The evil results, as Ribot remarks, are largely confined to those individuals in whom the quest for pleasure has the force of an obsession. But on the view of pleasure which we have indicated above, it is clear that all those doctrines, very common in critical literature, which set up pleasure as the goal of activity, are mistaken. Every activity has its own specific goal. Pleasure very probably ensues in most cases when this goal is reached, but that is a different matter. To read a poem for the sake of the pleasure which will ensue if it is successfully read is to approach it in an inadequate attitude. Obviously it is the poem in which we should be interested, not in a by-product of having managed successfully to read it. The orientation of attention is wrong if we put the pleasure in the forefront. Such a mistake is perhaps not common among instructed persons, but to judge by many remarks which appear in reviews and dramatic notices the percentage of instructed persons among reviewers and theatre-goers does not seem high. This error, a legacy in part from the criticism of an age which had a still poorer psychological vocabulary[44] than Our own, is one reason why Tragedy, for example, is so often misapproached. It is no less absurd to suppose that a competent reader sits down to read for the sake of pleasure, than to suppose that a mathematician sets out to solve an equation with a view to the pleasure its solution will afford him. The pleasure in both cases may, of course, be very great. But the pleasure, however great it may be, is no more the aim of the activity in the course of which it arises, than, for example, the noise made by a motor-cycle—useful though it is as an indication of the way the machine is running—is the reason in the normal case for its having been started. This very common mistake noted, the significance of pleasure and unpleasure may be insisted upon without misgiving. They are our most delicate signs of how our activities are thriving. But since even the most intense delight may indicate only a local success and the activity be generally detrimental, they are signs which need a very wary interpretation. [41] Titchener, _Text-book of Psychology_, p. 248. [42] Into conjectures as to what these are, it seems as yet not profitable to enter. [43] _Problèmes de Psychologie affective_, pp. 141-144. [44] It is probable that Wordsworth and certain that Coleridge if writing to-day would use quite other terms in place of pleasure for describing poetic values. CHAPTER XIII Emotion and the Cœnesthesia They are the silent griefs that cut the heart-strings. _The Broken Heart_.