Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of FeelingStanley, Hiram Miner
Philosophy
Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling
Stanley, Hiram Miner
Emotions
Comte, indeed, acutely remarks (_Positive Philosophy_, vol. 1, p. 463)
that “daily experience shows that the affections, the propensities, the
passions, are the great springs of human life; and that, so far from
resulting from intelligence, their spontaneous and independent impulse
is indispensable to the first awakening and continuous development of
the various intellectual faculties.” He here assumes the introspection
which he elsewhere denies as psychological method, and enunciates an
important principle which he never carried out. Horwicz has made a
survey of feeling as fundamental aspect of mind, but his discussion is
physiological.
Our conclusions have been founded on general considerations and on the
phenomena of growth of mind in general and particular. Another line of
evidence would be decadent mind. Mental powers should decline and vanish
in the reverse of the general order in which they arose; the order of
disappearance should be the reverse of appearance, and if pain-pleasure
be primitive, we should expect to find it both the first conscious
element in infancy and the last in old age. The last stage of senility
seems sensitive only to organic pleasures and pains. Further, old age
does not so much seek pleasure as guard against pains, and this fact is
in line with our treatment of pain as prior to pleasure and more
fundamental than it. We may consider it likely that conscious life in
the individual begins with a pain and ends with a pain. Senile
psychology on this and other points is worthy of far more attention than
it has received, for it is on the whole more accessible and trustworthy
than infant psychology.
With regard to Mr. H. R. Marshall’s remarks (_Philosophical Review_,
vol. 1, p. 632), it is sufficient to say that I lay no great emphasis on
either pain or pleasure being the first fact of consciousness; but my
main contention is that the primitive facts of consciousness are of the
pain-pleasure type. While I have noticed some considerations as implying
pain to be the first consciousness phenomenon, yet I am satisfied that
pain and pleasure are correlative and complementary, each implying the
other. Further, I do not regard pain as “primal sense,” but as primal
fact. Pain is not in any wise a sense, and sense of pain can only mean
capacity for pain, or actual pain experience.
Again, I do not, as Mr. Marshall implies, regard pain as the
differentiating basis of subsequent evolution, but rather as mere
_prius_ and impetus, and hence I do not look for pain-pleasure to
disappear with mental evolution, nor yet to mark divisions in
“sensational phenomena”; but it will ever remain in representative
forms, at least, as increasingly complex stimulant of all mental life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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