Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/707

Rh of attention; but we can at will look, hear, smell, taste, or touch. Now, pleasure precisely corresponds with this higher activity.

Between the higher and the lower senses is a kind of intermediate class, the importance of which has not hitherto been sufficiently remarked—we mean muscular sensations, or sensations of resistance, which many philosophers regard as the base of all the other sensations. Now, in the movement of our muscles, in which our activity is continually applied to overcoming a resistance, and in which, therefore, we are perpetually active and passive, we see the pleasure of exercise and the pain of fatigue drawn clearly one upon the other, according to the exact relation that exists between our muscular force and the external resistance. This essential fact clears up the rest. It shows the intimate and primitive connection of pleasure with activity, and of pain with passivity. The possible independence in respect to necessity and pain manifested by the highest senses is still more remarkable in the intellectual, æsthetic, and moral pleasures which may even come without being sought. Of such is the pleasure of surprise. The first shooting-star that passes before the eyes of a child charms it without having been anticipated or desired. A discovery made without having been sought is a happy chance, a pure gain, an unexpected inheritance. For all these reasons we assume that there exist pleasures of surplus which attend an excess of activity or stimulation. In them the same cause excites activity and satisfies it, without the intercalation of any want, of any "mechanical or mental hunger" or unsatisfied desire. Kant's doctrine that one pleasure can not immediately succeed another without the interposition of a want or a pain is contradicted by the facts. If, while I am eating savory meats, I unexpectedly hear fine music and am surprised by the spectacle of graceful dances, I experience an increase in which pleasures are added to one another without my having to go through the gate of suffering. Furthermore, a progressive' increase of pleasure would be impossible under Kant's theory, which supposes the necessity of successive breaks, or interrupting pains. Mr. Schneider believes that we are conscious of an agreeable feeling only when we perceive a change for the better, and of a disagreeable one when we perceive a change for the worse. His theory ends in the same vicious circle as Kant's: "We must suffer to be able to enjoy, and must enjoy to be able to suffer." How, then, do we get joy or suffering in the first place? The theories of Schopenhauer and Hartmann involve similar fallacies.

We have just shown that there exist direct pleasures, due to a surplus of activity without previous pain, the simple object of which is not the preservation of the organism in the struggle for life. We may go further, and ask if all pleasures, even those which appear to originate in a want, even those seemingly the grossest, are not of the same nature to one who looks to the bottom of the matter.

Does the complete satisfaction of a want, even of a physical one,