THE ORIGIN OF PLEASURE AND PAIN.
I.
IT is difficult to conceive what life would be if pleasure and pain were stricken out. If we go down into biology we find pleasure and pain to be the mainsprings of action. And if we go upward into human aesthetics and ethics, into the motives of individuals and of society, and into the inspirations and faiths of religion, we but more deeply realize at every step the importance of our subject. Pleasure and pain are not the whole of life; but leave them out, and life and the universe no longer have meaning.
Nearly all the greatest thinkers from the beginning of philosophy have grappled with the subject, yet we are inclined to believe that, from the first, no subject has been more profoundly misunderstood. Whatever the standpoint, whether philosophical or physiological, upon one point only, perhaps, has there always been substantially universal agreement; namely, that pleasure and pain are in some way direct and complementary expressions of the general welfare of the individual. From Plato and Aristotle down through Descartes, Leibnitz, Hobbes, Sulzer, Kant, Herbart, Bain, Spencer, Dumont, and Allen — down to the latest articles of Mr. Marshall in Mind, the idea, at base, has ever been the same: The experience, the judgment, the attainment of a perfect or imperfect life; the perfect or imperfect exercise of a faculty; the furtherance or hindrance of some activity; the rise or fall of some vital function, force, or energy. Everywhere pleasure and pain have been looked upon as complementary terms of a single phenomenon, and as the very essence of expression of the rise and fall of our inmost existence. How they should be so or are so, every philosopher, moralist, or physiologist has explained by theories fitted to his own. Of these theories and explanations almost no two agree; upon no subject, perhaps, is there more general disagreement. It
