The Psychology of the Emotions

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. PLEASURE. Sulject little studied—Is Pleasure a sensation or a quality 1 —Its physical concomitants: circulation, respiration, movements—Pleasure, like pain, is separable: physical and moral anhedonia—Identity of the different forms of pleasure—The alleged transformation of pleasure into pain—Common ground of the two states—Hypothesis of a difference in kind and in degree—Simultaneity of two opposite processes: what falls under consciousness is the result of a difference—Physiological facts in support of the above. In treating of grief, one is apt to be embarrassed by the abundance of documents, and the difficulty of being brief; in dealing with pleasure the contrary is the case. Are we to conclude that this is because, for centuries past, physicians have been collecting observations on pain, while there exists no profession having for its object the observation of pleasure ? Or is it because humanity is so constituted as to suffer more from pain than it can enjoy from pleasure, and therefore studies everything relating to pain in order to find deliverance therefrom, while accepting everything agreeable naturally and without reflection ? We cannot, however, accuse psychologists of having neglected this study, although the bibliography of Pleasure is very scanty compared with that of Pain. In general, they have considered these two subjects as complementary to one another, pleasure and pain being opposed to each other as contraries, so that the knowledge of the one implies the knowledge of the other. But this is only a hypothesis— perhaps true, perhaps false—resting in great part only onPLEASURE. the testimony of consciousness, which is always open to question and never above suspicion. " It may be," says Beaunis, very justly, " that pleasure and pain, which...