554 PSYCHOLOGY. 



student, a friend of my own, had to pass the window daily in 

 coming and going from his room, and experienced a dread- 

 ful temptation to imitate the deed. Being a Catholic, he told 

 his director, who said, ' All right ! if you must, you must,' 

 and added, ' Go ahead and do it,' thereby instantly quench- 

 ing his desire. This director knew how to minister to a 

 mind diseased. But we need not go to minds diseased for 

 examples of the occasional tempting-power of simjjle bad- 

 ness and unpleasantness as such. Every one who has a 

 wound or hurt anywhere, a sore tooth, e.g., will ever and 

 anon press it just to bring out the pain. If we are near a 

 new sort of stink, we must sniff it again just to verify once 

 more how bad it is. This very day I have been repeating 

 over and over to myself a verbal jingle whose mawkish 

 silliness was the secret of its haunting power. I loathed 

 yet could not banish it. 



Believers in the pleasure-and-pain theory must thus, 

 if they are candid, make large exceptions in the application 

 of their creed. Action from ' fixed ideas ' is accordingly 

 a terrible stumbling-block to the candid Professor Bain. 

 Ideas have in his psychology no impulsive but only a 'guid- 

 ing ' function, whilst 



" The pi'oper stimulus of the will, namely, some variety of pleasure 

 and pain, is needed to give the impetus. . . . The intellectual link is 

 not sufficient for causing the deed to rise at the beck of the idea 

 (except in case of an 'idee fixe') ;" but " should any pleasure spring 

 up or be continued, by performing an action that we clearly conceive, 

 the causation is then complete ; both the directing and the moving 

 powers are present." * 



Pleasures and pains are for Professor Bain the * genuine 

 impulses of the will.' f 



"Without an antecedent of pleasurable or painful feeling — actual 

 or ideal, primary or derivative — the will cannot be stimulated. Through 



* Emotion and Will, p. 353. But even Bain's own description belies 

 his formula, for the idea appears as the ' moving ' and the pleasure as 

 the ' directing ' force. 



f P. 398 



