154 S. J. HOLMES 



pain can he agents of accommodation and development only if the one 

 pleasure, carry with it the phenomenon of "motor excess," and the other, 

 pain, the reverse — probably some form of inhibition or of antagonistic 

 contraction. 



The theories of Spencer, Bain and Baldwin are physiological 

 since they attempt to explain the modifications of behavior, not 

 through the influence of certain states, but as the effect of the 

 physiological conditions of which these states are the concomi- 

 tants. The theories are all open to the objection that pleasure is 

 by no means the constant concomitant of heightened nervous 

 discharge. Laughing and crying are very similar in their physio- 

 logical expression though they go along with very different psychic 

 states. A child who burns his hands and writhes about in agony 

 certainly manifests a heightened nervous discharge, but he shows 

 no tendency to put his hands again into the fire. Another out- 

 reaching movement of the child brings his hands towards a pleas- 

 ant degree of warmth. The movement tends to be repeated. 

 The nervous discharge in the first case is much greater than in 

 the second, but in both cases it goes to the arm, though along 

 somewhat different nerves. It is obvious, I think, that we can- 

 not account for the difference between the responses to pleasurable 

 and painful stimuli on the basis of any quantitative difference in 

 the discharges to the part affected. It is a matter of nervous 

 connection rather than quantity of nervous energy. 



Pain-giving stimuli, owing to the arrangement of an animal's 

 reflex arcs, are generally followed by a withdrawing movement of 

 the part stimulated, but that there is a tendency for the "in- 

 creased energy of the pleasure process" to flow "into the channels 

 of the movement associated with the pleasure' ' (that is, I take 

 it, the movement which brings pleasure) is by no means evident. 

 There is, I think, no primary tendency, as Spencer and Bain seem 

 to think, for the nervous discharge to take the direction of the 

 organ from which the pleasure is derived. Animals, it is true, 

 move so as to bring an organ which is pleasantly stimulated again 

 under the action of the stimulus, but this is often due to the dis- 

 charge going mainly to a quite different part of the body, such 

 as distant appendages, instead of the part directly affected. 



