observed during the few days they are able to live. We must then admit either that the state of consciousness we call pain can be produced in the absence of the brain, or else that the physical phenomena can exist alone without their psychic concomitant. Pain (as a state of consciousness) is only a sign, an index, an internal event revealing to the individual his own disorganisation. The only case in which pain is a cause is when, being firmly fixed in consciousness and completely filling it, it becomes an agent of destruction, but then it is only a secondary cause. That is one of those cases, so frequent in the sciences of life, in which what is primarily an effect becomes in turn a cause. It is therefore an error, though common to most psychologists, to consider pain and pleasure as fundamental elements of the affective life; they are only marks, the foundation is elsewhere. What would be said of a doctor who confused the symptoms of a disease with its essential nature? We touch here a point so important that it needs emphasis. The thesis that pain is only a symptom, and altogether, in spite of the sovereign part it plays in human life, a superficial phenomenon in relation to the tendencies which lie at the basis of the affective life, finds support in the facts of _analgesia_, the disappearance of capacity to feel pain. This insensibility presents itself under two forms: spontaneous and artificial. Spontaneous analgesia is the rule in hysteria; it may vary in degree, position, and extent. The demonologists of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance knew these migrations of insensibility to various parts of the body, and they sought with care for the _stigmata diaboli_, that is, the regions insensible to pain. Some authors assign to it a purely psychic cause: painful impressions cannot be felt because they are outside the field of consciousness, which in these patients is in an almost permanently disassociated, scattered, and destroyed state.[20] It is, on the contrary, certain that an intense fixed idea, profound concentration of attention, fanatical exaltation, can produce temporary or permanent analgesia. Many soldiers, in the heat of battle, have not felt their wounds. Pascal, plunged in his problems, escaped his neuralgias. The Aïssaouas, the fakirs, certain Lamas of Thibet tear and cut themselves, secured against pain by delirium, and one may well believe that many martyrs, in the midst of their torture, have only experienced a sense of rapture. In certain forms of insanity (maniacal excitement, melancholia, idiocy, etc.) this spontaneous analgesia is frequent, and takes on extraordinary forms. Numerous examples may be found in special treatises.[21] One crushes glass in his mouth for half-an-hour without feeling any pain. Another breaks his leg in a struggle, and a fragment of the tibia projects through the torn skin, yet he continues to pursue the object of his rage, and then sits down to eat without the least sign of pain on his face.