THE "BENEFICENCE OF PAIN" THEORY.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3127, 6 July 1881, Page 4

THE "BENEFICENCE OF PAIN" THEORY.

Pain, in not a few cases of it, shows striking over-quantification, and also irrelevancy of occurrence in point of time, and great obscurity of localisation. Its absence in some other instances of injury and wrong activity is equally irrational. The old beliefs as to the uses subserved by bodily pain have received some rough shocks by the more detailed physiological researches of modern times. It was formerly assumed that this kind of suffering betokened what one may term a physical conscience in the body, protesting against wrong doing in reference tc physiological laws. But the frame may be ill used in many ways, and the physical conscience is all too late in commencing its reproaches. In some cases, the nervous symptoms mislead ; pleasure is felt where pain should arise ; in other instances —as, for example, in the effects of certain poisons—it cannot be said that there are any premonitions at all ; time is not given for them. Sometimes, the pain is wholly unintelligible — a mere unlocated uneasiness ; and it scarcely ever operates in the exact ratio of the importance of the injury. A corn on the foot gives more anguish than the beginnings of many fatal diseases. It used, further, to be thought that bodily pain, as well as having a preventive character, was punitive it its operation ; that, it fact, it was a mode of expiation, a balancing of the account, preventing illicit pleasure from being any gain. Again puzzling difficulties arise as soon as the theory is applied in detail. No principle of justice can be detected underlying these supposed expiations. Moreover, any judicial appointment of penalties for unlawful joys is now made for ever,irnpossible since the discovery of anaesthetics has enabled the chemists to retail the waters of oblivion over their counters. —Process of Human Experience, by William Cyples.