Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/642

626. This fact, if granted, is of course suggestive of the position maintained, but that it furnishes an argument of negative rather than positive force is apparent when one notes, first, that it is not claimed to relate to pleasure at all, but only to pain, and furthermore, that it can be asserted of only a very limited proportion of our pains.

I think it will be granted that the great mass of our pains are not of this distinct and 'disparate' nature: 'floating pains,' as they are sometimes called, are certainly not distinct. What is more, those which are markedly 'disparate' are in my observation, not pains pure and simple. There is always a something else than the pain by which we are likely to describe it. It is a cutting pain or a pricking pain or a crushing pain. One can always discern some differential where the pain is distinct, although the pain itself appears to me to be the same in all cases.

But even granting to pains this occasional 'disparateness' — this distinctness which enables them at times to usurp consciousness, — this fact seems to argue little for a sensational classification; for there are other states which appear to me to be equally distinct and which in moments of intensity equally usurp sway over the whole mental field, which, however, we