nothing more, as some have maintained, it would inspire us with the idea of avoiding the wretched rather than helping them, for pain is naturally abhorrent to us. This feeling of horror may indeed be at the root of pity; but a new element soon comes in, the need of helping our fellow-men and of alleviating their suffering. Shall we say with La Rochefoucauld that this so-called sympathy is a calculation, " a shrewd insurance against evils to come "? Perhaps a dread of some future evil to ourselves does hold a place in our compassion for other people's evil. These however are but lower forms of pity. True pity consists not so much in fearing suffering as in desiring it. The desire is a faint one and we should hardly wish to see it realized; yet we form it in spite of ourselves, as if Nature were committing some great injustice and it were necessary to get rid of all suspicion of complicity with her. The essence of pity is thus a need for self-abasement, an aspiration down wards. This painful aspiration nevertheless has a charm about it, because it raises us in our own estimation and makes us feel superior to those sensuous goods from which our thought is tem porarily detached. The increasing intensity of pity thus consists in a qualitative progress, in a transition from repugnance to fear, from fear to sympathy, and from sympathy itself to hu mility.
We do not propose to carry this analysis any fur- 20 TIME AND FREE WILL CHAM ther. The psychic states whose intensity we have just defined are deep-seated states which conscious JQ not seem to have any close relation to states oonnec- ** J p te< ^'- tneir external cause or to involve the pers~ ception of muscular contraction. But such states are rare. There is hardly any pas sion or desire, any joy or sorrow, which is not accom panied by physical symptoms; and, where these symptoms occur, they probably count for some thing in the estimate of intensities. As for the sensations properly so called, they are manifestly connected with their external cause, and though the intensity of the sensation cannot be defined by the magnitude of its cause, there undoubtedly exists some relation between these two terms. In some of its manifestations consciousness even appears to spread outwards, as if intensity were being developed into extensity, e.g. in the case of muscular effort. Let us face this last phenomenon at once: we shall thus be transported at a bound to the opposite extremity of the series of psychic phenomena.
If there is a phenomenon which seems to be presented immediately to consciousness under the Muscoiar ei- f°rm °* quantity or at least of magniflXXt?oStude, it is undoubtedly muscular effort. We picture to our minds a psychic force imprisoned in the soul like the winds in the cave of Aeolus, and only waiting for an opportunity to burst forth: our will is supposed to watch over CHA».I MUSCULAR EFFORT 21 this force and from time to time to open a passage for it, regulating the outflow by the effect which it is desired to produce. If we consider the matter carefully, we shall see that this somewhat crude conception of effort plays a large part in our belief in intensive magnitudes. Muscular force, whose sphere of action is space and which manifests itself in phenomena admitting of measure, seems to us to have existed previous to its manifestations, but in smaller volume, and, so to speak, in a compressed state: hence we do not hesitate to reduce this volume more and more, and finally we believe that we can understand how a purely psychic state, which does not occupy space, can nevertheless possess magnitude. Science, too, tends to strength en the illusion of common sense with regard to this point. Bain, for example, declares that " the sensibility accompanying muscular movement coincides with the outgoing stream of nervous energy: " x it is thus just the emission of nerv ous force which consciousness perceives. Wundt also speaks of a sensation, central in its origin, accompanying the voluntary innervation of the muscles, and quotes the example of the paralytic " who has a very distinct sensation of the force which he employs in the effort to raise his leg, although it remains motionless." a Most of the 1 The Senses and iht Intellect, 4th ed., (1894), p. 79. * Grundzuge der Physiologischen Psychologic, 2nd ed. (1880), Vol. i, p. 375.
authorities adhere to this opinion, which would be the unanimous view of positive science were it not that several years ago Professor William James drew the attention of physiologists to certain phenomena which had been but little remarked, although they were very remarkable.
