Herbert Nichols

“ Nearly all the greatest thinkers from the beginning of philosophy have grappled with the subject, yet we are inclined to believe that, from the first, no subject has been more profoundly misunderstood. Whatever the standpoint, whether philosophical or physiological, upon one point only, perhaps, has there always been substantially universal agreement; namely, that pleasure and pain are in some way direct and complementary expressions of the general welfare of the individual. ”

“ Most men inherit the same number and general arrangement of legs, arms, and features, yet there is abundance of variety in individuals. I am inclined to believe that most of the neural paths, even in the cortex, and of whatever kind of sense they be, are, as paths, fixed forever congenially; that the whole is the result of an untold period of selected adaptation of inner possibilities to outer possibilities; that we must, therefore, look to certain characteristics inherited in every human cortex for numerous mental traits exhibited in common by all men ”

“ Most of the facts which we have noted for the separateness of pain sensations speak as well for the independence of pleasure. We said a pain was always a pain; so pleasure is always pleasure. All kinds of sensations are at times so feeble and indistinct that we cannot tell of what kind they are. So with some pleasures. But, so soon as we do recognize the quality at 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. ”

“ IT is difficult to conceive what life would be if pleasure and pain were stricken out. If we go down into biology we find pleasure and pain to be the mainsprings of action. And if we go upward into human aesthetics and ethics, into the motives of individuals and of society, and into the inspirations and faiths of religion, we but more deeply realize at every step the importance of our subject. Pleasure and pain are not the whole of life ”

“ Every manner of agreeableness or disagreeableness not strictly of this order we are to throw out into a category of their own, to be explained afterward, yet in a manner entirely in accord with the doctrine of specific pleasure and pain activities. We are well aware of the meagreness of proportion which the aesthetic sensations which we shall discover will bear to the immense bulk of our associative or central aesthetics which we must throw out, but so also does our intellectual life as a whole outmeasure in like proportion the original experiences from which it has sprung. ”

“ Though, on the whole, each new sense must be representative of more benefit than detriment, yet it will be far less specially representative of benefit than we have seen the first sense become after being relieved of mediating experiences peculiarly representative of detriment. Thus, sight, though enormously beneficial on the whole, continually pours in upon us a flood of experiences of no benefit whatever. We have already compared the primary sense of our worm with pleasure as developed in us. ”

“ We may now observe a similar relationship between pleasures and their functions. We will not stop here to show the particular physical relationship between our pleasures and our desires, impulses, and motives which will make these functions clearer presently. But, assuming for the present that the function of pleasure is to prompt to certain conduct, we may note that our pleasures are most intense and most constant just in proportion as the act to which they prompt is vital or important. The functions of sex are the most requisite, yet the most precarious, in animal life. ”

“ Unusual heat or cold causes pain, as we hope to show, by unusual expansion or contraction of certain tissues in the skin. The whole system of pain nerves is an adjustment to the working equilibrium of our body. In places not usually disturbed, and where therefore they would be in the way, there they are not found. In places where violence or a disruption of the normal course of things is most imminent, there they are found. It would be difficult, we think, to account for the distribution of our pains in any similar manner upon the doctrine of their being inseparable qualia of other sensations. ”

“ Thus pain, though it be susceptible to as many kinds of influence as is pleasure, yet, since it is adapted to mediate the extreme rather than the medium or major ranges of influence playing upon animal organism, it would be less profitable as a primary sense than would pleasure. Pleasure, of all the senses we know anything about, best satisfies the demands of a primary sense, is open to more influences of the proper range. Any creature, having the pleasure sense as its primary sense, would therefore have advantages over others from the start. ”

“ It seems better to conceive that as new organs developed, — organs of all kinds, sensory and muscular, legs, arms, eyes, ears, tongue, — as the organism as a whole grew, and developed to special forms and functions, each new sense system grew along with and into its appropriate organs, while the old sense did not grow, at least did not grow to anything like the extent that the other special sense systems did. ”

“ The paths of our primary or pleasure sense are not the only associative or connective paths which our cortex has inherited. At birth the cortex is braided through and through with associative paths, probably of every kind of sense. Unquestionably the arrangement inherited by every sense system has somewhat to do with the manner in which it shall be stimulated. Thus, a stimulation of the retina must, by necessity, first go to the optic centre rather than to the auditory centre. There must be a vast number of optic cells in the cortex which are not direct terminals of optic fibres. ”

“ The instinct seems to be a complex motor-idea inherited as a whole. It never goes off, unless it be fired as a whole. When it is fired, we have reason to believe that it is felt as a whole. For myself, this, in connection with the theories of this paper, seems to bring the nature of our inherited emotions more clearly home to me. In life's varied experiences, more or less of our aesthetic paths may be knit up into the more complicated associations which we have described in connection with the 'objective' senses. ”

“ 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 our other senses. ”

“ The common notion of pleasure since philosophy began is that essentially it is the expression of our well-being. No such notion has ever arisen regarding sight. The notion is a competent indication, we think, of how much more fundamentally and representatively our first sense has been woven into our beneficial experiences, both biological and psychological, than have any of our other senses. ”

“ Neural activity in general is of two chief kinds: conscious and unconscious. The conscious activities all display two modes of appearance or intensity: one mode we call 'original sensations' and the other we term 'images,' 'copies,' or 'ideas' of such. Sensations proper result from stimulation of afferent nerves, while images immediately involve only central processes. Here also we place pleasure and pain precisely on a footing with the other senses. ”

“ The more fundamental a function is, the more nearly invariably must it work beneficially. Primary functions must be fundamental functions. We see, then, how any primary sense, which was the mental correspondent of these functions, must be wrought up into special representation of beneficial experiences, — how pre-eminently so above other senses subsequently added to the nervous organism for the purpose of mediating other less fundamental functions. ”

