2. Pleasures destructive of the individual. I do not stop to discuss certain anomalies of taste and smell which will be described elsewhere; but the pleasures due to intoxication and narcotics are so widespread that they seem inherent in humanity. At all times, in all places, even in the savage state, man has found artificial means of living—if only for a moment—in an enchanted world. He has himself created this pleasure for his own destruction. But there are still clearer cases—of tendencies not acquired or invented—when pleasure makes and dominates the process of disorganisation. Thus, during a certain period of the general paralysis of the insane, the patient believes himself to possess the supreme degree of strength, health, riches, and power; satisfaction and happiness are expressed in his whole bearing. Thus in certain forms of acute mania, on one side (which we shall pass over for the present) it shows itself in anger; on another, in exuberant spirits, abounding joy—a feeling of energy and vigour. Some patients say, after their recovery, that they never felt so happy as during their illness (Krafft-Ebing). We may also mention the case of consumptive patients, many of whom are never so rich in hopes or so fertile in projects as when at the point of death. Finally, we have the sense of well-being (“euphoria”) of the dying. It has been attempted to explain this by analgesia, as if the suppression of pain were identical with the appearance of joy. Féré, who has examined the question in his _Pathologie des Emotions_,[47] concludes that this exaltation is due to momentary but positive conditions of the cerebral circulation. Footnote 47: Pp. 170 _et seq._ Must we admit that, in these cases, by an inconceivable derogation from natural determinism, pleasure becomes the translation into consciousness of a deep and incurable disorganisation? There is no need of this. It is more rational to admit that this pleasure is here, as elsewhere, connected with its natural cause, a superabundance of vital activity. Every pathological pleasure is accompanied by excitability; but the latter is not a normal activity, or the fever-patient and the neuropath would enjoy an excess of health. In reality, we are confronted with a complex case; on the one hand, a perpetual and enormous loss, which goes on rapidly, without becoming perceptible to the consciousness; on the other, a superficial excitement, which is momentary and conscious. The anomaly is in this psychic disproportion, or rather in the short-sighted consciousness, which cannot pass its narrow limits and penetrate into the region of the unconscious.