Thus, when hypersthesia appears in the sensoriunt, when the pain reveals itself either as the effect of too intense peripheral, excitement (a wound, or any injury of the surface of the body), or as the effect of a per sistent irritation (moral emotion, prolonged intellectual labour, etc.), we may artificially cause the level of pain ful over-excitement to fall several degrees, just as if we had to deal with a peripheral plexus in a condition of painful erethism, and may thus to a certain extent dull the painful vibrations. It is thus that and stupefying drugs act when introduced as inhalations.
In operations on patients under chloroform, this agent spreading through the plexuses of the sensorium freezes its nervous elements, which it steeps in the same ansthesia in which the sensitive plexuses of the skin of a hysterical patient remain.* Painful excitations are in vain launched from the peripheral regions in the form of keen incisive thrills, when the tissues are cut ; they meet in the sensorium only zones of cells physically modified, stricken with ansthesia, and incapable of erection, of feeling,- or of being raised to the pitch of pain.
To complete the resemblance, just as we see anal resic patients whose skin is pinched, and into whose tis mes needles are thrust with impunity, witness with indifference and without painful reaction what takes place in their bodies ; so we meet with a certain num ber of operation patients who, being capable of analy zing their sensations at the moment of operation, tell us that during the period of ansthesia into which they were plunged, they have felt the cold of the knife penetrating into their flesh—that they have felt the keen instrument cutting through their tissues, but that to their surprise they perceived that they did not suffer, and that the usual pain was not naturally disengaged as they would have expected. One of them told me that he experienced a surprise simi lar to that of a person who should plunge his hand into a burning brazier, and should naturally be aston ished at not feeling the burn.
Moral Pain.—Moral pain is only the expression of the moral sensibility carried to its maximum of inten sity, as physical pain is but the most exquisite form of the physical sensibility thrown into agitation. The conditions of evolution are the same in both cases, except that moral pain presents itself to us under special aspects of amplitude and intensity, which give it an expression of a persistence quite characteristic.
Thus in studying the etiological conditions of moral sensibility, we have seen how this sensibility was but a long synthesis and the resultant of a combination of the sensibility of the sensorium thrown into agitation with the involuntary revival of memories, and the incessant participation of intellectual activity, which always under.. lies its manifestations.
External excitations, as we have already remarked, once deposited in the sensorium, do not become extinct all at once. They survive, and like phospho rescent gleams, leave persistent traces of their passage in the nervous plexuses. On the other hand, the ex citations of intellectual activity are also concerned in the process. They are always alert, always active, and by virtue of their automatic energies they reveal them selves in the shape of ideas associated with contem porary reminiscences and connected reflections ; so that they also constitute, as it were, so many foci of activity capable of incessantly intensifying the move ment in the plexuses of the sensorium.
The result, as regards the genealogy of moral pain, of the double participation of these two physiolo gical factors—the persistence of impressions, and the incessant participation of the intellect in the phenomena of sensibility, is this, that when the plexuses of our sensorium have been thus thrilled vividly to their depths, the impression so produced does not immediately die away. It becomes persistent—lives upon memo ries, and vibrates like the dolorous echo of a firmer agitation of our sensibility, to be effaced only as this sensibility becomes dulled in the region where it was primarily engendered. The shock once produced, it becomes incarnate, and perpetuates itself in us by pro ducing the phenomena of moral grief. We cannot avoid feeling it, and suffering—each in his own manner it is true, each in a different degree, according to the delicacy or richness of the nervous elements which constitute his sensorium. It is no more possible to escape from a painful emotion which comes to inflict a sort of contusion upon our natural sensibility, than to escape an ecchymosis when a heavy body crushes our integuments.