In passing from physical pain to moral pain we by no means change our subject, or enter another world. Languages with their special terms—“tristesse,” “chagrin,” “sorrow,” “Kummer,” etc.—create an illusion by which psychologists for the most part seem to have been duped—the illusion that between these two forms of pain there is a difference of nature. In any case they do not explain themselves clearly on the point, and seem to share the common opinion.[29] It is the object of this chapter to establish that, on the contrary, there is a fundamental _identity_ between physical and moral pain, and that they only differ from each other in the point of departure, the first being connected with a sensation, the second with some form of representation, an image or an idea. ----- Footnote 29: Hartmann alone, so far as I am aware, has dealt with this point, incidentally but very clearly: “When I have pain in my teeth or my finger or my stomach; when I lose my wife, my friend, or my situation, if in all these cases we distinguish what is pain and pain alone, and not to be confounded with perception, idea, or thought, we shall recognise that this special element is identical in all the cases.”—_Philosophie des Unbewussten_, vol. i., Part II., chap. iii. ----- I. At first sight it seems paradoxical, and to many even revolting, to maintain that the pain caused by a corn or a boil, that expressed by Michelangelo in his sonnets concerning his inability to reach his ideal, or that felt by a delicate conscience at the sight of crime, are identical in their nature. I purposely bring together these extreme cases. Yet there is no call for indignation if we remember that we are concerned with the pain alone, not with the events which provoke it, these latter being extra-affective phenomena. The best method of justifying our thesis, however, is to follow the evolution of moral pain in its ascending march from its lowest to its highest point. It will suffice to note the chief stages. _First Period._—Moral pain is at first connected with an extremely simple representation, a concrete image—that is to say, the immediate copy of a perception. It may be defined as the ideal reproduction of physical pain. It only presupposes a single condition, memory. The child who has had to swallow an unpleasant remedy, or who has had a tooth extracted, experiences when the next occasion approaches a pain which may be called physical, since it is connected with a simple image, of which it is the weakened copy and echo. It may be said in the language of mathematicians, that in this case the moral pain is to the physical pain as the image is to the perception. This form is so simple as to be found in many animals not reckoned among the highest. It is not yet moral pain—grief or sorrow—in the complete and rigorous sense, but it must be noted, because it corresponds to what naturalists call a transitional form.