Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: . CHAPTER III THEORIES OF PLEASURE-PAIN '"TTHE bearing of our studies on a theory of the condi- J- tions of pleasure-pain is obvious. If we consider pure feeling as the primary, fundamental, and conditioning mentality, it stands before all other mentality, and cannot be interpreted as conditioned. Pain as primum mobile is not intrinsically dependent on any other psychosis. Hence we run counter to the Herbartian School, which maintains that psychism exists from the first for itself as intellectual ideational activity, and that pleasure-pain is but reflex of the efficiency and ease, or the inefficiency and difficulty of this activity. The checking of the current of ideas may give a pain, but our exposition has been that pain arose before ideas or presentations of any kind, and long before any interference could be felt as pain. Again, if we say " all pain comes from tension " (Mind, xii. p. 6), we have to ask, Tension of what ? If we say tension of sensation or ideation, this is Herbartianism merely. How also can tension be felt as painful, except through sensation of tension, which is a feeling of intense sensation?obviously a late psychosis ? And certainly pain is more than a general consciousness fatigue. And further stress and strain result in pain, because we imply these as painful activities by the very notion of the words. A stress or strain is assumedly painful activity, but this is not explanation. But apart from this, if the organism felt pain merely as direct result of struggling and straining, itwould cease activity; activity and evolution would stop. It may be that by tension is not meant a mode of consciousness, but of nervous or muscular activity; but as we are now considering psychosis only as conditioning pure feeling, we leave this aspect for discussion til...