But even if we confine our attention to cases where the stimulus is palpable and strong, Mr. Bain’s identification of “pleasure and pain” with motive power does not appear to me to accord exactly with our common empirical judgments. He himself contrasts the “disproportionate strain of active powers in one direction,” to which “any sudden and great delight may give rise,” with the “proper frame of mind under delight,” which is “to inspire no endeavours except what the charm of the moment justifies.”[103] And he elsewhere explains that “our pleasurable emotions are all liable to detain the mind unduly,” through the “atmosphere of excitement” with which they are surrounded, carrying the mind “beyond the estimate of pleasure and pain, to the state named ‘passion,’” in which a man is not “moved solely by the strict value of the pleasure,” but also by “the engrossing power of the excitement.”[104] It is true that in such cases Mr. Bain seems to hold that these “disturbances and anomalies of the will _scarcely_ begin to tell in the actual feeling,”[105] but it seems to me clear that exciting pleasures are liable to exercise, even when actually felt, a volitional stimulus out of proportion to their intensity as pleasures; and Mr. Bain himself seems to recognise this in a passage where he says that “acute pleasures and pains stimulate the will perhaps more strongly than an equivalent stimulation of the massive kind.”[106] I also find that some feelings which stimulate strongly to their own removal are either not painful at all or only slightly painful:--_e.g._ ordinarily the sensation of being tickled. If this be so, it is obviously inexact to define pleasure, _for purposes of measurement_, as the kind of feeling that we seek to retain in consciousness. Shall we then say that there is a measurable quality of feeling expressed by the word “pleasure,” which is independent of its relation to volition, and strictly undefinable from its simplicity?--like the quality of feeling expressed by “sweet,” of which also we are conscious in varying degrees of intensity. This seems to be the view of some writers: but, for my own part, when I reflect on the notion of pleasure,--using the term in the comprehensive sense which I have adopted, to include the most refined and subtle intellectual and emotional gratifications, no less than the coarser and more definite sensual enjoyments,--the only common quality that I can find in the feelings so designated seems to be that relation to desire and volition expressed by the general term “desirable,” in the sense previously explained. I propose therefore to define Pleasure--when we are considering its “strict value” for purposes of quantitative comparison--as a feeling which, when experienced by intelligent beings, is at least implicitly apprehended as desirable or--in cases of comparison--preferable.