in view; there is no relating, until feeling has incited to it, and gradually the mind reaches out to an objective order from the purely central fact. In every psychical reaction there must be the purely central disturbance before the rebound to the actuality occasioning the disturbance. I must feel before I can discriminate or have any sense of the communication of the feeling. This means that when external objects are brought into relation with a wholly unanticipating consciousness, the first element in psychosis is always pure pleasure or pure pain. Thus, on a cold dark day a sudden rush of sunlight on a blindfold man causes pleasure, then feeling warm, and then sense of warming object. The glow of pleasure and the pang of pain merely as such is in all cases precedent to any objective reference. Pure centrality of response, I thus take to be the initial element of all psychosis, primitive or developed. The first tendency in every consciousness is pure pain-pleasure, complete subjectivity which, however, in higher consciousness is so quickly lost through practically consentaneous differentiation that all traces of it seem wholly extinguished. Pure subjectivity must be pronounced the most evanescent of all characters in developed minds and yet the most constant. It is the inevitable precedent in every sensation and in every perception. We always experience pleasure or pain before the pleasurable or painful. A bright color gives pleasure before we see it, and this pleasure incites to the seeing it. But so fully has the objective order been wrought into consciousness as a mode of interpretation that the great majority on reading the preceding sentence will mentally at first attribute sense of objectivity from the expression "bright color gives pleasure" as if there were pleasure at color, a color-pleasure, whereas is meant pleasure and nothing more, — bare, undifferentiated pleasure.