When a paralytic strives to raise his useless limb, he certainly does not execute this move ment, but, with or without his will, The feeling of,10 effort, we he executes another, borne movement are conscious. t.1 • not of an «- is carried out somewhere: otherwise penditure of...„,T..
force but of there is no sensation of effort.1 Vulpian muscular had already called attention to the fact that if a man affected with hemiplegia is told to clench his paralysed fist, he unconsciously carries out this action with the fist which is not affected. Ferrier described a still more curious phenomenon.2 Stretch out your arm while slightly bending your forefinger, as if you were going to press the trigger of a pistol; without moving the finger, without contracting any muscle of the hand, without producing any apparent movement, you will yet be able to feel that you are expending energy. On a closer examination, however, you will perceive that this sensation of effort coincides 1 W. James, Le sentiment de I' 'effort (Critique philosoph-ique, 1880, Vol. ii,) [cf. Principles of Psychology, (1891), Vol. ii, chap, xxvi.]
2 Functions of the Brain, 2nd ed. (1886), p. 386.
CHAP, i MUSCULAR EFFORT 23 with the fixation of the muscles of your chest, that you keep your glottis closed and actively contract your respiratory muscles. As soon as respiration resumes its normal course the con sciousness of effort vanishes, unless you really move your finger. These facts already seemed to show that we are conscious, not of an expendi ture of force, but of the movement of the muscles which results from it. The new feature in Pro fessor James's investigation is that he has verified the hypothesis in the case of examples which seemed to contradict it absolutely. Thus when the external rectus muscle of the right eye is paralysed, the patient tries in vain to turn his eye towards the right; yet objects seem to him to recede towards the right, and since the act of volition has produced no effect, it follows, said Helmholtz,1 that he is conscious of the effort of volition. But, replies Professor James, no account has been taken of what goes on in the other eye. This remains covered during the experiments; nevertheless it moves and there is not much trouble in proving that it does. It is the movement of the left eye, perceived by consciousness, which produces the sensation of effort together with the impression that the objects perceived by the right eye are moving. These and similar observations lead Professor James to assert that the feeling 1 Handbuch der Physiologischen Opiik, ist ed. (1867), pp. 600-601.
of effort is centripetal and not centrifugal. We are not conscious of a force which we are supposed to launch upon our organism: our feeling of muscular energy at work " is a complex afferent sensation, which comes from contracted muscles, stretched ligaments, compressed joints, an immo bilized chest, a closed glottis, a knit brow, clenched jaws," in a word, from all the points of the periphery where the effort causes an alteration.
It is not for us to take a side in the dispute. After all, the question with which we have to intensity of deal *s not whether the feeling of effort fort^ropJr-6*" comes from the centre or the periphery, teT1 of° oxur but m wnat does our perception of its body affected, intensity exactly consist? Now, it is sufficient to observe oneself attentively to reach a conclusion on this point which Professor James has not formulated, but which seems to us quite in accord with the spirit of his teaching. We maintain that the more a given effort seems to us to increase, the greater is the number of muscles which contract in sympathy with it, and that the apparent consciousness of a greater intensity of effort at a given point of the organism is reducible, in reality, to the perception of a larger surface of the body being affected.
Try, for example, to clench the fist with increas ing force. You will have the impression of a sensation of effort entirely localized in your hand and running up a scale of magnitudes. In reality, what you experience in your hand CHAT, i MUSCULAR EFFORT 25 remains the same, but the sensation which was at first localized there has affected scionsness of your arm and ascended to the shoulder; an increase of...,,, muscular et- finally, the other arm stiffens, both legs fort consists in,,..,,, the perception do the same, the respiration is checked; er number of it is the whole body which is at work, sensations (2) But you fail to notice distinctly all these a qualitative.., change in concomitant movements unless you are warned of them: till then you thought you were dealing with a single state of consciousness which changed in magnitude. When you press your lips more and more tightly against one another, you believe that you are experiencing in your lips one and the same sensation which is continually increasing in strength: here again further reflec tion will show you that this sensation remains identical, but that certain muscles of the face and the head and then of all the rest of the body have taken part in the operation. You felt this gradual encroachment, this increase of the surface affected, which is in truth a change of quantity; but, as your attention was concentrated on your closed lips, you localized the increase there and you made the psychic force there expended into a magnitude, although it possessed no extensity. Examine carefully somebody who is lifting heavier and heavier weights: the muscular contraction gradually spreads over his whole body. As for the special sensation which he experiences in the arm which is at work, it remains constant for a very long time and hardly changes except in 2(T) TIME AND FREE WILL CHAP. I quality, the weight becoming at a certain moment fatigue, and the fatigue pain. Yet the sub ject will imagine that he is conscious of a con tinual increase in the psychic force flowing into his arm. He will not recognize his mistake unless he is warned of it, so inclined is he to measure a given psychic state by the conscious movements which accompany it! From these facts and from many others of the same kind we believe we can deduce the following conclusion: our conscious ness of an increase of muscular effort is reducible to the twofold perception of a greater number of peripheral sensations, and of a qualitative change occurring in some of them.
