Having shown that the pain-phenomenon, in the course of evolution, attaches itself to representations more and more elevated and finally to superior conceptions, we will examine moral pain objectively, _from without_, to show afresh its identity with physical pain, or, more exactly, to prove that pain is invariable in its nature, under whatever form it manifests itself.
1. Grief is accompanied by the same modifications in the organism as physical pain. It is needless to repeat the description: circulatory disturbance, constriction of the vaso-motors, syncope; decrease of respiration or constant changes in its rhythm, sudden or prolonged reverberation on nutrition, loss of appetite, indigestion, arrest or diminution of secretions, vomiting. I may remark that rapid change of colour in the hair, already noted, is specially met with in violent moral shocks (Marie-Antoinette, Ludovico Sforza, etc.). The voluntary muscles of the larynx, the face, the whole body, undergo the same influences and express them in the same ways. For moral as for physical pain, there are silent forms and agitated forms.
2. If we admit the old maxim: “Naturam morborum medicationes ostendunt,” as we see every day the same general therapeutics applied to both forms of pain, we have here evidence in favour of their identity: no doubt there are curative methods proper to each; for moral pain, consolations, distractions, travel; but are not opium, sedatives, and tonics employed to relieve both?
3. I brought together at the beginning of this chapter the grossest forms of physical pain and the most refined forms of moral pain; but there are composite forms in which sensations and representations seem to form an equilibrium, so that such painful states might be entered under either head. This is the case with certain melancholics of whom I shall have to speak later, but we may take as a type the hypochondriacal person in whom we find the point of junction of the two pains. The physical troubles of hypochondriasis have often been described. There are localised pains, but in addition a large number of simply represented pains, enlarged as by a lens, and referred to the lungs, the heart, the liver, the spleen, the kidneys, the stomach, the intestines. The joints are cracking; there are conjectures concerning the appearance of the face, the tongue, the urine, and above all what perpetual anxiety! One of them said: “I feel better to-day, and that makes me anxious; it is not natural.” Is this physical pain or moral pain? Sometimes one, sometimes the other predominates, according to the individual and the moment. Clouston has observed that in melancholics sadness often diminishes when physical pain increases. They are so intimately intertwined that no point of departure can be established between them. This morbid state is worthy of mention because it also is a transitional form. We need have no hesitation in generalising, and saying that there is no physical (that is to say, localised) pain, however slight, unaccompanied by some fugitive mental irritation, and no mental irritation unaccompanied by some slight physical troubles.
The foregoing does not imply that grief is a very refined physical pain, or that it arises therefrom, as—according to the well-known formula: _Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu_—it is supposed that the superior forms of knowledge arise from sensation alone. That would be a misconstruction. Physical pain is not a genus of which moral pain is a species. The thesis which I maintain is that pain is always identical with itself, that it has its own conditions of existence, that the innumerable modes which it presents to us in the physical order and in the moral order are related to the sensorial or intellectual elements which excite and envelop it.[30]
-----
Footnote 30:
Hahnemann distinguished 73 kinds of physical pain, Georget 38, Renaudin 12, etc. I give these numbers as curiosities. More recently Goldscheider (_Ueber den Schmerz_) establishes three stages in physical pain: (1) true, real (_echte_) pains; they depend on the nerves of special sensibility, and are caused by mechanical, thermal, or chemical stimulations, by inflammation and poisons; (2) indirect pains, pseudo-pains, which consist especially in a state of discomfort (_Schmerzweh_); in the case of the head, stomach, etc., they may be as oppressive and cause as much torture as “real” pains; (3) psychic or ideal (_ideel_) pains, which are a hyperæsthesia of the sensitive activity; they are met with in neuroses (neurasthenia, hysteria, hypochondria), in hallucinations, the hypnotic state, etc. This classification is perhaps acceptable in physiology. For psychology, every pain, in virtue of being a fact of consciousness, is “true” and “real.”
-----
The question still remains why certain representations have the unfortunate privilege of arousing pain. This is a question which I can only touch on, because it belongs to another part of the subject. For the moment I simply reply that it is because they are the beginning of mental disorganisation, just as physical pain is the beginning of physical disorganisation. The sentient being, man or animal, is a bundle of needs, of appetites, of physical or psychic tendencies; everything that suppresses or impedes them is translated into pain. Physical suffering is the blind and unconscious reaction of the organism to every hurtful action. Grief is the conscious reaction to every decrease of psychic life. The man shut in by narrow and commonplace surroundings would certainly feel no æsthetic pain, because having no need of æsthetic satisfaction he could not be impoverished or impeded by its absence.
In short, pain under all its forms reveals an identical nature. The distinction between physical pain and moral pain is practical, not scientific.
