CHAPTER II.. Moral Pain.

MORAL PAIN.

Identity of all the forms of pain—Evolution of moral pain: (1) the pure result of memory; (2) connected with representations; positive form, negative form; (3) connected with concepts—Its external study; physical signs—Therapeutics—Conclusions—A typical case of hypochondriasis.

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. 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.

-----

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.

Second Period.—It is connected with complex representations and forms a very large class, the manifestations of which are the only ones met with in average human beings. At this stage moral pain presupposes reflection, or, more explicitly, first the faculty of reasoning (deductive or inductive), and secondly constructive imagination. It would be possible to quote a crowd of examples, taken at random: the news of a death, of an illness, of ruin, of frustrated ambition, etc. The point of departure is a dry and simple fact, but the pain attaches itself to all the perceived results which flow from it. Thus ruin means a series of privations, wretchednesses, labours begun over again, fatigues, and exhaustions. It is in this detailed translation, varying according to individuals and cases, that moral pain lies. It is clear, and is proved by observation, that the man endowed with an ardent and constructive imagination will feel intense pain when another, with a poor and cold imagination, remains indifferent, seeing nothing in his misfortune but the present actual fact—that is to say, a very little thing; the sum of pains evoked is proportional to the sum of representations evoked. The child remains insensible at the news of death or ruin; if he is moved it is through imitation; there is nothing in his experience enabling him to deduce what these fatal words contain, and to represent the future.

Moral pain presents itself under various forms—positive, negative, or mixed.

In the positive form it is an expenditure of movement, the representation of an exhaustive labour, of an incessant effort to begin again what is already felt in consciousness by anticipation. Such is the case of the candidate who fails at an examination to which he must go up again.

In the negative form it is an arrest of movement, a lessening, the consciousness of a deficit, a privation, cravings ceaselessly arising and ceaselessly disappointed. The death of a beloved person is the most perfect example.

In the mixed form we may see it in the ruined millionaire, the dethroned king, who set to work again to reconstruct the past. On the one hand the representation of the long labour of a new conquest; on the other, tendencies of all sorts which were formerly satisfied, and are now inexorably brought to a stop.

A complete study of the second group of moral pains would include two moments: the egoistic form, the first in date, and the sympathetic or altruistic form. The latter seems to appear early, since Darwin noted it at the age of six months and eleven days in one of his children, who was much affected when his nurse pretended to be unhappy and cry. Preyer even alleges, as we have seen, that grief appears at the age of four months. This sympathetic form of pain is found in certain animals, especially those living in society. In certain monogamous couples the death of one of the partners may cause the other to perish. I will not pause here at present to describe these two great forms of the affective life which will occupy us so often in the course of this study.

Third Period.—Grief in this case is connected with pure concepts or with ideal representations. This is intellectual pain, which is much rarer, and produces little effect, at all events for any length of time, on the ordinary man. Such is the pain of the religious person who feels he is not sufficiently devout, of the metaphysician tormented by doubt, of the poet and the artist, conscious of an abortive creation, of the man of science who unsuccessfully pursues the solution of a problem.

These forms of pain are chiefly negative and secondarily positive. They consist, first, in unsatisfied needs, privations, lacunæ in existence; afterwards in effort, expenditure of force, fatigue, achieving nothing.

II.

Having shown that the pain-phenomenon, in the course of evolution, attaches itself to representations more and more elevated and finally to superior conceptions, we will examine moral pain objectively, from without, to show afresh its identity with physical pain, or, more exactly, to prove that pain is invariable in its nature, under whatever form it manifests itself.

1. Grief is accompanied by the same modifications in the organism as physical pain. It is needless to repeat the description: circulatory disturbance, constriction of the vaso-motors, syncope; decrease of respiration or constant changes in its rhythm, sudden or prolonged reverberation on nutrition, loss of appetite, indigestion, arrest or diminution of secretions, vomiting. I may remark that rapid change of colour in the hair, already noted, is specially met with in violent moral shocks (Marie-Antoinette, Ludovico Sforza, etc.). The voluntary muscles of the larynx, the face, the whole body, undergo the same influences and express them in the same ways. For moral as for physical pain, there are silent forms and agitated forms.

