Sensation, imagery, feeling, emotion, together with pleasure, unpleasure and pain are names for the conscious characteristics of impulses. How they may best be sorted out is a problem whose difficulty is much aggravated by the shortcomings of language at this point. We speak, for instance, of pleasures and pains in the same fashion, as though they were of the same order, but, strictly, although pains as single self-sufficing modifications of consciousness are easily enough obtainable, pleasures by themselves do not seem to occur. Pleasure seems to be a way in which something happens, rather than an independent happening which can occur by itself in a mind. We have, not pleasures, but experiences of one kind or another, visual, auditory, organic, motor, and so forth, which are pleasant. Similarly we have experiences which are unpleasant. If, however, we call them painful we give rise to an ambiguity. We may be saying that they are unpleasant or we may be saying that they are accompanied by pains, which is a different matter. Online help with book reports for students of all levels! The use of the term pleasure, as though like pain it was itself a complete experience, instead of being something which attaches to or follows along with or after other experiences, has led to a number of confusions; especially in those critical theses, to which objection has already been taken in Article Nine, which identify value with pleasure. The twenty or more distinct kinds of sensations, into which modern psychology has elaborated the old five senses, can be observed to differ very widely in the degree to which they are susceptible of and accompanied by pleasantness and unpleasantness. The higher senses, sight and hearing, in most persons seem to yield sensations which vary much less from neutrality or indifference than the others. We must be careful to understand this difference correctly however. An arrangement of colours and shapes, a sequence of notes or a musical phrase may, of course, in suitable people, be as intensely toned, pleasantly or unpleasantly, as any organic or taste sensations, for example. But even this is not usual. The right experiment is to compare a single colour, say, or a single note, with such a sensation as a uniform touch or temperature gives rise to, a bath for example, or with a simple uniform taste or smell, or with hunger, or nausea. Fair comparison is difficult, equivalent levels of simplicity and uniformity being impossible to discover, but few will doubt that the degree of pleasure-unpleasure aroused by tastes, for example, far exceeds that which auditory or visual sensations excite by themselves. We must of course be careful here to avoid confusing the intrinsic pleasure-unpleasure of the sensations with that which arises through memory, through the effects of other sensations, pleasant or unpleasant, which may have accompanied them in the past, and through expectations agreeable or disagreeable.

Bookmark: