Page:Psychology and preaching.djvu/97

 FEELING 79

role in life, it is entirely inadequate as a guide for life. That an experience gives pleasure means nothing more than that it falls in with some present vital or habitual tendencies and processes of the organism ; and that it causes unpleas antness means only that it runs counter to some such tend encies and processes. Those tendencies and processes may need to be encouraged or to be restrained, judged by stand ards established in universal human experience ; but as to this the present feeling can give no trustworthy verdict. Feeling is at once indispensable and inadequate for the proper guidance of life.

7. The relation of feeling to desire. Desire in itself is neither a pleasant nor an unpleasant state of consciousness, but it is accompanied by a compound feeling-tone in which both pleasantness and unpleasantness are found. Desire is the i^is, the conscious reaching or straining of the or ganism toward a possible situation which it is believed would afford more satisfaction than the actual one. On the one side there is a sense of discomfort or maladjustment asso ciated with the actual situation; on the other there is the mental image of a possible situation in which the adjustment would be more satisfactory, and this mental image is asso ciated with pleasure. Sometimes the unpleasant tone is dominant in the consciousness of desire and sometimes the pleasant. Two conditions determine which tone is domi nant. It depends in part upon the vividness of the image of the actual situation as compared with the vividness of the image of the possible situation. If the former is more vivid at the moment, the unpleasant tone predominates ; if the lat ter, the pleasant tone. But it is also conditioned by the sense of the possibility of the anticipated situation. If its possibility is strong and near, that tends to give predom inance to the pleasant tone; if weak and remote, it tends to reduce the pleasant tone. If the sense of its absolute im possibility possesses the consciousness, the desire dies. De sire cannot live except as it feeds upon the possibility of realizing the desirable thing ; the possibility must be believed

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