Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/661

No. 6.] healthful and harmful to the organs functioning. This hypothesis also makes it easy to understand why, with Pleasure-Pain so early a development as it must have been, there is no evidence of the later development of consciousness on the two great lines of Pain and of Pleasure as would seem to be necessitated by any doctrine which makes Pleasure and Pain the primal sensational elements.

Let us now turn to the objections which I have raised to the sensational view.

9. The bond between pleasure and pain so widely recognized and so inexplicable under the sensational hypothesis becomes natural under the theory here defended; for the two are really part of a continuum, both being determined by relations of the nutritive conditions to the activity of the organ which is the physical correspondent of the mental state.

10. Under our theory no special localized organs should be looked for in the brain for Pleasure and for Pain, for each differentiation of pleasure or pain, except as to degree, implies a change of organ, so to speak. The theory does not meet the demand that we shall tell what special organs are active for pleasure and for pain, because under it we are led to hold that, properly speaking, there are none such: or, to put it differently, that there are an indefinite number of such; that each organ which is capable of bringing about by its activities a definite psychosis is in that special case an organ either for pleasure or for pain.

11. This hypothesis accounts most easily for the fact that pleasures and pains are aroused by the widest range of psychic occurrences; that there are sensational, emotional, and intellectual pleasures and pains. It would be most unexpected if it were not so found in experience, when we consider that each sensation, each emotion, each intellectual act implies activity of an organic coincident, in some effective or ineffective relation.

12. That under continuation of stimulus-conditions pleasure habitually fades into pain, is to be expected under my hypothesis; for pleasure means the use of surplus stored energy, and the hypernormal stimulus which is bringing about this result, if