Thus pain, notwithstanding its inhibitive character, may act, especially when it is acute, as a motor incitement. Hence the curious cases of favourable medical effects produced by severe physical suffering, which may serve not only as a distraction of the attention, but also as a positive stimulation of sinking vitality. Hence also the enhanced intellectual activity which often follows upon pain.[56] There was perhaps more malignity than truth in the remark of Michelet that Flaubert might imperil his talent by curing his boils;[57] but there are unquestionable instances to prove that wounds and acute diseases have exercised a powerful exciting influence on certain artistic temperaments. All these stimulating effects of pain must naturally be taken into account in every emotional theory. But they can by no means be adduced, as Fechner thinks, as an argument against the definition which we have already given.[58] Reactions to pain follow, indeed, so immediately upon the sensation, that they cannot be separated in time from its proper expression. But it must always be remembered that the activities, whether of writhing under the influence of pain or of combating it, are secondary manifestations by which the feeling-tone is gradually weakened. Whether the stimulating effects appear at the very moment of impression or only when the sensation has become fully conscious, pain is always, we believe, at its keenest when the outward development of energy is lowest. If the notion “expression” is conceived in its strictest sense, _i.e._ as the physiological counterpart of the emotional state, then pain has only one expression—inhibition.