The Pursuit of Happiness: A Book of Studies and StrowingsBrinton, Daniel G. (Daniel Garrison)
Philosophy
The Pursuit of Happiness: A Book of Studies and Strowings
Brinton, Daniel G. (Daniel Garrison)
Happiness
It may not be quite correct to say that all pleasurable sensations are
immediately derived from or directly lead to others of a painful
character. There are some belonging to the organic life, such as the
satisfaction of the desire for food or for muscular exercise, in which
mere repose or remission is enough to repay the nervous drafts. But
how close these are to pain is visible from the acuteness of the pangs
of hunger, or the painfulness of prolonged positions of restraint.
Even exalted esthetic and intellectual pleasures, which seem to leave
no sting behind and to require no goad for their advance, constantly
make unfelt though heavy drafts on the nervous centres, the results of
which, under the various forms of cerebral and spinal exhaustion and
degeneration, physicians are obliged to take cognizance of only too
often.
So close is the analogy between the two antagonistic sensations, that
the one becomes merged into the other without our being able to mark
the dividing line between them. A moderate pain may by its active
diffusion actually bring a surplus of pleasure, as Professor Bain has
remarked; and that an acute sensation of pleasure may pass into one of
pain is matter of common observation. Thus, Pain is born of Pleasure,
Pleasure of Pain; and memory and association have a tendency to
diminish the extremes of each by recalling to the mind the sources
from which it sprang. Some physiologists, therefore, refuse to
discriminate between such inseparable feelings, and prefer to regard
them both as manifestations of the same, calling it the “Pleasure-Pain
sensation.”
In all these respects what is true of these sensations also holds good
of their analogues in the realm of emotions, as joy and sorrow, mirth
and sadness, hope and fear, and the like. Each of these exercises, and
by exercising exhausts, some fibres of the nervous system, and thus
tends to develop its contrary.
The general law which, as far as it goes, explains these facts is that
of the alternation or periodicity of the manifestations of force. This
is the fundamental law of the Universe, beyond which no analysis has
proceeded. Force, or Power, or Energy, wherever we discern it and
under every one of its exhibitions, expresses itself in undulatory or
rhythmical movements, pulsations of the primal potency, vibrations of
the central harmony, of the universe. In the rise and fall of
sensation and emotion the sequences of height and depth are as closely
related as are the proportions of the crest and trough in the waves of
the ocean, or those of the vibration of the strings of a musical
instrument.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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