

vii ASSIMILATION AND READJUSTMENT 119 



The analogy may be carried a little further. Confining 

 ourselves for the moment to the action of pain and the 

 case in which a mode of reaction is inhibited, we have to 

 remark that the act of inhibition is of a twofold character. 

 We have spoken already of the subsequent and more or 

 less permanent effect of the painful experience, but this is 

 only a sort of repetition of its immediate effect. If there 

 is time, pain inhibits or arrests the particular action that 

 is causing it. A nasty morsel is spat out from the mouth ; 

 the hot potato is dropped before it is well seized. It is the 

 same with the chicks. The orange-peel, the very first 

 time it is seized, is " at once relinquished, the chick 

 shaking his head." Another is held for a moment, and then 

 dropped, the chick scratching "at the base of his beak" 

 to rub away the taste, as a child would explain. Significant 

 in this relation is the behaviour of another chick, which had 

 already had experience of cinnabar larvae. When, later in 

 the day, more were given him, he "ran but checked him- 

 self, and without touching the caterpillar, wiped his bill." 

 Mr. Lloyd Morgan explains this as due to c< a memory of 

 the nasty taste" being " suggested by association at sight 



and we do not understand all its expressions so readily. Still, the 

 inference is at bottom the same, and the attribution of feeling to the 

 chick is in conformity with the general principles of method laid down 

 in Chapter II. 



Here and elsewhere I use the term "feeling "as the generic expression 

 for every state in so far as it interests the agent. Of such interest two 

 things seem universally true. It is not a detached, so to say self-subsistent, 

 state, but adheres to or inheres in some object, or if the term be preferred, 

 some content. Thus in sensory feeling it is an object of sense which is 

 felt as pleasant or painful. In some experiences, e.g., in internal pain, it 

 is true that the feeling is itself the predominant factor, but even here 

 there is some more or less definite recognisable quality, e.g., a diffused 

 ache or pressure, or a sharp sting which so to say is the subject carrying 

 the pain as predicate, and we approach rather than reach the limit of 

 pure feeling without sensory content. Secondly, feeling is the basis of 

 conation but not the same thing as conation. In the simplest forms the 

 two tend to identity simple sensory pain, e.g., involving either flinching 

 or efforts of rejection as part of itself, but the feeling as such is not the 

 act as such. It is its immediate basis. Pain, moreover, as I use the 

 term, is always (in the absence of inhibition) the basis of a negative 

 conation. Apparent exceptions arise from the fact that intensity is an 

 essential element in feeling, whence it comes about that some sensations, 

 e.g., those of a prick or a slap, while normally painful may be indifferent 

 or even in certain states of organic tension pleasurable in low degrees of 

 intensity. In these cases the sensory experience has acquired the name of a 

 " pain," and so we hear of pains in which there may be a certain pleasure. 



