CHAPTER V.. The Neutral States.

THE NEUTRAL STATES.

Two methods of study—Affirmative thesis founded on observation, deduction, and psycho-physics—Negative thesis: the psychological trinity; confusion between consciousness and introspection—Diversity of temperaments.

Up to the present, pleasure and pain have been studied first separately, as two perfectly distinct states, pure, by hypothesis, from every admixture. We then examined those singular cases where pain becomes the material or occasion of pleasure, and vice versâ. We have still to speak of those cases where the agreeable and the painful coexist in varying proportions in the consciousness—e.g., in the mountain-climber who feels at the same time fatigue, the fear of the precipices, the beauty of the landscape, and the pleasure of difficulty vanquished. Nothing is more frequent than these mixed forms; they would even be the rule if one could admit, with certain authors, that there are no unmixed pleasures or pains; but by their complex and composite nature they are, in fact, emotions, and we shall come to them again later on.

The subject of this chapter is quite different. It is the much-discussed, still unsolved, and perhaps insoluble problem of neutral states, states of indifference, free from any accompaniment, either pleasurable or painful. Do such exist? Both the affirmative and negative are maintained by good authorities; there is even a psychologist who seems to me to have adopted each thesis in turn.

Footnote 53:

For a short historical summary of the question up to the middle of the nineteenth century, see Bouillier, Du plaisir et de la douleur, chap. xi.

The question can only be entered on in two ways—by observation and by argument. Let us examine the results of these two methods.

1. Does the state of indifference exist as an observable fact? Bain is, among contemporary writers, the principal champion of this thesis, which has excited a lengthy discussion. He does not pretend to affirm that there is a single state of feeling free from every agreeable or disagreeable element; but if these elements only exist as infinitesimal quantities, psychology need take no account of them. Pleasure and pain are clearly defined generic states; yet there is a practical interest in knowing whether any neutral conditions exist. Bain finds the type of these in cases of simple excitement, which may be accompanied either by pleasure or by pain, but remain distinct from either. The sensation of burning, the smell of asafœtida, the taste of aloes, these are modes of excitement which we call pain, because in them pain predominates. The noise of a mill, the confused murmur of a great city, are modes of excitement which may be called agreeable or disagreeable; but the excitement is the essential fact, the pleasure and pain are accidental.

Footnote 54:

See Mind, Oct. 1887, Jan. and April 1888, Jan. 1889; and J. Sully, The Human Mind, vol. ii. pp. 4, 5.

Bain does not appear to me happy in most of the examples he has chosen. I quote some of them. The shock produced by surprise—but surprise is only a mitigated form of fear, and in nearly all cases instantaneously assumes a painful or pleasurable character. The state of expectation: “The intense objectivity of one’s looks when following a race, or a great surgical operation, is not, strictly speaking, unconsciousness, but a maximum of energy with a minimum of consciousness. It is rather a mode of indifference—more of an excitement than an affective state.” Here we may make the same comment; moreover, there is in expectation a feeling of effort which soon becomes fatigue, and, in most instances, expectation involves the anticipation of some event either desired or dreaded.

Those who do not attempt to prove the existence of neutral states by direct observation deduce them from general principles. Thus Sergi considers them as the necessary effect of determinate biological conditions. Pleasure and pain being the two fundamental forms—the two poles of the life of feeling, there must exist between them a neutral zone corresponding to a state of perfect adaptation. Pain is a state of consciousness revealing a conflict of the organism with exterior forces—a want of adaptation of one to the other; whence a loss of energy. Pleasure is a state of consciousness which makes it evident that the reaction of the organism is connected with external excitations, whence arises, by synergy, a heightening of vital activity. Indifference is the neutral state of consciousness showing a perfect adaptation of the organism to constant and variable intensities—in other words, excitations which neither increase nor diminish vital activity, but preserve it, produce a state of equilibrium and appeal to the consciousness neither as pleasure nor pain. This hypothesis—viz., that at certain moments the sentient being neither loses nor gains, and that such is the substratum of the psychic state called neutral, seems to me extremely probable, but remains no more than a hypothesis.

Footnote 55:

Psychologie physiologique, iv., ch. i., pp. 309 et seq. (French edition.)

