However energetically strong emotions may accentuate our existence, and however deeply we may enjoy the “realisation of ourselves” which we find in the violent excitement accompanying them, high-strung states are naturally bound to be followed by exhaustion and stupor. And thus even the intoxication of life, this most powerful of sensations, sooner or later passes its climax and sinks into dull insensibility. The lower the function by the incitement of which the exaltation is produced, the greater probably is its orgiastic power. But its duration is also so much the shorter. A wild dance, for instance, invariably ends in impotent prostration, during which the power of function and sensation is completely exhausted. As long as the mental desire for increased excitement is unsatisfied, this state must be distinctly disagreeable. Hence all the frenetic manifestations by which man, when raging in insatiable exaltation, strives to awake and rouse his failing powers of enjoyment. In the whole domain of comparative psychology there can scarcely be adduced an example which throws so much light on the orgiastic state of mind as the Bacchanal frenzy. And the descriptions of this “Dionysischer Zustand” which are to be found in classic literature give us the most complete idea of the various expedients by which the devotee tries to maintain and increase his state of exaltation in spite of the growing tendency to relaxation. By noise, roaring, and loud cries, by frenetic dance and wild actions, the “Maenads” strive to preserve and recover the fading sense of life, which ever baffles their exertions. And as the last, infallible means of excitement, resorted to when all other stimulations have proved unable to stir up the dulled senses, we may explain the tortures which the partly insensible Bacchante inflicts upon herself. “Suum Bacchis non sentit saucia vulnus.”[91] There are various kinds of orgiastic exaltation connected with self-torture—as that of the tarantella dancers, of the dervishes, of the shamans, and others—in which the creation of pain-sensations may be explained as a desperate device for enhancing the intensity of the emotional state. Acute pain often makes it possible to overcome momentarily the exhaustion or the dulness which unfits us for work. And it is evident that pain may produce a similar excitement when we require an increase of energy, not for the sake of obtaining the greatest possible result from a working activity, but for the sake of extracting the greatest possible enjoyment out of an emotional state.