extent of asserting that slow heart
beat always gave a pleasant state of feeling, and rapid heart beat an
unpleasant; for there is slow heart beat during a "morning grouch",
and rapid during joyful expectation. Or, in regard to breathing, try
this experiment: hasten your breathing and see whether a feeling of
pleasantness results; slacken it and see whether unpleasantness
results. The fact is that pleasantness can go with a wide range of
organic states, so far as these are revealed by heart beat and
breathing; and the same with unpleasantness. If there is any organic
fact definitely characteristic of either state of feeling, it is a
subtle fact that has hitherto eluded observation.

{177}

2. Pleasantness might represent smooth and easy brain action,
unpleasantness slow and impeded brain action. According to this
theory, unimpeded progress of nerve currents through the brain is
pleasant, while resistance encountered at the brain synapses is
unpleasant. A stimulus is pleasant, then, because the nerve currents
started by it find smooth going through the brain centers, and another
stimulus is unpleasant because it finds the going poor.

While this theory looks good in some ways, and fits some cases very
well--as the great unpleasantness of blocked reaction, where you
cannot make up your mind what to do--there are two big objections to
it. The first objection is found in the facts of practice. Practising
any reaction makes it more and more smooth-running and free from inner
obstruction, and should therefore make it more and more pleasant; but,
as a matter of fact, practising an unfamiliar act of any sort makes it
more pleasant for a time only, after which continued practice makes it
automatic and neither pleasant nor unpleasant. The smoothest
reactions, which should give the highest degree of pleasant feeling
according to the theory, are simply devoid of all feeling.

The second objection lies in the difficulty of believing unpleasant
stimuli to give slow, impeded reactions. On the contrary, the
instinctive defensive reactions to unpleasant stimuli are very quick,
and give no sign of impeded progress of nerve currents through the
brain centers.

3. There is one fact, not yet taken into account, that may point the
way to a better theory. Feeling is impulsive. In pleasantness, the
impulse is to "stand pat" and let the pleasant state continue; in
unpleasantness, the impulse is to end the state. The impulse of
pleasantne