Our conclusions have been founded on general considerations and on the phenomena of growth of mind in general and particular. Another line of evidence would be decadent mind. Mental powers should decline and vanish in the reverse of the general order in which they arose; the order of disappearance should be the reverse of appearance, and if pain-pleasure be primitive, we should expect to find it both the first conscious element in infancy and the last in old age. The last stage of senility seems sensitive only to organic pleasures and pains. Further, old age does not so much seek pleasure as guard against pains, and this fact is in line with our treatment of pain as prior to pleasure and more fundamental than it. We may consider it likely that conscious life in the individual begins with a pain and ends with a pain. Senile psychology on this and other points is worthy of far more attention than it has received, for it is on the whole more accessible and trustworthy than infant psychology.
With regard to Mr. H. R. Marshall’s remarks (_Philosophical Review_, vol. 1, p. 632), it is sufficient to say that I lay no great emphasis on either pain or pleasure being the first fact of consciousness; but my main contention is that the primitive facts of consciousness are of the pain-pleasure type. While I have noticed some considerations as implying pain to be the first consciousness phenomenon, yet I am satisfied that pain and pleasure are correlative and complementary, each implying the other. Further, I do not regard pain as “primal sense,” but as primal fact. Pain is not in any wise a sense, and sense of pain can only mean capacity for pain, or actual pain experience.
Again, I do not, as Mr. Marshall implies, regard pain as the differentiating basis of subsequent evolution, but rather as mere _prius_ and impetus, and hence I do not look for pain-pleasure to disappear with mental evolution, nor yet to mark divisions in “sensational phenomena”; but it will ever remain in representative forms, at least, as increasingly complex stimulant of all mental life.
The objection urged by Höffding and others to the primitive nature of pure feeling is that we sense before we feel pain or pleasure; thus we have the sensation of touch before we feel the pain from contact with a hot stove; we feel the pin, then the pricking sensation, then the pain. This precedence has been measured by Beau and others.