ASSOCIATION AND THOUGHT. 365 implying a donation or even a relation to an Ego, but rather for that which is simply, and comes as it is, then in this sense pain and pleasure must be called presentations. But the objection leads on to a further discussion. Is there anything at the start beyond mere presentation, that is feeling with the distinctions of quality, quantity and ' tone,' which we abstract from one another, but which at first come within one blurred whole which merely is? I feel convinced that there is nothing. I do not think, in the first place, that there is at the start any aspect of self- feeling (Principles, p. 456). True, the whole that is given, however poor that may be, does expand and contract, and feels pleasure and pain ; but to be a felt expansion, and to feel it as such, are not the same thing. Until a core has grown together, against which the alteration can come as an
- other,' I cannot see how the aspect of self is possible. And
I find no reason to suppose that at the beginning this in- ternal group does, even in a rudimentary shape, exist. If the early soul is rich enough to afford this variety, yet the distinction is not a thing which requires no making, or can make itself at once and without machinery. Hence there is at first no self-feeling, even though we mean by that merely one aspect of the whole ; and still less is there anything like a subject and object. I observe much confusion on this head. The distinction, we may hear, is not to be tran- scended. Now, if this is meant metaphysically, it is utterly irrelevant. Whether really and in the end all the contents of the Universe, my self included, are or are not relative to some subject, is a question on which psychology has nothing, and cannot have anything, to say ; while to stop short of this question is to make no advance at all. But, remaining within psychology, I remark, in the first place, that in verifiable experience we occasionally have states where this relation of subject and object wholly ceases to exist. Still this is not the main point. For where experience does give us a reference to self, that self is not naked form. It has always a content, a concrete filling that varies but never is absent. Now, I would urge, if this reference exists at the start, what is the content of the subject ? Is it likely that experience, at its poor and blurred beginning, does divide general may as such have associations, and still more probable that pleasures in their union with qualities may have special associations, and may recall where the qualities alone would not recall. And the evidence seems in favour of pleasure and pain being recalled by qualities sometimes and not being always recreated. That being so, I feel bound to include them under the law.