Now let us question the psycho-physicists who have treated this subject according to their own special method, while coming to different conclusions. It is difficult to adopt a procedure more theoretical than theirs, or one better adapted to show the insufficiency of the intellectualist method in this domain of psychology. In truth, the subject treated by them is a special aspect of the problem, not its totality; they are inquiring whether, in the “transformation” of pleasure into pain, and vice versâ, there is, in the passage from one contrary to the other, a point of neutrality or indifference. Wundt graphically represents the phenomenon by a curve: the portion of this curve above the line of the abscissa has a positive value, and corresponds to the development of pleasure; the portion below corresponds to the development of pain, and has a negative value; the precise point where the curve cuts the line of the abscissa (to rise in the direction of pleasure or descend in that of pain) corresponds to neutrality or indifference. Lehmann, who, however, admits that weak sensations are neutral states, gives a curve rather different from that of Wundt. From an observation first made by Horwicz, and experiments conducted by Lehmann himself, it appears that, if one dips one’s finger into water whose temperature gradually rises from 35° to 50° Centigrade during a space of 2 minutes and 20 seconds, one feels first an agreeable warmth, then some slight, unpleasant prickings, then oscillations of intense prickings with moments of rest, and lastly, pain. His conclusion is contrary to Wundt’s, for he finds that the passage from pleasure to pain does not take place in a neutral state.

Footnote 56:

Wundt, Grundzüge der physiol. Psychologie (4th German ed.), vol. i. pp. 557 et seq.; Lehmann, Hauptgesetze, etc., §§ 236-241. One of Wundt’s most distinguished pupils, Külpe, in his Umriss der Psychologie (1895), considers the existence of a state of indifference “can hardly be doubted in the face of a long series of observations which support it.” (English edition, p. 242.)

Experiments are not to be despised; but as for the figure supposed to illustrate the phenomenon, it is merely misleading; this mathematical conception explains nothing. The assimilation of pleasure to a positive, and pain to a negative value, is quite arbitrary. Moreover, the passage from plus to minus quantities through zero is an operation which has its base in our faculty of abstraction, and for its materials abstract and homogeneous quantities. The different degrees of pleasure and pain are nothing of this sort. We do not even know if these two phenomena have a common foundation, if there is a common measure between the two, if they are not both irreducible, and we have no right to place, theoretically, a Nullpunkt at the point of transition from one to the other. The problem is one of a concrete order; it is a question of fact, whether soluble or not, which is put before us.

2. Let us now listen to those who refuse to admit states of indifference.

Every state of consciousness is a trinity in the theological sense: it is the knowledge of some exterior or interior event; it includes motor elements; it has a certain tone of feeling. We describe it as intellectual, motor, or emotional, according to the preponderance of one of these elements, not its exclusive existence. It is a well-known fact that the clearer a perception, the weaker is its tone of feeling, and the more intense an emotion, the more attenuated the intellectual element which has evoked it; but diminution is not equivalent to disappearance. If neutral states existed, one of the fundamental elements of psychic life would exist only in an intermittent form, and at some moments even cease to be.

Besides this, let us observe ourselves and interrogate our own consciousness. “Let us consider ourselves at one of those moments of calm and apparent indifference, when it seems as if nothing could move us, and our numbed sensibility remains, as it were, suspended between pleasure and pain. This deceptive appearance of insensibility and aridity always masks some more or less feeble sensations of ease or uneasiness, some more or less slight and confused sentiments of joy or grief which are none the less real for being in nowise vivid or exciting. Moreover, how could our sensibility fail to be, constantly, more or less impressed by so many general causes which, independent of particular causes, so constantly act upon us, at every instant of our life, and which, so to speak, ceaselessly besiege us, from within and from without?” Bouillier, the author of this passage (op. cit., chap. xi.), supports his assertions by citing the innumerable impressions which come from the internal organs, from the state of the air and sky, from light, from the most trivial incidents of common life.

