all, then as unmistakably do we know it to be pleasure and not pain as we do that heat is not cold; far more quickly than we perceive that smell is not taste or that ocular accommodation is not retinal distance. Whether we ever have pleasures as purely and exclusively filling the focus of attention as some other sensations — as, say, color, sound, or acute pains — is doubtful, though I have seen men who seemed absorbed in the momentary gratification of an unusually fine 'bouquet' or flavor, and have myself been all but entranced by the pure sensuous delight from the rendering of certain music. Some drugs also seem to produce prolonged and heightened states of pure pleasure excitement, accompanied by no likewise prolonged or heightened other sense.
It is commonly emphasized, in presenting the traditional theory of aesthetics, that the stimulations causing pleasure are of the gentle order in contrast with the violent ones of pain. And so they are, but so also are all other sense stimulations. The contrast lies in those of pain being violent, and not in those of pleasure being specially gentle, which they are not necessarily. They may be gentle in sight; those of sex are not gentle. There is a separate reason for these varying intensities everywhere.
Having now roughly looked over general grounds, let us come to closer details with the senses. We have carefully distinguished sensations from their central images or copies. When speaking of 'sight' we ordinarily include in our meaning both sight sensations and sight images. We are so aware of the difference between these that very little confusion comes into our discussions by so doing. But it is of the first importance that we carefully distinguish between the sensations proper of pleasure and pain and the images of such, in untangling the many obscurities of our subject; to nothing is the confusion which has befallen it from the earliest times more due than to lack of this discrimination. As the two orders require entirely separate treatment, it shall be our care to separate the one from the other, and, to begin with, attempt to account only for those sensations pure and proper which now commonly mingle with