We are thus led to define the intensity of a superficial effort in the same way as that of a deep-seated psychic feeling. In both The same de-.,...j finition of m- cases there is a qualitative progress and to superficial an increasing complexity, indistinctly seated feelings perceived. But COnSClOUSnCSS, aCCUSujriJcUate be- tomed to think in terms of space and to translate its thoughts into words, will denote the feeling by a single word and will localize the effort at the exact point where it yields a useful result: it will then become aware of an effort which is always of the same nature and increases at the spot assigned to it, and a feeling which, retaining the same name, grows without changing its nature. Now, the same illusion of consciousness is likely to be met with again in the case of the states which are inter- CHAP, i ATTENTION AND TENSION 27 mediate between superficial efforts and deepseated feelings. A large number of psychic states are accompanied, in fact, by muscular contractions and peripheral sensations. Sometimes these super ficial elements are co-ordinated by a purely specu lative idea, sometimes by an idea of a practical order. In the first case there is intellectual effort or attention; in the second we have the emotions which may be called violent or acute: anger, terror, and certain varieties of joy, sorrow, passion and desire. Let us show briefly that the same de finition of intensity applies to these intermediate states.
Attention is not a purely physiological pheno menon, but we cannot deny that it is accompanied The interme- ^Y movements. These movements are neither the cause nor the result of the i- phenomenon; they are part of it, they traction. express it in terms of space, as Ribot has so remarkably proved. l Fechner had already reduced the effort of attention in a sense-organ to the muscular feeling *' produced by putting in motion, by a sort of reflex action, the muscles which are correlated with the different sense organs." He had noticed the very distinct sen sation of tension and contraction of the scalp, the pressure from without inwards over the whole skull, which we experience when we make a great effort to recall something. Ribot has studied 1 Le mecanisme de V attention. Alcan, 1888.
(28! TIME AND FREE WILL CHAP. I more closely the movements which are character istic of voluntary attention. " Attention con tracts the frontal muscle: this muscle...draws the eyebrow towards itself, raises it and causes transverse wrinkles on the forehead...In extreme cases the mouth is opened wide. With children and with many adults eager attention gives rise to a protrusion of the lips, a kind of pout." Certainly, a purely psychic factor will always enter into voluntary attention, even if it be nothing more than the exclusion by the will of all ideas foreign to the one with which the subject wishes to occupy himself. But, once this exclusion is made, we believe that we are still conscious of a growing tension of soul, of an immaterial effort which increases. Analyse this impression and you will find nothing but the feeling of a muscular -Contraction which spreads over a wider surface or changes its nature, so that the tension becomes pressure, fatigue and pain.
