Sensory pleasure

“ Its pleasure is denoted by laughing, kicking, and corresponding movement and expression of face. It derives pleasure also from excitation of its centres of motion, from being tossed, dandled, and rocked, while rough and violent movements cause no less pain and discomfort. We see, then, in such a child, manifestations of a very considerable amount of feeling—feeling which is at this stage entirely bodily, or at the most sensory, arising from the exercise of the senses. ”

“ Yet not only tactile sensations, but also all other kinds of sensations, can gradually pass into pleasure and pain. Pleasure and pain can also justly be called sensations. Only they are not so well analysed and so familiar as sensory sensations. Sensations of pleasure and pain, however faint the mode of their appearance, make up indeed the real content of all so-called feelings. Thus perceptions, as well as ideas, volition, and feelings, in short the entire inner and outer world, are composed of a small number of homologous elements united in relations now more evanescent and now more lasting. ”

“ It is, however, impossible to account for the details of our sensory pleasures any more than for our æsthetic pleasures. All that can be said is, generally, that the form or quality of the excitation must be taken account of, as well as its quantity. ”

“ In some way or other the brain receives an impression of feeling. Just how it does, I understand, is not known; but scientists tell us that these impressions of sight, while they are not quite similar to the feelings aroused by sound, have something in common. Just as some sounds give pleasure while others are disturbing, so with colors—we receive from them sensations of pain or pleasure. According to the degree of our sensitiveness to sound or color our feelings are aroused. ”

“ What other than "Physical Antecedents" excite those states of Consciousness which we call Sensations, and the Pleasure and Pain associated with them?
2. Does not all Psychological as well as Physiological probability point to the identity of the Sensorial instrumentality through which we become conscious (1) of a present Impression, and (2) of a remembered Sensation? ”

“ By the word stimulus is not only meant the application of external bodies to our organs of sense and muscular fibres, which excites into action the sensorial power termed irritation; but also pleasure or pain, when they excite into action the sensorial power termed sensation; and desire or aversion, when they excite into action the power of volition ”

“ For a sound stimulus awakens not only a sensory process in the ear, the correlative of which is a sensation, but also incipient motor reactions, which, if carried out, would be an emotion, but which, being too slight and diffuse, produce only what we call a mood. Every sensation has a meaning for the organism in an environment where it has constantly to be on its guard for danger or assistance; every sensation is therefore connected with the mechanism of reaction, with its attendant emotions. ”

“ From whence arises this facility, which our sensations have of undergoing so many different, so many contrary modifications? To conceive it, let us first remark that the centre of these revolutions of pleasure, of pain, and of indifference, is by no means seated in the organs, which receive or transmit the sensation, but in the soul. The affections of the eye, of the tongue, and the ear, are at all times the same from the same objects, but to these affections at different times, we attach a variety of sentiments. ”

“ The right experiment is to compare a single colour, say, or a single note, with such a sensation as a uniform touch or temperature gives rise to, a bath for example, or with a simple uniform taste or smell, or with hunger, or nausea. Fair comparison is difficult, equivalent levels of simplicity and uniformity being impossible to discover, but few will doubt that the degree of pleasure-unpleasure aroused by tastes, for example, far exceeds that which auditory or visual sensations excite by themselves. ”

“ It will be seen that a synaesthesia—which may involve taste, smell, and other senses besides hearing and sight—causes an impression of one sensory order to be automatically and involuntarily linked on to an impression of another totally different order. ”

“ For this reason, I think, we must suppose that certain sense-stimuli and combinations of stimuli not only produce in the sensory areas of the brain the appropriate sensations, but that their effects are prolonged, overflowing into the motor channels and there causing a total reaction of the organism, the conscious aspect of which is a vague feeling. The organic resonance is too slight and diffuse to produce a true emotion ”

“ But it may also be contended that the functional enhancement, the stimulation itself, when present to consciousness, is perceived as pleasure, and that the feeling-tone created by movement is thus not indirect and secondary, but, on the contrary, is a typical pleasure. ”

“ Again, activities which are uniformly disagreeable when first experienced, if not too extreme or too long continued or too often stimulated, habitually become gradually less disagreeable and finally may be productive of pleasures. This process is commonly described as the 'acquisition of tastes.' The only explanation of these phenomena in terms of the sensational theory would seem to be that pain nerves become separated from activities or cease to act when the latter function, and that pleasure nerves begin to become connected with the same activities. ”

“ This appears first, because our pains and pleasures are always caused by our ideas or muscular motions, which are the motions of the extremities of the sensorium. And, secondly, because the sensation of pleasure or pain frequently continues some time after the ideas or muscular motions which excited it have ceased: for we often feel a glow of pleasure from an agreeable reverie, for many minutes after the ideas, that were the subject of it, have escaped our memory; and frequently experience a dejection of spirits without being able to assign the cause of it but by much recollection. ”

“ When our sense organs are stimulated, the stimulus is conveyed by means of sensory nerves to the brain and there gives rise to sensation, the sense organs are sensitive to various kinds of stimuli, the stimulus to the eyes gives the sensation of sight, to the ears the sensation of sound and so on. ”

“ A Sensation is an impression made by some external object on the Senses; the motion thus excited is propagated along the appropriate nerve, until it reaches the Sensory in the Brain, and it is there and there only, felt or perceived. ”

