It is evident that pain as a sign of life and function may be especially welcome when the vital sensation has for any reason become weakened. The self-woundings of the heathen and Christian saints, although no doubt fully justified to the sufferers themselves by religious motives, may thus have had their innermost unconscious motive in an endeavour to overcome that anæsthesia which is so usual an accompaniment of hysterical disturbances.[85] It is hard to believe that the tortures which they inflict upon themselves are really felt as neutral or pleasurable. But we can easily understand that such torture, although more or less painful, may afford a kind of satisfaction by compelling the slow and dull senses to function. Professor Lange has in his work on the emotions laid special stress upon this point. “It is a condition of our well-being,” he says, “that our sensorial centres should be in a certain degree of activity called forth by the impressions which reach them through the sensorial nerves from the outside. If from some cause or other—for instance, from a decrease in the functional powers of these centres—there arises an insensibility, anæsthesia, then we feel a longing to force them to their usual activity by addressing to them an abnormally strong appeal, or, in other words, by intensifying the external impressions and thereby neutralising the insensibility.”[86] This principle has, indeed, as applied by Lange to the expressions of anger, been mercilessly ridiculed by Wundt.[87] But it seems to us that the observation itself can scarcely be contested. Whether we explain it as a case of the indispensability of the accustomed or as the result of some peculiar yearning for life—a soul-desire, as Mr. Jefferies would have called it—a deficient consciousness of function is in most cases distinctly unpleasant. And, on the other hand, it seems as if an increased consciousness of function were _per se_ pleasurable. It is of course difficult to prove by exact argument the existence of a feeling which can be observed only as the innermost concealed motive of our life. But on as strong evidence as can ever be adduced on matters of emotional life, we may believe that in every conscious life there operates a dim instinctive craving for fuller and greater consciousness, or, if the expression be preferred, for the most complete self-realisation. Happiness itself has been defined by a philosopher so little inclined to mysticism as Mr. Brinton, as “the increasing consciousness of self.”[88] It is therefore easy to understand why, when this consciousness has been blunted by some cause or other, we may even long for suffering and pain as a means of escaping the dulness, emptiness, and darkness of insensibility. It may seem to be a disturbance of all normal instincts that pain—an element hostile to vital activity—can thus be preferred to a state the unpleasantness of which is only diffuse. But we have to remember that