Now, we do not see any essential difference between the effort of attention and what may be intensity called the effort of psychic tension: acute desire, uncontrolled anger, passionion- ate love, violent hatred. Each of these states may be reduced, we believe, to a system of muscular contractions co-ordinated by an idea; but in the case of attention, it is the more or less reflec tive idea of knowing; in the case of emotion, the unrefiective idea of acting. The intensity of these violent emotions is thus likely to be nothing but CHAP, i VIOLENT EMOTIONS 2Q the muscular tension which accompanies them. Darwin has given a remarkable description of the physiological symptoms of rage. ' The action of the heart is much accelerated...The face red dens or may turn deadly pale. The respiration is laboured, the chest heaves, and the dilated nostrils quiver. The whole body often trembles. The voice is affected. The teeth are clenched or ground together and the muscular system is commonly stimulated to violent, almost frantic action. The gestures...represent more or less plainly the act of striking or fighting with an enemy." l We shall not go so far as to maintain, with Professor James, 2 that the emotion of rage is reducible to the sum of these organic sensations: there will always be an irreducible psychic element in anger, if this be only the idea of striking or fighting, of which Darwin speaks, and which gives a common direction to so many diverse movements. But, though this idea determines the direction of the emotional state and the accompanying movements, the growing in tensity of the state itself is, we believe, nothing but the deeper and deeper disturbance of the organism, a disturbance which consciousness has no difficulty in measuring by the number and extent of the bodily surfaces concerned. It will be useless to assert that there is a restrained rage which is all the more intense. The reason is that, where -J emotion has free play, consciousness does not ^ "\ 1 The Expression of the Emotions, ist ed., (1872), p. 74. c >" 1 " What is an Emotion? " Mind, 1884, p. 189.
/ t J* f dwell on the details of the accompanying move ments, but it does dwell upon them and is concen trated upon them when its object is to conceal them. Eliminate, in short, all trace of organic disturbance, all tendency towards muscular contraction, and all that will be left of anger will be the idea, or, if you still insist on making it an emotion, you will be unable to assign it any intensity.
" Fear, when strong," says Herbert Spencer, " expresses itself in cries, in efforts to escape, in palpitations, in tremblings." l We go refl«sl move- further, and maintain that these movewsentiai °dif- ments form part of the terror itself: by ferencc be-,,,-, -, tween inten- their means the terror becomes an emotion capable of passing through violent "^mo- different degrees of intensity. Suppress them entirely, and the more or less intense state of terror will be succeeded by an idea of terror, the wholly intellectual representation of a danger which it concerns us to avoid. There are also high degrees of joy and sorrow, of desire, aversion and even shame, the height of which will be found to be nothing but the reflex movements begun by the organism and perceived by conscious ness. ' When lovers meet," says Darwin, " we know that their hearts beat quickly, their breathing is hurried and their faces flushed." 2 Aversion is marked by movements of repugnance which we repeat without noticing when we think of the 1 Principles of Psychology, 3rd. ed., (1890), Vol. i, p. 482. 1 The Expression of the Emotions, ist ed., p. 78.
CHAP, i VIOLENT EMOTIONS 31 object of our dislike. We blush and involuntarily clench the fingers when we feel shame, even if it be retrospective. The acuteness of these emotions is estimated by the number and nature of the peripheral sensations which accompany them. Little by little, and in proportion as the emotional state loses its violence and gains in depth, the peripheral sensations will give place to inner states; it will be no longer our outward move ments but our ideas, our memories, our states of consciousness of every description, which will turn in larger or smaller numbers in a definite direction. There is, then, no essential difference from the point of view of intensity between the deep-seated feelings, of which we spoke at the beginning, and the acute or violent emotions which we have just passed in review. To say that love, hatred, desire, increase in violence is to assert that they are projected outwards, that they radiate to the surface, that peripheral sensations are substituted for inner states: but super ficial or deep-seated, violent or reflective, the intensity of these feelings always consists in the multiplicity of simple states which consciousness dimly discerns in them.
We have hitherto confined ourselves to feelings and efforts, complex states the intensity of which Magnitude of does not absolutely depend on an exsensations.. Affective and ternal cause. But sensations seem to us representative sensations. simple states i in what will their magnitude consist? The intensity of sensations varies with the external cause of which they are said to be the conscious equivalent: how shall we explain the presence of quantity in an effect which is inextensive, and in this case indivisible? To answer this question, we must first distinguish between the so-called affective and the representative sensa tions. There is no doubt that we pass gradually from the one to the other and that some affective element enters into the majority of our simple representations. But nothing prevents us from isolating this element and inquiring separately, in what does the intensity of an affective sensation, a pleasure or a pain, consist?
Perhaps the difficulty of the latter problem is prin cipally due to the fact that we are unwilling to see Affective sen- m tne affective state anything but the "redo S?- conscious expression of an organic disturbirbanoe. ^HCC, the mward echo Qf an outwar(i CaUS6.