It is certain that the domain of the indifferent states, if existent at all, is very scanty. Yet, however skilfully Bouillier may support his thesis, there is one irrefragable objection to be urged against it: the testimony of the consciousness, always doubtful, is here more so than elsewhere. What he proposes to us is, in fact, to observe ourselves. From the moment when we begin to do this, we no longer have to deal with the natural consciousness, in its raw state, but with that somewhat artificial consciousness which is created by attention. We look, not with our eyes, but through a microscope; we amplify, we enlarge the phenomenon; and here the method of enlargement is not to be trusted. It causes certain subconscious states to cross the threshold of the consciousness; it makes them pass out of the penumbra into full light, and disposes us to believe that such is their normal condition. We know that some individuals, by fixing the attention firmly on some particular part of the body, can bring about in it a sensation of weight, of irritation, of arterial pulsation, etc. Do these modifications always exist, unperceived only so long as the attention is not directed to them? or does attention produce them by means of an increased vascular activity, increasing, but not creating? The latter supposition is the more probable. The hypochondriac who obstinately and patiently watches the details of his organic life feels within himself the motion of the vital mechanism which escapes most men. It would be easy to give other examples, proving that we must distinguish between consciousness pure and simple and internal observation, and that it is the less allowable to argue from one to the other, since in practice the problem is reduced to a difference of intensity.

This question well deserves to be called, as it has been by J. Sully, “one of the cruces of psychology.” Those who wish to take sides in it can only guide their decision by probabilities and preferences. I am inclined to favour the thesis of indifferent states. I find it difficult to admit that certain perceptions or representations, incessantly repeated, imply anything more than the fact of knowledge. The sight of my furniture, arranged in its usual order, causes me no appreciable degree of pleasure or displeasure; or if these exist as infinitesimal quantities, psychology, as Bain justly says, has no concern with them. Fouillée also points out that the feeling of indifference is not primary, but due to an effacement.

Footnote 57:

Fouillée, Psychologie des idées-forces, i. 68.

The repugnance of certain psychologists to admit indifferent states arises from the fact that this thesis appears to them to introduce discontinuity into the affective life. The mobile and incessantly alternating series of pleasurable or painful modifications would, in that case, have moments of interruption, gaps, and vacant spaces. I yield to no one in asserting the continuity of the affective life; but it must be sought elsewhere. It is in the appetites, the tendencies—conscious or unconscious—the desires and aversions, which, for their part, are always at work, permanent and indestructible. Here, again, we find the mistake of considering pleasure and pain, which are only symptoms, as essential and fundamental elements.

I find it strange, moreover, that, in a subject so much studied and discussed, no one should have contributed an observation which seems to me of some importance. Each author supposes the formula adopted by himself to be applicable to all men. This is to state the question in a philosophical, not in a psychological form—i.e., without taking into account individual variations of temperament and character, an element by no means to be neglected. It is to suppose, without the least proof, that all cases are reducible to unity. On the contrary, there are presumptions that the solution adopted, whatever it is, may be true for some men and false for others. A nervous, excitable temperament, in a perpetual state of vibration, constantly kept on the alert by the workings of passion or thought, may, by its very constitution, leave no moment accessible to an intermission of the incessantly renewed states of pain and pleasure. A lymphatic temperament, on the other hand, a cold disposition, a limited intelligence, poor in ideas, constitute a soil perfectly suited to the frequent appearance and long continuance of indifferent states.

Footnote 58:

I give an instance of a similar character, narrated by a historian, from Arabic sources. "The Emir Mohammed (at Granada, in 1408), finding himself dying, and anxious to secure the throne to his son, sent orders for his brother Yussuf, whom he was keeping in captivity at Salobreña, to be put to death. The alcalde, when he received this order, was playing at chess with his prisoner, whose gentleness had gained the heart of his gaolers. On reading the fatal despatch he was troubled, and did not dare to communicate its contents to the prince. But Yussuf guessed from his confusion what was the matter, and said to the alcalde, ‘Is it my head that is asked of thee?’ The latter, for all answer, handed to him his brother’s letter. Yussuf asked only for a few hours’ delay, in order to take leave of his wife; but the messenger of death declared that the execution must take place at once, the hour of his return being fixed beforehand. ‘Well,’ replied Yussuf, ‘let us at least finish the game.’ But the alcalde was so distressed that he advanced his pawns at random, and Yussuf was obliged to inform him of his mistakes. However, the game was never finished. Some knights, riding from Granada at full gallop, saluted Yussuf as Emir, and announced to him the death of his brother. When thus passing from the scaffold to the throne the Mussulman prince remained master of himself, as he had been in the face of death. Still doubting his good fortune, he set out for Granada, where he was received by the people with cries of joy." (Rosseuw St.-Hilaire, Histoire d’Espagne, vol. v., p. 227.) Analogous traits are recorded of various historic personages.

These differences, which are matter of common observation, show the necessity of distrusting an over-simple solution.