Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/476

MB. JAMES WAED'S " PSYCHOLOGY ". 475 contrary, forces on our attempts to escape the causes, and is the most urgent schoolmaster in our voluntary education. The author endeavours to minimise the counter tendency of pleasure to prompt to its own continuance and increase. That stage in the gratification of appetite, when pain has ceased and pleasure is pursued up to point of satiety, he would regard as a later growth or consequence of the primary urgency of pain. This refinement, however, may be carried too far. Granting that the removal of pain must always possess the highest degree of urgency, yet there are nume- rous cases where, starting from a state of pure neutrality, we enter upon a taste of positive pleasure, and follow it up till it ceases to become pleasure. But for the discipline of pains in the distance, which accompany all considerable pleasures, I am disposed to believe that the pursuit of plea- sure, as such, would be no less genuine and unmistakable than the avoidance and removal of pain. Out of the diffusive movements of feeling, and the fundamental law that connects the relief of pain and the increase of pleasure with accidentally coinciding movements, the growth of the will has to be explained. The difficulties of bringing about these happy chance-coincidences are formidable, and the time demanded is correspondingly great. Mr. Ward thinks that natural selection, and the survival of the fittest, would come in to accelerate the process. Be this as it may, the subjective selection must follow its course by bringing about an association between lucky movements and the state of feeling that they favour. After Will comes Desire, with its various problems, which are fairly grappled with. What makes desire first to arise, what constitutes its urgency, and wherein lies the difference between represented pleasures that give their own satisfac- tion and those that stimulate pursuit for the reality all these matters are soluble by manipulating the various elements concerned : the power of the representation ; the activities of the moment, and the bearing of these on the end ; the operation of habit in weakening the sense of pleasure, and increasing the tendencies to action. On the whole, the author contends that the activity involved in desire is a question of pain in some sort, and not the following of pleasure. The higher forms of " Intellection " are now entered upon. The difficult question of controlled and regulated thinking is first to be considered. Then comes the vast instrumentality of Language, which Mr. Ward illustrates with great success. No less good is the discussion of general ideas, hitherto