“ Most of the aesthetics of vision we shall, in proper place, endeavor to account for as associations. Whether we now have pure aesthetic sensations of color will depend, as we hold, on whether there are yet fibres in the retina which will respond directly to ordinary light of any kind with sensations of pain or pleasure. Whether there be any such or not is a matter for investigation. If they be found, certain aesthetic phenomena would be quite in accord with their presence ”

“ On the other hand, as we have just seen above, we do observe a scale of intensities for our pleasures, correspondent to those of the influences causing such in the various sense organs. Sight is the 'clearest' of all the senses, its processes the most delicate, its pleasure sensations, if there be such, the most indistinct and uncertain. On the other hand, the pleasures of sex markedly agree with the physical mode of their production, but contrast with the low objective clearness of the accompanying touch sensations. ”

“ We now are able to understand why our pleasure sense, if it be our primary sense, does not occupy that quantitative share of our present mental life which, under our postulate, its various multiplications by newly rising sense associations at first seemed to promise. The surface and even the interior of our body has been usurped by a varied set of new sense systems, which now mediate the majority of our efferent experiences. Our primary sense now mediates but few original sensations. ”

“ If, then, our above account of their origins be correct, pleasure, and also pain, in us ought to betray both certain characteristics resembling the make-up of our motor feelings and other characteristics more like those of our objective senses, — these which give us our ideas of outer things and objects. This ought to be so for pleasure, because pleasure has inherited characteristics of a motor make-up, and is now by its central functions intimately associated with the outer senses. ”

“ By means of this, the creature digs, eats, procreates, is a respectable traveller, and leads a complicated life. It does not see, hear, or smell. To say it does not experience touch, taste, heat, cold, pain, or pleasure would raise criticism respectively from the champions of each of these as the primary sense. We will only assume, then, what all seem inclined to agree to, that the worm does all that it does in terms of some one sense. And for our ancestral worm, we will leave the kind, or psychic quality, of its single sense for the present unnamed. ”

“ If any certain viand would always taste well, especially if applied to some particular taste bulb or region, or would follow any clear law for any good number of people, as quinine gives bitter from the papillae circumvallatæ for nearly every one — under such conditions for the various senses pleasure would more surely seem to be a sensation proper. But it is doubtful if there be a single form of stimulation common to any sense, to which pleasure as a sensation will respond invariably. Champagne and terrapin are delicious on one occasion, and only nauseous on another. ”

“ We have said that the pleasures of eating are among the most sensuous that we have. We believe these grosser pleasures of eating come from the act of eating rather than from the kind of food eaten; that the precise stimulations causing the taste and the smells do not cause these pleasures. But these pleasures should not be classed here, but with the various sensations — muscular, digestive, tactual, circulatory, or what they may — into which the processes of eating may be analyzed. ”

“ The retina, unlike any other of the so-called sense organs, is a part of the cortex. The cortex is pre-eminently a centre of memories, conscious and unconscious. Rising from the classical discussions of the space problem are reasons to believe that our perceptions of space, figure, and perspective are peculiarly dependent upon developed memories. If it should happen that certain parts of the retina acting as cortex areas were the physical basis of certain memories fundamental to the workings of our eyes as space organs, we ought not to class these memories as sensations. ”

“ All this about temperature we present tentatively — to be placed on a footing with Hering's theory of color, as most plausible for the present. We would be positive of nothing except that it is more plausible than qualia. Finally, we make the same reservations about temperature as about sight, sound, taste, and smell. There may be no æsthetic sensations of temperature at all and no nerves. Our doctrine of specific pleasure and pain energies would not be wrecked without them. If they exist, the majority of temperature æsthetics are yet associations, and they may all be associations. ”

“ It is fair to suppose that the cells and fibres of tones but infrequently heard before would now tend to develop, — those which involved pain as well as the others. The complicated apparatus of tone cells and fibres would be likely to get far more of the new exercise than would the simpler pain nerve fibres and so develop more and faster. Again, the apparatus for tone outmeasuring in bulk that for pain, even if the increased growth were but proportional to the bulk to be developed, we should soon have the tone apparatus crowding that of pain into atrophy. ”

“ If our theory be correct, the distribution of pain nerves must have much bearing upon the coexcitation of pain with other sensations. If there were no pain fibres in the optic sheath, but only in proximity to sight regions, this would explain why sensations of bodily pain do not accompany ordinary sight; only rare excitations of light, those violent enough to cause influences radiating to adjoining nerve terminals, or some mechanical disturbances upon the eye, as a blow, or some pathological irritation of the eye, would then cause optic pains. ”

“ We will begin with color. We know that light of any color, if sufficiently intense, will cause pain. Our hypothesis of specific pain nerves explains this. But we do not know that light of any single color, and of intensity less than will cause positive bodily pain from abnormal disturbances, will be accompanied normally and invariably either with agreeableness or disagreeableness. Undoubtedly our 'like' or 'dislike' often does accompany certain colors, which otherwise apparently are the sole objects of presentation. But these 'likes' may be indirect results of retinal stimulation. ”

“ The fact that pain rises from intense stimulation of most sensory organs, and that the specific quality of the senses disappears, or apparently is transformed into pain with increased violence of stimulation, is, at first sight, also a pertinent matter. For example, the blinding of sight and the alleged blending into pain under prolonged excitation of violently intense light, looks like a single process passing from one phase into another, rather than like two separate processes. ”

“ But the traditional view not only holds that pleasure and pain are inseparable attributes of other sensations, but that they are inverse and excluding complements of each other; that they are two ends or polar aspects of a single phenomenon. One of the most conclusive tests of nerve functions is that, when their terminals are electrically stimulated, each responds with its proper sensation. ”