There are two questions suggested by the above—(1) Is pleasure good, and if so, in what sense is it good? (2) Is pain evil, and in what way is it evil? Let us take the latter first.
Considered psychically pain is an evil, because it is the feeling of the negation of the self or life. The good is the affirmation of the self, and hence pain is counter to the good. If we are asked to suppose a pain which is a feeling of negation, but not a felt negation, i.e. which is not really in any way the negation of function or the cause of such negation, and are then asked, Is such hypothetical pain an evil? we can not say it would be, because we can say nothing about it at all. It seems to us to be an unreal abstraction. Real pain is the feeling of the negatedness of the self, and therefore, as such, it is bad. It is bad also, because it further acts in the direction of the general lowering of life. Both as felt diminution of the good, and as the cause of further diminution, it is an evil.
If, where pain comes from negated function, but the function is supposed to be indifferent, we are asked, Is then the pain bad? we reply that it is so, because the whole self is negated; I feel pain, and am therein lowered directly or indirectly.
In passing we may ask, Is then pain on the whole an evil? We can not say that. We know that pain often is a good; and we should have a right to say of any pain that it was an absolute evil, only if we knew that it was pain per se, i.e. mere negation. But that is what we can not know. Speaking generally, you can not have mere pain, the negative without the positive; painlessness means death; pain appears to involve reaction; and again, wherever there is an active conscious self, it seems there must be pain. To say that pain is an absolute evil, we should have to answer in the affirmative the question, Can you have the positive without the negative, or the negative in this form? And I do not see how we can give this answer. We know that pain is often a stimulus; without some pain little is produced—perhaps nothing. We know that the pain of the part is often the good of the whole; that that good demands sometimes even the destruction of the part. The life of the whole is the
