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SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. I. No. 16. 



experience. There is one more to mention. 

 Tiiis self of ours, this ' I,' which is ex- 

 posed to the physical changes in the world 

 in part, and in part helps to bring about 

 physical changes in the world by moving to 

 and fro in it, is not indifferent to what goes 

 on in either case. It does not just have 

 ideas, on the one hand ; and attend to them 

 or move in consequence of them, on the 

 other. It does more ; it feels. It feels 

 when impressions come in ; it feels when 

 efforts go out. So that alongside of ideas 

 and efforts must come a third category of 

 m.ental experience — feelings. Feeling is of 

 two kinds, pleasurable and painful. It is 

 quite distinct in consciousness from idea- 

 tion, and from effort and attention. That 

 is another of the points which arise at the 

 very beginnings of a study of psychology 

 that it is extremely difficult to get clear 

 about — that pleasure and pain, as such, be- 

 long to an entirely different order of pro- 

 cesses from the processes which we call col- 

 lectively ideas. But it is a fact, despite 

 the intimate interconnection of the two in 

 our concrete experience. Let me try to 

 drive it home for you by two illustrations. 

 You cannot remember a pleasure or pain. 

 When you try to recall the pain of a flog- 

 ging that you had at school, what you re- 

 call is really only the complex of percep- 

 tions, not the pain itself. You remember 

 all the circumstances — ^your being sen- 

 tenced, the people standing round you, the 

 room in which the fatal event took place, 

 the master who did the deed. All these 

 are ideas. But so far are you from being 

 able to remember the actual pain of the 

 flogging that the memory of the circum- 

 stances to-day may be actually pleasant ; 

 you smile as you look back on them. That 

 is the first illustration ; the second is this: 

 You cannot attend to a pleasure or pain as 

 such. It is a common saying that if you 

 attend to a toothache, for instance, you 

 ' make it worse.' That is bad psychology. 



You attend, in reality, to the tooth. That 

 means that you perceive the tooth more 

 clearly than anj^thing else for the time 

 being ; your idea of the tooth is the very 

 strongest in consciousness. But by attend- 

 ing to the idea and so making it clearer, 

 the feeling that goes along with the idea 

 is made clearer, too. So the pain ' gets 

 worse,' not because you attended to it, 

 but because you attended to the group 

 of perceptions with which it was con- 

 nected. 



Now, then, we have got our raw material 

 into something like order. Consciousness, 

 instead of being a shapeless tangle and maze 

 of various intertwined and interwoven pro- 

 cesses — as it appeared to us to be when we 

 started out on our enquiry — has proved to 

 be capable of arrangement and simplifica- 

 tion. You may, it is true, raise the objec- 

 tion that our table of contents is, perhaps, 

 not inclusive of every known mental state. 

 Where, you may ask, is emotion ; where is 

 expectation ; where are all the rest of the 

 familiar terms for mental experiences'? 

 Well, you must take my word for it, that 

 all these other states of mind or mental ex- 

 periences can be derived from the tlu-ee 

 simple processes which I have named to 

 you . If you were to work through a psy- 

 chology, you would find that there was 

 nothing treated of, in any chapter of it, 

 which was not a compound of these three 

 sets of elements — ideas, feeling-s and eflbrts 

 — mixed in different proportions. And that 

 being the case, it is these three elements 

 with which psychology begins. She first 

 of all describes them, as minutelj^ and accu- 

 rately as possible ; and then furnishes a the- 

 ory or an explanation of them, in the sense 

 that she gives the conditions, bodilj- and 

 mental, of their appearance in consciousness. 

 Under what conditions do we have this and 

 this perception ? Under what conditions 

 do we remember and imagine? Under 

 what conditions do we feel so and so, attend 



