The feeling of satisfaction which has ensued, now at any rate has qualified the object. The object contains in its very notion, not the memory of this or that past satisfaction, but the ideas of the activities or states in which the satisfaction consists, and through them can call up the feeling (as distinct from the idea of the feeling) of a similar satisfaction. These ideas and this feeling are pleasant when want exists, but not otherwise. If I feel hungry, the sight of food pleases me; or the sight of food may, given the unfelt need for it, make me feel hungry; but, if I am satisfied, I do not desire satisfaction, at least while I remain in the stage of mere appetite. No man of simple tastes cares to see food when he is not hungry; e.g. it is not pleasant to live in the public room of an inn where eating goes on all day.[1]
But appetite does not remain appetite. Certainly in man (I wish to say nothing further about the lower animals) it tends to
- ↑ As an instance of the collision with fact which follows on false doctrine, I may mention that Mr. Bain, to save his theory, has to assert that, when a child or animal is fed, it goes on eating until compelled to stop by pain (Senses, Ed. ii. p. 308-9; Emotions, Ed. iii. p. 316). No doubt that may and does happen, but that it always does and must happen, will, I think, be recognized by anyone who has fed dogs on proper food, and seen eagerness by slow degrees pass into tranquil indifference, as a palpable fiction. Mr. Bain’s treatment of the will is thorough and instructive, but, I think, by no means satisfactory. His theory stands on two foundations, (1) the fact of a discharge of energy, preceded by no feeling, and yet followed by pleasure: this ‘fact’ seems to me nothing whatever but an assertion, which the instances adduced do not verify; (2) the ‘law’ of ‘self-conservation,’ i.e. the fact that pleasure always promotes and pain always hinders action. Whether it is well to call any and every unrationalized general statement a ‘law’ I will not ask. Here the statement of fact is incorrect. Mr. Bain evidently sees that it is so, and yet the theory stands and falls with it. Not being initiated into the ‘inductive method,’ I hardly like to offer an opinion, but I should have said that there were ‘three courses’ open to Mr. Bain. The first is to revolutionize the theory until it systematically expresses the facts. The second is to say, ‘A law is never the worse for a few exceptions.’ The third is to torture the facts until they square with the theory. Mr. Bain seems to compromise between the second and third course. But if exceptions do not matter, why trouble oneself to get rid of them? If they do matter, why admit a ‘supplementary law of Stimulation’ (Emotions, ed. iii. p. 311-12) which is the direct denial of the main law? It is always wet on half-holidays because of the law of Raininess, but sometimes is not wet because of the Supplementary Law of Sunshine.
