The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/On Primitive Consciousness
ON PRIMITIVE CONSCIOUSNESS.
SCIENCE views the world as an assemblage of objects having mutual relations. In this cosmos of interacting elements certain objects are endowed with mental powers by which they accomplish self-conservation. Just what these objects are and how they attain mental quality is beyond our direct investigation. However, assuming consciousness as a purely biological function, as a mode for securing favorable reactions, we can discuss the probable course of its evolution under the law of self-conservation. Mind, like all other vital function, must originate in some very simple and elementary form as demanded at some critical moment for the preservation of the organism. It is tolerably obvious that this could not be any objective consciousness, any cognitive act, like pure sensation, for this has no immediate value for life. It was not as awareness of object or in any discriminating activity that mind originated, for mere apprehension would not serve the being more than the property of reflection the mirror. The demand of the organism is for that which will accomplish immediate movement to the place of safety. The stone pressed upon by a heavy weight does not react at once to secure itself, but is crushed out of its identity; but the organism reacts at once through pain. It is certainly more consonant with the general law of evolution that mind start thus in pure subjective act rather than in mere objective acts, like bits of presentation or a manifold of sense. We shall now endeavor to elucidate this conception of pure pain as primitive mind, first from the general point of view of the law of self-conservation, and secondly from particular inductive considerations.
It is very difficult to conceive what this bare undifferentiated pain as original conscious act was, it being so foreign to our own mental acts. Our psychoses have a certain connection one with the other, and a connection which is cognized as such, 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.
Pleasure, then, we have excluded from playing any rôle in absolutely primitive consciousness. Pleasure and pain could not both be primitive functions, and of the two pain is fundamental, in that the earliest function of consciousness must be purely monitory. Pain alone fulfils primitive demands, and secures struggle which ends in the abatement of pain through change of environment or otherwise. Pain lessens, but pleasure does not come, but unconsciousness instead, for no continuous organic psychic life is yet evolved. As long as pain continues there is effort and self-conserving action; when pain ceases, consciousness ceases, because the need for it is gone. Each fit of pain subsides into unconsciousness as struggle succeeds, and there is no room for even the pleasure of relief which, indeed, must be accounted a tolerably late feeling. As far as the lowest organisms have a conscious life it is a pain life; but they have a Nirvana in a real unconsciousness. The evolution of pleasure must be accounted a distinct problem.
The law of evolution is that origin of function, and all progressive modification is at critical stages. Thus it is in painful circumstances that the origin of mind is to be traced, and the important steps in its development have been achieved in severest struggle and acutest pain at critical periods. Pleasure then is not the original stimulant of will, but is a secondary form. Pleasure has an obvious utility, especially as foreseen, but this is far from being primitive. The pleasure-mode early enters, however, to sharpen by contrast the pain-mode, and it is only by their interaction that any high grade of psychic life could be built up. The development of pleasure cannot be from pain, but as a polar opposite to it. We cannot bring the development of mind into a perfectly continuous evolution from a single germ, as is the case with organs and tissues in biology where such very different elements as muscle and nerve may be traced to a common undifferentiated basis. In a certain sense we may say that pleasure and pain are complementary, like positive and negative electricity, but the comparison cannot be pressed. We cannot, indeed, carry it so far as to believe either absolutely essential to the other. We mention then the evolution of pleasure as a problem which is yet to be dealt with in full. However, that it is not original element in mind is easily seen from this. As we ascend the grades of psychic life the pleasure-pain gamut lengthens, and as we descend, it shortens, with pleasure always as the intermediate factor. Thus if we can represent it by a line,
Pain Pleasure Pain
Any single element which can affect psychic life, as temperature, moves through a highest pain intensity, an intermediate region, then to pain again as effects in a range from a very high temperature to very low, or vice versa. Now, this gamut in a human being, from the intensest agony from heat to the greatest suffering from cold, consists of very many notes, but the step to unconsciousness is always at one end of the scale. In lower psychic life it shortens, but always at the intermediate points where pain merges into pleasure and pleasure into pain, and thus in the lowest form the original element of consciousness as feeling is seen when only the two extremes remain, primitive consciousness as pain reaction. As the step from feeling consciousness to unconsciousness is through a pain, this certainly points to pain as the original feeling, and the first element in consciousness. We must suppose then that the first organism which attained consciousness felt pain, that if this came from temperature, for example, that intense heat and intense cold would both produce a pain one and the same in nature, bare pain, not sensation of heat or cold. And this pain-consciousness response came at first only at the application of these critical temperatures, all other degrees not bringing any response. If consciousness like other functions originated as an infinitesimal germ at some crisis in life, it must have been with pain. The pleasure function unlike the pain does not originate in life and death crises.
The origin of pleasure is then, I think, to be traced as an intermediary feeling between pain as produced by excess, and pain from lack as differentiated form. Pain as original and undifferentiated is the same whether resulting from excess or lack, but it is only after it has differentiated so far as to be in two modes that pleasure can enter as a mediate form of feeling and become a directing force to advantageous action. The primitive pleasure-pain gamut was this:
| Lack Pain | Pure Pleasure | Excess Pain |
A general survey from the point of view of self-conservation leads us then to regard the original psychic state as a pain-effort form. There is first a purely undifferentiated sense of pain and closely consequent a purely undifferentiated nisus. There is neither sense of objectivity in general, nor in any special mode, nor is there feeling of pleasure. And the study of what seem to be the earliest forms of mental life in the child and in the lower animals points toward this conclusion. Preyer, in his studies on the mind of the child, expresses his conviction that the feelings "are the first of all psychical events to appear with definiteness," and that at first in no manifold forms. He adds, "The first period of human life belongs to the least agreeable, inasmuch as not only the number of enjoyments is small, but the capacity for enjoyment is small likewise, and the unpleasant feelings predominate until sleep interrupts them" (Mind of the Child, Part I, New York, 1888, p. 143, cf. p. 185). Since in the embryology of the mind as in that of the body the individual repeats in condensed manner the evolution of life, we judge that these observations point toward the genesis of consciousness in a single feeling state, pure undifferentiated pain. The earliest consciousness we can discover seems to approach this type. The close observer of very young infants must feel that the meagre psychic life they may have consists mainly of intermittent pains interrupted by comparatively long periods of unconsciousness in sleep. Of course, the earliest psychic life of the infant is not absolutely primitive both on account of heredity and on account of pre-natal experience; but in its general form it, no doubt, reverts toward the original status of mind. This original state, to which that of a very young infant is akin, was merely pain which knew not itself nor its relation to other states, nor its relation to the external world, but was a wholly central subjective fact, and so was expressed only in wild and blind general movements. The very lowest types of psychic life which we can interpret seem to feel and nothing more. They do not feel at anything, and do not feel because they know, nor do they have definite kinds of feeling.
Pure feeling as bare pain and as undifferentiated pleasure is certainly far removed from our ordinary conscious experience, yet it may sometimes appear in a survival form, especially in sluggish states, in waking from sleep, and in recovering from anæsthetics. We are sometimes awakened by a dull pain which was evidently in its inception mere bare pain without differentiation. But in all such cases the pure pain or pure pleasure is but momentary and is quickly swallowed up in a flood of manifold sensations. Many objects by many modes of sense at once invade and possess consciousness, and the early indefinite mode vanishes so quickly that we very rarely have time to note it by reflective consciousness.
But it is not merely in exceptional states of developed consciousness that we may trace the elementary form of feeling, but we may believe it to be fundamental to consciousness in general. It is natural for us who are so pervaded and dominated by sense of objectivity to see in it the causal element in mentality; feeling and will seem consequent to it, and we apprehend and feel accordingly. But the order of evolution was not from knowledge in any form to feeling, but the reverse, and we may suspect that in the completest analysis consciousness will still be found to obey its original law. If the rise of knowledge was at the instance of feeling, it is certainly unlikely that a fundamental order should be more than apparently reversed.
The order of consciousness is really the reverse of the order conceived by the objectifying consciousness, and this is a point where cognition by its very nature as objective may be said to obscure itself. To apprehend is to bring into relation, and the relation is very easily attributed to what is purely unrelated, to pure subjectivity. Thus here in the interpretation of merely subjective facts knowledge tends to stand in its own way. It is only objectively that the objectifying can appear causative of feeling, subjectively sense of object must always be taken as subsequent to a pleasure-pain psychosis. The object communicates or causes the feeling, but the subjective order is as such of necessity the opposite; the object does not come in view; there is no relating, until feeling has incited to it, and gradually the mind reaches out to an objective order from the purely central fact. In every psychical reaction there must be the purely central disturbance before the rebound to the actuality occasioning the disturbance. I must feel before I can discriminate or have any sense of the communication of the feeling. This means that when external objects are brought into relation with a wholly unanticipating consciousness, the first element in psychosis is always pure pleasure or pure pain. Thus, on a cold dark day a sudden rush of sunlight on a blindfold man causes pleasure, then feeling warm, and then sense of warming object. The glow of pleasure and the pang of pain merely as such is in all cases precedent to any objective reference. Pure centrality of response, I thus take to be the initial element of all psychosis, primitive or developed. The first tendency in every consciousness is pure pain-pleasure, complete subjectivity which, however, in higher consciousness is so quickly lost through practically consentaneous differentiation that all traces of it seem wholly extinguished. Pure subjectivity must be pronounced the most evanescent of all characters in developed minds and yet the most constant. It is the inevitable precedent in every sensation and in every perception. We always experience pleasure or pain before the pleasurable or painful. A bright color gives pleasure before we see it, and this pleasure incites to the seeing it. But so fully has the objective order been wrought into consciousness as a mode of interpretation that the great majority on reading the preceding sentence will mentally at first attribute sense of objectivity from the expression "bright color gives pleasure" as if there were pleasure at color, a color-pleasure, whereas is meant pleasure and nothing more, — bare, undifferentiated pleasure.
The objective statement, however true, is no measure of subjective fact, but this twisting of subjective fact to correspond with objective order is so embedded in language and common thought that it will perhaps always remain the form of ordinary thinking, like common-sense realism and geocentric appearance. The expressions, it pleased me, it pained me, and the common modes of speech in general, are fundamentally misleading. Pleasure and pain bring their objects, not objects pleasures and pains. Pleasure per se does not come for and in consciousness from the object, — though this is objective order, — but the object for and in consciousness comes from the pleasure. Pleasure and pain always precede any cognizance of the thing, and it is only the combination of the two elements that constitutes pleasure or pain of or at a thing. The primitive element, the original feeling movement, also excludes subject as real object; both the "it" and "me" are not yet apparent; there is not yet identification of experience with subject or object, and in fact no sense of experience at all. The psychologist must retain common expressions, however, but like the astronomer who retains such phrases as the sun rises, the sun sets, he must reverse common interpretation and correct natural error.
Guided by this principle we note an obvious error in the interpretation of child consciousness. If a bright-colored object is passed before the eyes of a young infant we may conclude from its expression that a pleasure-consciousness is awakened, but we are probably quite at fault if we conceive it to have a consciousness of bright, and that this consciousness preceded and gave rise to pleasure and gave it a quale as pleasure-brightness. Sense of pleasure-object is manifested by appropriative activities, but in the very young, where these activities are lacking, the response to object is best regarded not as in any wise sense of object, nor even any kind of sensation, but as a pure subjectivity of pleasure. Of course the same remarks apply to the pain side of the child's experience.
The purely subjective experience, while it becomes more and more evanescent factor as mind develops, yet always maintains its place as the initial point and vanishing-point of every psychosis. Every psychosis beyond the most primitive must be accounted a feeling will-knowing group. These physic forces exist in a correlated union generally comparable with the correlated activity of physical forces like electricity and heat. Each psychosis repeats in itself, in tendency form at least, the essential stages in the evolution of consciousness. Every psychosis rises from the pure pleasure-pain as the lowest level of mentality like a wave, and like a wave falls back into it again. Every wave of consciousness, whether it rises slowly or rapidly, whether it subsides gradually or violently, rises from pure subjectivity and comes back to it again. This absolutely simple feeling phase is accomplished so rapidly in ordinary human consciousness as to be rarely perceptible, but in lower consciousness it often exists as mood, as more or less permanent psychosis. The Brahmans attain artificially a subjectivity akin to this through their expertness, in mental control and manipulation. They succeed in reducing and keeping consciousness in some very simple type, and their Nirvana may be considered as a state of pure subjectivity on the pleasure side. They of course cannot really attain this state or, at least, keep it, for pleasure is at bottom relative, yet they come to something approaching it. Pain at its height just before unconsciousness is reached, is always of the pure subjective type. In slow torture pain increases to a maximum intensity in pure pain, beyond which there is a gradual loss of intensity and consciousness in general, till ultimate failure of all consciousness. From the maximum intensity on to the end, consciousness is entirely subjective. Pleasure at its maximum attains only comparative subjectivity. Such facts tend toward a theory of mind which makes its original and fundamental act purely central; mind starts as in a germ which pushes outward till it penetrates space and time, but not in any reverse motion a pushing inward of a series of presentation forms.
From both an a priori point of view of the law of self-conservation, and also from a brief survey of certain forms in comparative and human psychology, we incline toward accepting pure pain as the original consciousness. This is soon differentiated into pain of excess and pain of lack with the evolution of pure pleasure. Will exists throughout as sequent of feeling. Much, indeed, is to be done before this theory of the nature of mind is either fully elucidated or completely proved, but I am persuaded that when we consider mind as a life function, we are led toward the doctrine maintained in the preceding pages. I am more and more convinced that sensationalism and intuitionalism are both mistaken as to the essence of mentality. Consciousness is not, at bottom, any mode of cognition, either as more or less freely accomplished by a "mind," or as more or less mechanical impression from things; but it is primitively and fundamentally pain and pleasure as serving the organism in the struggle for existence. It seems somewhat strange that evolutional psychologists have not generally set forth this theory, but almost without exception they are sensationalists. Horwicz is the only one whom I know to have made a survey of feeling as primitive and simple fact of mind in relation to self-conservation, but his discussion is mainly physiological and not the introspective induction and deduction which I have herein sketched.
LAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY.