by H.R.  Marshall in his Pain, Pleasure, and AEsthetics.  He contends that pleasure and pain are “general qualities, one of which must, and either of which may, belong to any fixed element of consciousness.”  “Pleasure,” he considers, “is experienced whenever the physical activity coincident with the psychic state to which the pleasure is attached involves the use of surplus stored force.”  We can see, therefore, how, if pain acts as a stimulant to emotion, it becomes the servant of pleasure by supplying it with surplus stored force.

This problem of pain is thus one of psychic dynamics.  If we realize this we shall begin to understand the place of cruelty in life.  “One ought to learn anew about cruelty,” said Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil, 229), “and open one’s eyes.  Almost everything that we call ‘higher culture’ is based upon the spiritualizing and intensifying of cruelty....  Then, to be sure, we must put aside teaching the blundering psychology of former times, which could only teach with regard to cruelty that it originated at the sight of the suffering of others; there is an abundant, superabundant enjoyment even in one’s own suffering, in causing one’s own suffering.”  The element of paradox disappears from this statement if we realize that it is not a question of “cruelty,” but of the dynamics of pain.

Camille Bos in a suggestive essay ("Du Plaisir de la Douleur,” Revue Philosophique, July, 1902) finds the explanation of the mystery in that complexity of the phenomena to which I have already referred.  Both pain and pleasure are complex feelings, the resultant of various components, and we name that resultant in accordance with the nature of the strongest component.  “Thus we give to a complexus a name which strictly belongs only to one of its factors, and in pain all is not painful.”  When pain becomes a desired end Camille Bos regards the desire as due to three causes:  (1) the pain contrasts with and revives a pleasure which custom threatens to dull; (2) the pain by preceding the pleasure accentuates the positive character of the latter; (3) pain momentarily raises the lowered level of sensibility and restores to the organism for a brief period the faculty of enjoyment it had lost.

It must therefore be said that, in so far as pain is pleasurable, it is so only in so far as it is recognized as a prelude to pleasure, or else when it is an actual stimulus to the nerves conveying the sensation of pleasure.  The nymphomaniac who experienced an orgasm at the moment when the knife passed through her clitoris (as recorded by Mantegazza) and the prostitute who experienced keen pleasure when the surgeon removed vegetations from her vulva (as recorded by Fere) took no pleasure in pain, but in one case the intense craving for strong sexual emotion, and in the other the long-blunted nerves of pleasure, welcomed the abnormally strong