Henri Bergson

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or smaller number of elementary psychic phenomena which we dimly discern in the fundamental emotion.

      The moral feelings. Pity. Its increasing intensity is a qualitative progress.

      The moral feelings might be studied in the same way. Let us take pity as an example. It consists in the first place in putting oneself mentally in the place of others, in suffering their pain. But if it were nothing more, as some have maintained, it would inspire us with the idea of avoiding the wretched rather than helping them, for pain is naturally abhorrent to us. This feeling of horror may indeed be at the root of pity; but a new element soon comes in, the need of helping our fellow-men and of alleviating their suffering. Shall we say with La Rochefoucauld that this so-called sympathy is a calculation, "a shrewd insurance against evils to come"? Perhaps a dread of some future evil to ourselves does hold a place in our compassion for other people's evil. These however are but lower forms of pity. True pity consists not so much in fearing suffering as in desiring it. The desire is a faint one and we should hardly wish to see it realized; yet we form it in spite of ourselves, as if Nature were committing some great injustice and it were necessary to get rid of all suspicion of complicity with her. The essence of pity is thus a need for self-abasement, an aspiration downwards. This painful aspiration nevertheless has a charm about it, because it raises us in our own estimation and makes us feel superior to those sensuous goods from which our thought is temporarily detached. The increasing intensity of pity thus consists in a qualitative progress, in a transition from repugnance to fear, from fear to sympathy, and from sympathy itself to humility.

      Conscious states connected with external causes or involving psychical symptoms.

      We do not propose to carry this analysis any further. The psychic states whose intensity we have just defined are deep-seated states which do not seem to have any close relation to their external cause or to involve the perception of muscular contraction. But such states are rare. There is hardly any passion or desire, any joy or sorrow, which is not accompanied by physical symptoms; and, where these symptoms occur, they probably count for something in the estimate of intensities. As for the sensations properly so called, they are manifestly connected with their external cause, and though the intensity of the sensation cannot be defined by the magnitude of its cause, there undoubtedly exists some relation between these two terms. In some of its manifestations consciousness even appears to spread outwards, as if intensity were being developed into extensity, e.g. in the case of muscular effort. Let us face this last phenomenon at once: we shall thus be transported at a bound to the opposite extremity of the series of psychic phenomena.

      Muscular effort seems at first sight to be quantitative.

      The feeling of effort. We are conscious not of an expenditure of force but of the resulting muscular movement.

      Intensity of feeling of effort proportional to extent of our body affected.

      It is not for us to take a side in the dispute. After all, the question with which we have to deal is nοt whether the feeling of effort comes from the centre or the periphery, but in what does our perception of its intensity exactly consist? Now, it is sufficient to observe oneself attentively to reach a conclusion on this point which Professor James has not formulated, but which seems to us quite in accord with the spirit of his teaching. We maintain that the more a given effort seems to us to increase, the greater is the number of muscles which contract in sympathy with it, and that the apparent consciousness of a greater intensity of effort at a given point of the organism is reducible, in reality, to the perception of a larger surface of the body being affected.

      Our consciousness of an increase of muscular effort consists in the perception of (1) a greater number of peripheral sensations (2) a qualitative change in some of them.

      Try, for example, to clench the fist with increasing force. You will have the impression of a sensation of effort entirely localized in your hand and running up a scale of magnitudes. In reality, what you experience in your hand remains the same, but the sensation which was