98 The Triunity of Personality [CH. 



painful emotion, though I feel pain after it. The emo- 

 tion that is associated with pain is not the effect of the 

 blow, but the way in which my mind expresses some- 

 thing that lies behind and originates a suitable volition 

 and action to the afferent stimulus of the blow, which 

 is itself an experience of limitation. If I were not 

 limited, the blow would not hurt. Indeed it would be 

 impossible. But stick and the emotion associated with 

 the sensation of pain belong to totally different cate- 

 gories, and one cannot cause the other. Strict causality 

 only holds when the action moves within one category. 

 No doubt the emotion is related to pain, when the whole 

 is considered. But the point with which we are con- 

 cerned is, that this relation is not one of strict causality, 

 but is dependent on the fact that the being who is con- 

 scious of the emotion is free in some measure, limited 

 in some measure. In short, the possibility of the 

 pain-emotion is rooted in the whole nature of personal 

 being as creative, and so self-limiting. To return to the 

 illustration we used awhile ago, the call of a child in 

 pain. There is a causal chain linking the call to the 

 effect on my ear, another linking my will to help with 

 my approach to the child ; but there is a break at each 

 end. The child is free to call, and chooses to call, I am 

 free to interpret the call, and to rush to help. But be- 

 cause the child and I are, in different degrees, thinking 

 beings, the whole process does not move simply in the 

 plane of causality : freedom comes in the freedom of a 

 true emotion. The case is a good one for illustrative 

 purposes, since the partial development of the child's 

 personality is intermediate between the man whose free- 

 dom of emotion is large, and the animal which is almost 

 without freedom, and in which the pain-sensation pro- 

 duces a reflex, practically untinged by emotion. Pain 

 itself, then, is simply the sensation-link which relates 

 the limited mediating function of cognition which 



