Pleasure and Pain a special mode of conscious life distinctly removed from all other mental activity.
17. In bringing this list of objections to a close, I must mention one difficulty which relates to the special form of this sensational theory defended by Dr. Nichols in the article above referred to. Dr. Nichols's theory, especially as it relates to pleasure, necessitates the existence of images of pleasure and of pain, similar to the images of sensations and objects which are grasped in revival. I think there is no ground in experience for supposing that pleasure and pain are 'represented' in this way. It seems to me to be an error to hold that there are images of pain or of pleasure, as it would be an error to speak of there being images of intensity, for example. The intensity of an image of a sensation, is not an image of the intensity of the sensation. The intensity in both cases is a psychosis of relation; and it seems to me that the case is similar with pleasure and pain. Sensations and their images, indeed, however closely they may be bound together, are always markedly distinct. It seems probable to me that the image is present with the sensation, but swamped, as it were, by the force of the sensation, somewhat as represented by the symbols below.
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Sensational Object. |
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Image. |
Thus when the image arises it is grasped in its relations as familiar, but with a sense of the loss of its emphatic part. Be this true or no, it is certain that sensational images are definitely distinct from their sensational "presentations" and I cannot find any corresponding distinction in my experience of pleasure-pain. A pleasant sensation may be revived pleasurably (or at times painfully), a painful sensation may be revived painfully (or at times pleasurably), in manner similar to that by which a special relation of. intensity is revived. The word
