Page:Philosophical Review Volume 25.djvu/510

496 of our objects. If yielding to curiosity brings the finger into the flame, or yielding to the pecking impulse leads a chicken to take up an undesirable lady-bug, definite sensible 'annoyers' are encountered whose relation to the original impulse is simply an empirical fact. The result of such an experience is likely to be simply caution in getting the rose without the thorn, or a discrimination as of the edible from the non-edible insects, without any reflection upon the nature of the impulse itself. It is not, for instance, that the chicken's hunger was misdirected; but that what it took to be the same object as one which had previously satisfied it was not in fact the same; the genus was too widely drawn. Nature might have made all flame as innocent as incense, and all lady-bugs as sweet as corn, so far as our insight yet goes; the attributes of these things have to be learned as one learns the alphabet, without inner illumination.

There is a shade more reflection involved in another type of dissatisfaction. There are some experiments which at the moment seem to turn out well, but which bring painful results at greater or lesser distance from the satisfaction. The pains which follow over-indulgence may, if one has sufficient mentality to 'integrate' them with his experience, lead to the judgment, "This, after all, is not what I want." But here again nature might have made us so that some high orgy could be pursued without resulting depression; or, if not, the question might still be raised, and is raised, whether the orgy, or some orgy like it, might not be worth the cost. So long as the satisfaction itself shines out with unclouded light, and the connected pains are externally related to it, the entire effort of revision is directed to the circumstances and not to the wish.

But there is a third type of experience, and here it is that we encounter the dialectic change, in which an achievement is followed by an ill-defined sense that one is not, after all, satisfied with that apparent satisfaction. The memory of that terminal joy itself is mixed with unpleasantness. There is what I should call a mental negative after-image of the experience. It is hardly necessary to illustrate; but a common example may be taken from almost any experience of impulsive pugnacity. I have a