690 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



consist only in filling a pre-existing void, without anything more, and 

 thus simply re-establishing an equilibrium ? If it were so, the equilib- 

 rium would produce a mental condition of consciousness and feeling, 

 or immobility, and there would be no evolution. What causes enjoy- 

 ment in satisfying a want, such as the want of food or exercise, is that 

 there is, relatively to the previous condition, a surplus, and hence a 

 movement of progression in which is continuously produced an excess 

 as compared with what we have just got, and we are enriched above 

 our previous poverty. It is not, therefore, simple suppression of pain 

 that constitutes sensual enjoyment, for that would be merely neutrali- 

 zation of the former condition by the after condition. Enjoyment is 

 constituted by the suppression of pain plus an excess, which produces 

 a progress, not a rest, of activity. The painful condition of hunger is 

 composed of an infinite number of rudimentary pains. The pleasure 

 which we feel in restoring our forces is a continual victory over these 

 rudiments of pain, and produces something like the accelerated velocity 

 of a moving body. But a continual victory is a continual surplus, and 

 it is this surplus that makes the pleasure. Hence, not only does pleasure 

 not require for its existence a previous want, but even when it succeeds 

 a real want, as in many of the pleasures of the senses, it is neverthe- 

 less in itself independent of the want, or essentiaHy positive. We can 

 not, then, with Messrs. Leslie Stephen and Delbceuf, locate pleasure 

 in the simple feeling of a normal equilibrium. Even in the act of 

 eating, the pleasure felt incites the expenditure of energy, and the 

 equilibrium is not reached till satiety causes the action to cease. The 

 feeling of equilibrium only constitutes a general and fundamental com- 

 fort, very near to indifference. We can not be satisfied, either, with say- 

 ing, with Mr. Spencer, that equilibrium is the accompaniment of normal 

 action. To our mind pleasure, as a distinct emotion, appears precisely 

 when the limit of normal action has been passed, for it supposes, at 

 whatever point, a richness. We go, then, to the end of the way opened 

 to us by the great philosophers, and define pleasure as the feeling of 

 : a surplus of activity. Its relation to pain only marks the beginnings, 

 not the end, of evolution and selection ; it is primary, but not defini- 

 tive; it is accidental, but not essential. 



We now turn to the final and fundamental question Is pain the 

 sole motive to activity, and consequently the real motive power of 

 universal evolution ? This discouraging doctrine maybe found among 

 other psychologists than Schopenhauer and the pessimists, and they 

 have not always drawn from it the moral, metaphysical, and religious 

 consequences that they might have drawn. According to Mr. Leslie 

 Stephen, pleasure, being a condition of equilibrium, is for that reason 

 a state of satisfaction in which there is a tendency to persist. Mr. 

 Rolph (" Biologische Probleme") remarks that it is a state which we 

 seek to prolong, and can therefore never be the cause of a change of 

 condition. W x hen it is objected to this, that man when, for example, 



