Note † — Chapter XII · Pleasure

This is perhaps as good a guess at what pleasure and unpleasure are as can yet be made, pleasure being successful activity of some kind, not necessarily of a biologically useful kind, and unpleasure being frustrated, chaotic, mal-successful activity. We shall consider this theory again at a later stage (cf. Chapter XXIV). The point to be made here is that pleasure and unpleasure are complicated matters arising in the course of activities which are directed to other ends. The old controversies as to whether pleasure is the goal of all striving or whether avoidance of unpleasure the starting-point, are thus escaped. As Ribot pointed out† the exclusive quest of pleasure for itself, plaisir-passion, is a morbid form of activity and self-destructive. Pleasure on this view is originally an effect signifying that certain positive or negative tendencies have instinctively attained their aim and are satisfied. Later through experience it becomes a cause. Instructed by experience man and animal alike place themselves in circumstances which will arouse desire and so through satisfaction lead to pleasure. The gourmet, the libertine, the æsthete, the mystic do so alike. But when the pleasure which is the result of satisfying the tendency becomes the end pursued rather than the satisfying of the tendency itself, then an ‘inversion of the psychological mechanism’ comes about. In the one case the activity is propagated from below upwards, in the other from above downwards, from the brain to the organic functions. The result is often an exhaustion of the tendency, ‘disillusionment’ and the blasé, world-wearied attitude.