Pain, pleasure and æsthetics : an essay concerning the psychology of pain and pleasure, with special reference to æsthetics / by Henry Rutgers Marshall.

  • Henry Rutgers Marshall
Date:
1894
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Pain, pleasure and æsthetics : an essay concerning the psychology of pain and pleasure, with special reference to æsthetics / by Henry Rutgers Marshall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    produce a shock powerful and painful enough to overbalance the pleasure led up to. We all realise how dangerous it is to treat lightly subjects which may be of sacred interest to others. Our third minor division relates to— C, Pleasures which accompany vividness of presentation. [In physiological terms these pleasures may be described as due to hypernormal activity of a normally efl&cient organ.] Vividness of impression is a well-recognised means of producing testhetic result in its cruder forms. Barbaric art shows this distinctly, and the art of the masses, even in our day, makes use of the same means. Vivid colouring and contrasts, startling forms and combinations, vivacious rhythms, loudness of sound as in martial music, all are common tools of the popular artist. But we here tread on ground dangerous to permanency ; for hypernormal activity, as we have seen, is the basis of pain as well as of pleasure, and pleasure which is determined by this alone must be of a very ephemeral char- acter. So in the higher aH. this crude means of producing Eesthetic effect is not prominent. In a more delicate form, however, we do find it of service to higher art in the stimulation by varied means of the same activities at the same time. The principle here involved is that of harmony or the unification of the manifold, which is widely recognised as of the highest importance in eesthetics. [In hedonic language it may be stated thus: Two or more elements act simultaneously as stimuH to the activity of some new element, the resulting psychosis being one m which the original elements stand in the background, the focus of the held consisting of this new element which, being stimulated from more than one source, appears in a pleasurable condition ot hypernormality.]
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