“ They are in a state of morbid activity. And as sensibility depends upon vital action of the bodily organisms, there is necessarily produced a degree of sense gratification or pleasure. The reason why these sensations are pleasurable instead of painful is, in this state of moderate excitement the circulation is materially increased without being materially unbalanced. ”

“ ALL our sensations, from the most trifling pleasure to the highest delight, from the hardly perceptible discomfort to the keenest anguish, the whole gradation of manifold variations of feeling, originate from the propagation of excitations from without through the nerves to the central organ of the nervous system and to consciousness. ”

“ And when this relation, besides being frequently repeated in the individual, occurs in successive generations, all the many nervous actions involved tend to [255] grow organically connected. They become incipiently reflex; and, on the occurrence of the appropriate stimulus, the whole nervous apparatus which in past generations was brought into activity by this stimulus, becomes nascently excited. Even while yet there have been no individual experiences, a vague feeling of pleasure or pain is produced; constituting what we may call the body of the emotion. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The sensorial power causes the contraction of the fibres, and is excited into action by four different circumstances, by the stimulus of external bodies, by pain or pleasure, by desire or aversion, or by the previous motions of other contracting fibres. In the first situation it is called the sensorial power of irritation, in the second the sensorial power of sensation, in the third the sensorial power of volition, and in the fourth the sensorial power of association. ”

“ And however indomitably colour- and sound-sensations force themselves upon us, our submission to them will not be accompanied by even the most "passive" pleasure if we are bodily or mentally out of sorts. How much more frequent must be lack of receptiveness when, instead of dealing with sensations whose intensity depends after all two thirds upon the strength of the outer stimulation, we deal with perceptions which include the bodily and mental activities of exploring a shape and establishing among its constituent sensations relationships both to each other and to ourselves ”

“ True, a child, having a fresh, unsated sensorium, can receive with more vivid pleasure than an adult—for a while. But it is easily over-tired, easily over-fed with sensation, easily bored and weary with receiving. ”

“ We found that when a sense organ is stimulated by its appropriate type of stimulus, this stimulation travels through the sensory nerves and sets up an excitation in the brain. This excitation in the brain gives us sensation. We see if the eye is stimulated. ”

“ We have, however, no separate organs for the appreciation of pleasure and pain. These feelings arise out of, and are bound up with, our sensations, our perceptions, and especially with the conscious exercise of our bodily activities. There may be, at any rate in some cases, separate nerves for the appreciation of the pleasurable and the painful; but even if this be so, these shades of feeling are so closely associated with our other activities, mental and bodily, that we may for the present regard them simply as the accompaniments of these activities. ”

“ The nerves are the organs and channels of Sensibility. By means of them we receive our sensations, whether of mere pleasure and pain, or of qualities which we ascribe to external objects, as a bitter taste, a sweet odour, a shrill sound, a red colour, a hard or a hot feeling of touch. Some of these sensations are but obscurely the objects of our consciousness; as for example the feeling which our feet have of the ground, or the sight which our eyes have of neighbouring objects, when we walk in a reverie. ”

“ At length all these circumstances are increased; the quantity of pleasure introduced into the system by the increased irritative muscular motions of the whole sanguiferous, and glandular, and absorbent systems, becomes so great, that the organs of sense are more forcibly excited into action by this internal pleasurable sensation, than by the irritation from the stimulus of external objects. ”

“ I. Stimulation is of various kinds adapted to the organs of sense, to the muscles, to hollow membranes, and glands. Some objects irritate our senses by repeated impulses. II. 1. Sensation and volition frequently affect the whole sensorium. 2. Emotions, passions, appetites. 3. Origin of desire and aversion. ”

“ All bodily pleasures and pains we shall conceive to be due to separate currents, rising like other sensory nervous activities at their proper nerve terminals in the body, and running thence through their appropriate paths and centres to the cortex. ”

“ We say the sound rolled on, the odor was wafted, the color was printed, our language and our thoughts implying that the sound, the odor, the color, are things, when in reality they are all mere sensations, answering to the touch of physical agents. All sensation is nerve-motion. Outer stimulus, applied to the nerves, causes contractions which, communicating with the brain, give the idea of color or taste or sound. ”

“ The movements of touching and feeling for a smooth continuous curved object are themselves pleasant. This complex of psychical factors makes a pleasurably stimulating experience. The greater the tendency to complete reproduction of these movements, that is, the stronger the "bodily resonance," the more vivid the pleasure. ”

“ In this meaning of the word we may be said to be passive to sound and colour quality: our share in the effects of these sensations, as in the effect of agreeable temperatures, contacts and tastes, is a question of bodily and mental reflexes in which our conscious activity, our voluntary attention, play no part: we are not doing, but done to by those stimulations from without; and the pleasure or displeasure which they set up in us is therefore one which we receive, as distinguished from one which we take. ”

“ Under our hypothesis we do not need to look for any special environmental stimulus-differentiation corresponding with pleasure and pain, as we did under the sensational view, if the hypothetical pleasure and pain senses are to fall in line with all other sensations; for under our hypothesis pleasure and pain are determined by relations within the organism which are general and which occur with all differentiations of environmental action upon us. ”

“ But all the evidence that we possess goes to show that the sensory centres, stimulated by what we will assume to be the taste of the morsel, are different from those which are affected by sight, and the movements concerned in pecking. So that the consciousness which is effective in guiding future action is an accompaniment of the stimulation of centres that are different from those concerned in the behaviour over which guidance is exercised. ”