EDUCATION AS A SCIENCE. 401 



feelings are painful ; the progress here is not so tedious nor so liable 

 to thwarting and interruption. 



With understood exceptions, pleasure is related physically with 

 vitality, health, vigor, harmonious adjustment of all the parts of the 

 system ; it needs sufficiency of nutriment or support, excitement with- 

 in due limits, the absence of everything that could mar or irritate any 

 organ. Pain comes of the deficiency in any of these conditions, and 

 is therefore as easy to bring about and maintain as the other is diffi- 

 cult. To evoke an echo or recollection of pleasure, is to secure, or at 

 least to simulate, the copiousness, the due adjustment and harmony 

 of the powers. Tliis may be easy enough when such is the actual state 

 at the time, but that is no test. What we need is to induce a pleasui*- 

 able tone, when the actuality is no more than indifferent or neutral, 

 and even, in the midst of actual pain, to restore pleasure by force of 

 mental adhesiveness. A growth of this description is, on a priori 

 grounds, not likely to be very soon reached. 



On the other hand, pain is easy in the actual, and easy in the ideal. 

 It is easy to burn one's fingers, and easy to associate pain with a flame, 

 a cinder, a hot iron. Going as spectators to visit a fine mansion, we 

 feel in some degree elated by the associations of enjoyment ; but we 

 are apt to be in a still greater degree depressed by entering the 

 abodes of wretchedness, or visiting the gloomy chambers of a prison. 



II. The facility of painful growths is not fully comprehended, un- 

 til we advert to the case of passionate outbursts or the modes of feel- 

 ing whose characteristic is explosiveness. These costly discharges 

 of vital energy are easy to induce at first hand, and easy to attach to 

 indifferent things, so as to be induced at second hand likewise. Very 

 rarely are they desirable in themselves ; our study is to check and 

 control them in their original operation, and to hinder the rise of new 

 occasions for their display. One of the best examples is terror, an 

 explosive and wasteful manifestation of energy under certain forms 

 of pain. If it is frequently stimulated by its proper causes, it attaches 

 itself to by-standing circumstances with fatal readiness, and proceeds 

 with no tardy steps. Next is irascibility, also an explosive emotion. 

 It too, if ready to burst out by its primary causes, soon enlarges its 

 borders by new associations. It is in every way more dangerous 

 than terror. The state of fear is so miserable that we would restrain 

 it if we could ; the state of anger, although containing painful ele- 

 ments, is in its nature a luxurious mood ; and we may not wish either 

 to check it in the first instance, or to prevent it from spreading over 

 collateral things. When any one has stirred our irascibility to its 

 depths, the feeling overflows upon all that relates to him. If this be 

 pleasure, it is a pleasure of rapid growth ; even in tender years we 

 may be advanced in hatreds. That combination of terror and iras- 

 cibility giving rise to what is named antipathy is (unless strongly re- 

 sisted) a state easy to assume and easy to cultivate, and is in wide 



VOL. XI, 26 



