I2I4 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



more exacting disciplines, seem not yet to have reached an adequate 

 evolutionary presentment. Yet as we break away from the apsychic 

 convention of mechanistic biology, and follow Darwin's pioneering 

 in his Expression of the Emotions upwards throughout the animal 

 series, the extending range and deepening intensity of feeling 

 become increasingly manifest, and this at times up to emotional 

 expression which we cannot but realise as essentially akin to our 

 own; as fundamentally connected with the self -maintaining and 

 species-maintaining urges and activities, satisfactions, or failures. 

 The correlation of the organism is towards its general well-being; 

 and this as coenaesthesia essentially pleasurable, as the face of the 

 sleeping babe is enough to show — for this must be surely but a 

 typical culmination for the organic series, and not an exception to 

 it. Ihe child or adult when out of sorts again indicates, in the sub- 

 conscious, what may next sharply arise to consciousness as pain. 

 Hence may not — indeed, must not — pain have had great influence 

 and impulse in the awakening of self-consciousness generally. 



What idea is more familiar than that we do not appreciate good 

 health until we experience its deterioration or disturbance ? For the 

 like reason, psychologists have often more or less ignored pleasure 

 as normal and positive, and treated it rather as a neutral state 

 from which pain arouses us; so essentially from its abatement or 

 disappearance do we recognise pleasure. Such a view, however 

 satisfactory it may seem in simple cases, like relief from toothache 

 or seasickness, may also be supported by reference to the dulled 

 activity, the subsidence of the joy of life, too common in mam- 

 malian adults other than our own species ; but not as a real present- 

 ment of the manifestly happy immaturity of child and kitten, of 

 puppy and lamb alike. But if we were to venture psychologically 

 to interpret developmental characters as recapitulatory of race- 

 history, as we so much do in embryology, have we not a saddened 

 picture of mammalian maturity; and perhaps of that of other lines 

 of evolution as well, as of degeneration from some early Eden of 

 universal joy? Yet surely not for the birds, who instead of exhibiting 

 such adult depression, show rather the opposite as they mature, 

 unless in captivity. Indeed! are there not reasons for ascribing to 

 the captivity of domestication no small share of the depression of 

 active pleasure we see alike in our animals and in each other; 

 though hardly the whole. 



In any case we cannot be satisfied by a too simply physiological 

 treatment, such as Dr. Bousfield's, in his recent Pleasure and Pain, 

 for which "pain is the mental result of an increase of organic tension, 

 within certain limits, and pleasure the result of its rate of reduc- 

 tion". Ably though he develops his thesis, and not without some 

 recognition that there may be pleasures beyond abatement of 

 tensions and their pain, he does not venture into the discussion of 



