Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/708

690 consist only in filling a pre-existing void, without anything more, and thus simply re-establishing an equilibrium? If it were so, the equilibrium would produce a mental condition of consciousness and feeling, or immobility, and there would be no evolution. What causes enjoyment in satisfying a want, such as the want of food or exercise, is that there is, relatively to the previous condition, a surplus, and hence a movement of progression in which is continuously produced an excess as compared with what we have just got, and we are enriched above our previous poverty. It is not, therefore, simple suppression of pain that constitutes sensual enjoyment, for that would be merely neutralization of the former condition by the after condition. Enjoyment is constituted by the suppression of pain plus an excess, which produces a progress, not a rest, of activity. The painful condition of hunger is composed of an infinite number of rudimentary pains. The pleasure which we feel in restoring our forces is a continual victory over these rudiments of pain, and produces something like the accelerated velocity of a moving body. But a continual victory is a continual surplus, and it is this surplus that makes the pleasure. Hence, not only does pleasure not require for its existence a previous want, but even when it succeeds a real want, as in many of the pleasures of the senses, it is nevertheless in itself independent of the want, or essentially positive. We can not, then, with Messrs. Leslie Stephen and Delbœuf, locate pleasure in the simple feeling of a normal equilibrium. Even in the act of eating, the pleasure felt incites the expenditure of energy, and the equilibrium is not reached till satiety causes the action to cease. The feeling of equilibrium only constitutes a general and fundamental comfort, very near to indifference. We can not be satisfied, either, with saying, with Mr. Spencer, that equilibrium is the accompaniment of normal action. To our mind pleasure, as a distinct emotion, appears precisely when the limit of normal action has been passed, for it supposes, at whatever point, a richness. We go, then, to the end of the way opened to us by the great philosophers, and define pleasure as the feeling of: a surplus of activity. Its relation to pain only marks the beginnings, not the end, of evolution and selection; it is primary, but not definitive; it is accidental, but not essential.

We now turn to the final and fundamental question—Is pain the sole motive to activity, and consequently the real motive power of universal evolution? This discouraging doctrine maybe found among other psychologists than Schopenhauer and the pessimists, and they have not always drawn from it the moral, metaphysical, and religious consequences that they might have drawn. According to Mr. Leslie Stephen, pleasure, being a condition of equilibrium, is for that reason a state of satisfaction in which there is a tendency to persist. Mr. Rolph ("Biologische Probleme") remarks that it is a state which we seek to prolong, and can therefore never be the cause of a change of condition. When it is objected to this, that man when, for example,