emotional, stimulate the muscles (_Essays_, 1st series, p. 360, 1,
or 2d ed. Vol. I. p. 211, 12). Pain, however (and also pleasure when
very intense), simultaneously has an inhibitory effect on all the
reflex actions; and as the vital functions in general are carried on
by reflex actions, this inhibition, increasing with the intensity
of the pain, proportionately depresses the vital functions. Arrest
of the heart's action and fainting is an extreme result of this
inhibition; and the viscera at large feel its effects in degrees
proportioned to the degrees of pain. Pain, therefore, while directly
causing a discharge of muscular energy as pleasure does, eventually
lowers muscular power by lowering those vital processes on which the
supply of energy depends. Hence we cannot, I think, ascribe the
prompt desistance from muscular movements causing pain, to decrease
in the flow of energy; for this decrease is felt only after an
interval. Conversely, we cannot ascribe the persistence in a muscular
act which yields pleasure to the resulting exaltation of energy; but
must, as indicated in § 33, ascribe it to the establishment of lines
of discharge between the place of pleasurable stimulation and those
contractile structures which maintain and increase the act causing
the stimulation--connections allied with the reflex, into which they
pass by insensible gradations.
CHAPTER VII.
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL VIEW.
§ 40. The last chapter, in so far as it dealt with feelings in their
relations to conduct, recognized only their physiological aspects:
their psychological aspects were passed over. In this chapter,
conversely, we are not concerned with the constitutional connections
between feelings, as incentives or deterrents, and physical benefits to
be gained, or mischiefs to be avoided; nor with the reactive effects
of feelings on the state of the organism, as fitting or unfitting it
for future action. Here we have to consider represented pleasures
and pains, sensational and emotional, as constituting deliberate
motives--as forming factors in the conscious adjustments of acts to
ends.
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