so that the whole of mental life is pervaded by an ego-sense. But primitive consciousness must have been by intermittent and isolated flashes. The primitive pain, moreover, was not a pain in any particular kind, but wholly undifferentiated bare pain. There was no sense of the painful, but only pure pain. Nor was there any consciousness of the pain, any knowledge or apperception of it. The pain stands alone and entirely by itself, and constituting by itself a genus.
Now to assert that this general pain exists, is not, of course, realism. The pain is a particular act though it is wholly without particular quality. It is not a pain as one of a kind distinct from other kinds, but it is comparable to a formless unorganized mass of protoplasm which has in it potency of future development. Pain may exist as such, but not a consciousness or a feeling. It is meaningless to say that the first psychosis may have been a consciousness in general form which was neither a feeling, a will, or a cognition, but the undifferentiated basis of these, nor can a feeling, per se, exist. The expressions, painful consciousness, and painful feeling are deceptive; there is no consciousness which pains, but consciousness is the pain, and the feeling is not pleasurable or painful, but is the pleasure or pain. "Feeling," as I have said (Mind, Vol. XIII, p. 244), "has no independent being apart from the attributes which in common usage are attached to it, nor is there any general act of consciousness with which these properties are to be connected."
Further, the law of conservation requires us to associate with this primitive act of blind formless pain the will act of struggle and effort which is as simple and undifferentiated as the feeling. And these two we must mark as the original elements of all mental life. Strenuousness through and by pain is primal and is simplest force which can conduce to self-preservation. It is thus that active beings with a value in and for themselves are constituted. The earliest conscious response to outward things is purely central and has no cognitive value. The first consciousness was a flash of pain, of small intensity, yet sufficient to awaken struggle and preserve life.
