A celebrated man of the Renaissance, Cardan, says in his autobiography that “he could not do without suffering, and when this happened to him, he felt such an impulse arise in him, that every other pain seemed a relief.” When in this state, he was in the habit of torturing his own body till forced to shed tears by the pain.[44] I might enumerate a long series of these pleasures of physical pain. Of the pleasures of moral pain I will give but one example: melancholy in the ordinary, non-medical sense-the melancholy of lovers, poets, artists, etc. This state may be considered as typical of the deliberate enjoyment of sadness. Any one may be sad, but melancholy is not to be attained by every one. I may mention also, in passing, the pleasures of ugliness in æsthetics, and the taste for sanguinary spectacles and tortures which we shall have to consider in another place. Footnote 44: A curious study of pathological psychology might be founded on the _De Vila Propria_ of Cardan, who was evidently what would now be called a neuropath and a _déséquilibré_. If we leave the facts and come to the explanations proposed, we shall find that they are not numerous. Bouillier (_op. cit._) seems to adopt the opinion of a Cartesian, who said, “If the soul, in all movements of the passions, even the most painful, is in some measure tickled by a secret feeling of pleasure, if it takes pleasure in pain, and does not wish to be consoled, it is because of a consciousness that the state in which it finds itself is the state of heart and mind best suited to its situation.” I fail to understand this pretended explanation. I prefer that of Hamilton, who places the principal cause in the increased activity imparted to our whole being by the sense of our own sufferings. This, at least, is logical, since pleasure is connected with its habitual correlative—an increase of activity. Spencer has examined the problem at greater length.[45] "Here I will draw attention only to another egoistic sentiment, and I do this because of its mysterious nature. It is a pleasurably painful sentiment, of which it is difficult to identify the nature, and still more difficult to trace the genesis. I refer to what is sometimes called ‘the luxury of grief.’... It seems possible that this sentiment, which makes a sufferer wish to be alone with his grief, and makes him resist all distraction from it, may arise from dwelling on the contrast between his own worth, as he estimates it, and the treatment he has received—either from his fellow-beings or from a power which he is prone to think of anthropomorphically. If he feels that he has deserved much while he has received little, and still more if instead of good there has come evil, the consciousness of this evil is qualified by the consciousness of worth, made pleasurably dominant by the contrast.... There is an idea of much withheld, and a feeling of implied superiority to those who withhold it.... That