The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/Summary: Bain - Pleasure and Pain
Pleasure is of course indefinable, but individuals and species may be enumerated. From these may be formed representative groups, on which to base a theoretical treatment. In some instances, at least, of the cessation of pains, there is a notable reaction or recoil of pleasurable feeling. But we must take into account the continuance of pain in the idea after it has ceased in fact. It is in the case of acute physical pains that, the persistent memory being feeble, the grateful reaction is most apparent. Relativity covers a wide field, more or less allied to the above. What is peculiar to relativity is partly, but not wholly, included in the general law that every organ needs exercise, or relishes it, in proportion to its active endowment. This is adequately expressed by the law of rotation or change. B. considers pleasure and pain from the point of view of the different senses, and arrives at the following results, which are negative rather than positive: (1) As a rule, extreme violence or intensity of nervous stimulation, as measured by destruction of tissue, is attended with pain. There are, however, important exceptions. (2) The nourishment and vitality of the system are usually attended with pleasure, and the opposite condition with pain. (3) There is pleasure in the exertion of all the active faculties — muscles, senses, brain — with a painful feeling of fatigue to determine the limit of active competence. (4) The pleasure attached to rest is somewhat various, being most conspicuous in regard to the muscles, and almost wanting in the case of the senses and the nerves. (5) We have many acute nervous pleasures beginning and ending in the brain itself, and neither exalting nor depressing the organic functions that are the support of life. The study of actual sensations has to be supplemented by study of the memory or the ideas of them. The conditions of harmony and conflict enter abundantly into the field of ideas. Here we have to consider what are commonly called æsthetic pleasure and pain. Æsthetic pleasure appears to depend upon the subtle operation of concurrence between effects differing in their own proper nature while possessing something in common. The answering of sound to sense is a familiar example. Many attempts have been made to explain the pleasure of this sort of harmony, but with very indifferent success. There remains a certain range of feelings relatively simple, while entering into many important compounds. These are the more fundamental or elementary emotions of the mind, which seem to be rooted in organic and other primitive modes of stimulation. The most prominent are love, anger, and fear. Inferences from the study of these are at some points confirmatory of previous inductions. There still remain pleasures and pains in connection with ideas. Ideas being the traces of surviving impressions of sense, everything must depend upon the forces that determine the retention or survival of what has passed out of actual or real presence. Generally, the idea of a pleasure is pleasant and the idea of a pain painful. We have seen that the cessation of a pain as such is a source of pleasure. Yet the pain must subsist in memory, and the memory of a pain has just been assumed to be painful. This apparent contradiction may be partly explained away by distinguishing between the various kinds of pleasure and pain. It is in the case of physical pain, especially, that this cessation causes pleasure. An acute physical pain is not really reproducible in the full strength of the actuality. Thus the physical pains that we have passed through do not mar the enjoyment of life after the complete subsidence of the actual. With pleasures and pains compounded of emotion and intellect, the character of the survival is greatly altered. The memory of an attack of neuralgia is not necessarily painful, while that of a severe rebuff or defeat is quite sure to be so.