2. If we admit the old maxim: “Naturam morborum medicationes ostendunt,” as we see every day the same general therapeutics applied to both forms of pain, we have here evidence in favour of their identity: no doubt there are curative methods proper to each; for moral pain, consolations, distractions, travel; but are not opium, sedatives, and tonics employed to relieve both?

3. I brought together at the beginning of this chapter the grossest forms of physical pain and the most refined forms of moral pain; but there are composite forms in which sensations and representations seem to form an equilibrium, so that such painful states might be entered under either head. This is the case with certain melancholics of whom I shall have to speak later, but we may take as a type the hypochondriacal person in whom we find the point of junction of the two pains. The physical troubles of hypochondriasis have often been described. There are localised pains, but in addition a large number of simply represented pains, enlarged as by a lens, and referred to the lungs, the heart, the liver, the spleen, the kidneys, the stomach, the intestines. The joints are cracking; there are conjectures concerning the appearance of the face, the tongue, the urine, and above all what perpetual anxiety! One of them said: “I feel better to-day, and that makes me anxious; it is not natural.” Is this physical pain or moral pain? Sometimes one, sometimes the other predominates, according to the individual and the moment. Clouston has observed that in melancholics sadness often diminishes when physical pain increases. They are so intimately intertwined that no point of departure can be established between them. This morbid state is worthy of mention because it also is a transitional form. We need have no hesitation in generalising, and saying that there is no physical (that is to say, localised) pain, however slight, unaccompanied by some fugitive mental irritation, and no mental irritation unaccompanied by some slight physical troubles.

The foregoing does not imply that grief is a very refined physical pain, or that it arises therefrom, as—according to the well-known formula: Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu—it is supposed that the superior forms of knowledge arise from sensation alone. That would be a misconstruction. Physical pain is not a genus of which moral pain is a species. The thesis which I maintain is that pain is always identical with itself, that it has its own conditions of existence, that the innumerable modes which it presents to us in the physical order and in the moral order are related to the sensorial or intellectual elements which excite and envelop it.

-----

Footnote 30:

Hahnemann distinguished 73 kinds of physical pain, Georget 38, Renaudin 12, etc. I give these numbers as curiosities. More recently Goldscheider (Ueber den Schmerz) establishes three stages in physical pain: (1) true, real (echte) pains; they depend on the nerves of special sensibility, and are caused by mechanical, thermal, or chemical stimulations, by inflammation and poisons; (2) indirect pains, pseudo-pains, which consist especially in a state of discomfort (Schmerzweh); in the case of the head, stomach, etc., they may be as oppressive and cause as much torture as “real” pains; (3) psychic or ideal (ideel) pains, which are a hyperæsthesia of the sensitive activity; they are met with in neuroses (neurasthenia, hysteria, hypochondria), in hallucinations, the hypnotic state, etc. This classification is perhaps acceptable in physiology. For psychology, every pain, in virtue of being a fact of consciousness, is “true” and “real.”

-----

The question still remains why certain representations have the unfortunate privilege of arousing pain. This is a question which I can only touch on, because it belongs to another part of the subject. For the moment I simply reply that it is because they are the beginning of mental disorganisation, just as physical pain is the beginning of physical disorganisation. The sentient being, man or animal, is a bundle of needs, of appetites, of physical or psychic tendencies; everything that suppresses or impedes them is translated into pain. Physical suffering is the blind and unconscious reaction of the organism to every hurtful action. Grief is the conscious reaction to every decrease of psychic life. The man shut in by narrow and commonplace surroundings would certainly feel no æsthetic pain, because having no need of æsthetic satisfaction he could not be impoverished or impeded by its absence.

In short, pain under all its forms reveals an identical nature. The distinction between physical pain and moral pain is practical, not scientific.