Note * — Chapter XII · Pleasure

It has been much disputed whether pleasure-unpleasure is a quality of general bodily or organic consciousness, of some part of it perhaps, or whether it is something quite different from any quality of any sensation or set of sensations. As we have seen, it is not a quality of an auditory sensation in the sense in which its loudness, for instance, is a quality. There seem to be similar objections to making it a quality of any sensation of any kind. A sensation is what an impulse at a certain stage in its development feels like, and its sensory qualities are characters* of the impulse at that stage. The pleasure-unpleasure attaching to the impulse may be no character of the impulse itself, but of its fate, its success or failure in restoring equilibrium to the system to which it belongs.