We notice that a more intense sensation generally corresponds to a greater nervous disturbance; but inasmuch as these disturbances are uncon scious as movements, since they come before con sciousness in the guise of a sensation which has no resemblance at all to motion, we do not see how they could transmit to the sensation anything of their own magnitude. For there is nothing in common, we repeat, between superposable magnitudes such as, for example, vibrationamplitudes, and sensations which do not occupy CHAP, i AFFECTIVE SENSATIONS 33 space. If the more intense sensation seems to us to contain the less intense, if it assumes for us, like the physical impression itself, the form of a magnitude, the reason probably is that it retains something of the physical impression to which it j, corresponds. And it will retain nothing of it if it * is merely the conscious translation of a movement of molecules; for, just because this movement is translated into the sensation of pleasure or pain, it remains unconscious as molecular movement.
But it might be asked whether pleasure and pain, instead of expressing only what has just pleasure and occurred, or what is actually occurring, m *ne organism, as is usually believed, could not also point out what is going to, or what is tending to take place. It past stimulus. seems indeed somewhat improbable that nature, so profoundly utilitarian, should have here assigned to consciousness the merely scientific task of informing us about the past or the present, which no longer depend upon us. It must be noticed in addition that we rise by imperceptible stages from automatic to free movements, and that the latter differ from the former principally in introducing an affective sensation between the external action which occasions them and the volitional reaction which ensues. Indeed, all our actions might have been automatic, and we can surmise that there are many organized beings in whose case an external stimulus causes a definite reaction without calling up consciousness as an intermediate agent. If pleasure and pain make their appearance in certain privileged beings, it is probably to call forth a resistance to the automatic reaction which would have taken place: either sensation has nothing to do, or it is nascent free dom. But how would it enable us to resist the reaction which is in preparation if it did not acquaint us with the nature of the latter by some definite sign? And what can this sign be except the sketching, and, as it were, the prefiguring of the future automatic movements in the very midst of the sensation which is being experienced? The affective state must then correspond not merely to the physical disturbances, movements or phe nomena which have taken place, but also, and especially, to those which are in preparation, those which are getting ready to be.
It is certainly not obvious at first sight how this hypothesis simplifies the problem. For we are intensity oi trYmg to ^n^ wnat there can be in common, from the point of view of magnitude» between a physical phenomenon an(* a state °f consciousness, and we seem to have merely turned the difficulty round by making the present state of consciousness a sign of the future reaction, rather than a psychic translation of the past stimulus. But the difference between the two hypotheses is considerable. For the molecular disturbances which were mentioned just now are necessarily unconscious, since no trace of the movements connsciobuesne°ssr CHAP, i AFFECTIVE SENSATIONS 35 themselves can be actually perceived in the sensation which translates them. But the auto matic movements which tend to follow the stimulus as its natural outcome are likely to be conscious as movements: or else the sensation itself, whose function is to invite us to choose between this automatic reaction and other possible movements, would be of no avail. The intensity of affective sensations might thus be nothing more than our consciousness of the involuntary movements which are being begun and outlined, so to speak, within these states, and which would have gone on in their own way if nature had made us automata instead of conscious beings.
If such be the case, we shall not compare a pain of increasing intensity to a note which grows louder and louder, but rather to a Intensity o! a...pain estim- symphony, in which an increasing numated by extent / r •,,1 of organism ber of instruments make themselves heard. Within the characteristic sen sation, which gives the tone to all the others, consciousness distinguishes a larger or smaller number of sensations arising at different points of the periphery, muscular contractions, organic movements of every kind: the choir of these elementary psychic states voices the new demands of the organism, when confronted by a new situa tion. In other words, we estimate the intensity of a pain by the larger or smaller part of the organism which takes interest in it. Richet l has observed that the slighter the pain, the more precisely is it referred to a particular spot; if it becomes more intense, it is referred to the whole of the member affected. And he concludes by saying that " the pain spreads in proportion as it is more intense." l We should rather reverse the sentence, and define the intensity of the pain by the very number and extent of the parts of the body which sympathize with it and react, and whose reactions are perceived by conscious ness. To convince ourselves of this, it will be enough to read the remarkable description of disgust given by the same author: "If the stimu lus is slight there may be neither nausea nor vomiting...If the stimulus is stronger, in stead of being confined to the pneumo-gastric nerve, it spreads and affects almost the whole organic system. The face turns pale, the smooth muscles of the skin contract, the skin is covered with a cold perspiration, the heart stops beating: in a word there is a general organic disturbance following the stimulation of the medulla oblongata, and this disturbance is the supreme expression of disgust." * But is it nothing more than its expression? In what will the general sensa tion of disgust consist, if not in the sum of these elementary sensations? And what can we un derstand here by increasing intensity, if it is not the constantly increasing number of sensations AFFECTIVE SENSATIONS 37 which join in with the sensations already experi enced? Darwin has drawn a striking picture of the reactions following a pain which becomes more and more acute. " Great pain urges all animals...to make the most violent and diversified efforts to escape from the cause of suffering...With men the mouth may be closely compressed, or more commonly the lips are retracted with the teeth clenched or ground together...The eyes stare wildly...or the brows are heavily contracted. Perspiration bathes the body...The cir culation and respiration are much affected."1 Now, is it not by this very contraction of the muscles affected that we measure the intensity of a pain? Analyse your idea of any suffering which you call extreme: do you not mean that it is unbearable, that is to say, that it urges the organism to a thousand different actions in order to escape from it? I can picture to myself a nerve transmitting a pain which is independent of all automatic reaction; and I can equally understand that stronger or weaker stimulations influence this nerve differently. But I do not see how these differences of sensation would be interpreted by our consciousness as differences of quantity unless we connected them with the reactions which usually accompany them, and which are more or less extended and more or 1 The Expression of the Emotions, ist ed., pp. 72, 69, 70.
less important. Without these subsequent re actions, the intensity of the pain would be a quality, and not a magnitude.
We have hardly any other means of comparing several pleasures with one another. What do pleasures com- we mean bY a §reater pleasure except a S"taci5ation! pleasure that is preferred? And what can our preference be, except a certain disposition of our organs, the effect of which is that, when two pleasures are offered simultane ously to our mind, our body inclines towards one of them? Analyse this inclination itself and you will find a great many little movements which begin and become perceptible in the organs con cerned, and even in the rest of the body, as if the organism were coming forth to meet the pleasure as soon as it is pictured. When we define inclina tion as a movement, we are not using a metaphor. When confronted by several pleasures pictured by our mind, our body turns towards one of them spontaneously, as though by a reflex action. It rests with us to check it, but the attraction of the pleasure is nothing but this movement that is begun, and the very keenness of the plea sure, while we enjoy it, is merely the inertia of the organism, which is immersed in it and rejects every other sensation. Without this vis inertiae of which we become conscious by the very resistance which we offer to anything that might distract us, pleasure would be a state, but no longer a magnitude. In the moral as in CHAP, i REPRESENTATIVE SENSATIONS 39 the physical world, attraction serves to define movement rather than to produce it.
We have studied the affective sensations separ ately, but we must now notice that many repre- The intensity sentative sensations possess an affective tive sensations, character, andthus call forth a reaction Many also af-.
fectiveandin- on our part which we take into account forth, in siderable increase of light is represented others a new.,...
element enters- for us by a characteristic sensation which is not yet pain, but which is analogous to dazzling. In proportion as the amplitude of sound-vibrations increases, our head and then our body seem to us to vibrate or to receive a shock. Certain representative sensations, those of taste, smell and temperature, have a fixed character of pleasantness or unpleasantness. Between flavours which are more or less bitter you will hardly distinguish anything but differ ences of quality; they are like different shades of one and the same colour. But these differ ences of quality are at once interpreted as differ ences of quantity, because of their affective char acter and the more or less pronounced movements of reaction, pleasure or repugnance, which they suggest to us. Besides, even when the sensation remains purely representative, its external cause cannot exceed a certain degree of strength or weakness without inciting us to movements which enable us to measure it. Sometimes indeed