? May not pain
just as much as fear keep us from possible and splendid things? But why
ask a question that is already answered in principle in every dentist's
chair? Benham's idea, however, went much further than that, he was
clearly suggesting that in pain itself, pain endured beyond a certain
pitch, there might come pleasure again, an intensity of sensation
that might have the colour of delight. He betrayed a real anxiety to
demonstrate this possibility, he had the earnestness of a man who is
sensible of dissentient elements within. He hated the thought of
pain even more than he hated fear. His arguments did not in the least
convince White, who stopped to poke the fire and assure himself of his
own comfort in the midst of his reading.

Young people and unseasoned people, Benham argued, are apt to imagine
that if fear is increased and carried to an extreme pitch it becomes
unbearable, one will faint or die; given a weak heart, a weak artery or
any such structural defect and that may well happen, but it is just as
possible that as the stimulation increases one passes through a brief
ecstasy of terror to a new sane world, exalted but as sane as normal
existence. There is the calmness of despair. Benham had made some notes
to enforce this view, of the observed calm behaviour of men already
hopelessly lost, men on sinking ships, men going to execution, men
already maimed and awaiting the final stroke, but for the most part
these were merely references to books and periodicals. In exactly the
same way, he argued, we exaggerate the range of pain as if it were
limitless. We think if we are unthinking that it passes into agony and
so beyond endurance to destruction. It probably does nothing of the
kind. Benham compared pain to the death range of the electric current.
At a certain voltage it thrills, at a greater it torments and convulses,
at a still greater it kills. But at enormous voltages, as Tesla was
the first to demonstrate, it does no injury. And following on this came
memoranda on the recorded behaviour of martyrs, on the self-torture of
Hindoo ascetics, of the defiance of Red Indian prisoners.

"These things," Benham had written, "are much more horrible when one
considers them from the point of view of an easy-chair";--White gave
an assenting nod--"ARE THEY REALLY HORRIBLE AT ALL? Is it possible that
these charred and slashed and splintered persons, those Indians hanging
from hooks, those walkers in the fiery furnace