uld have cured us we should long ago have
been saved. The bitterest quintessence of pain is its helplessness, and
our incapacity to abolish it. The most intolerable torments are those
we feel gaining upon us, intensifying and prolonging themselves
indefinitely. This baffling quality, so conspicuous in extreme agony, is
present in all pain and is perhaps its essence. If we sought to describe
by a circumlocution what is of course a primary sensation, we might
scarcely do better than to say that pain is consciousness at once
intense and empty, fixing attention on what contains no character, and
arrests all satisfactions without offering anything in exchange. The
horror of pain lies in its intolerable intensity and its intolerable
tedium. It can accordingly be cured either by sleep or by entertainment.
In itself it has no resource; its violence is quite helpless and its
vacancy offers no expedients by which it might be unknotted and
relieved.

Pain is not only impotent in itself but is a sign of impotence in the
sufferer. Its appearance, far from constituting its own remedy, is like
all other organic phenomena subject to the law of inertia and tends only
to its own continuance. A man's hatred of his own condition no more
helps to improve it than hatred of other people tends to improve them.
If we allowed ourselves to speak in such a case of efficacy at all, we
should say that pain perpetuates and propagates itself in various ways,
now by weakening the system, now by prompting convulsive efforts, now by
spreading to other beings through the contagion of sympathy or
vengeance. In fact, however, it merely betrays a maladjustment which
has more or less natural stability. It may be instantaneous only; by its
lack of equilibrium it may involve the immediate destruction of one of
its factors. In that case we fabulously say that the pain has
instinctively removed its own cause. Pain is here apparently useful
because it expresses an incipient tension which the self-preserving
forces in the organism are sufficient to remove. Pain's appearance is
then the sign for its instant disappearance; not indeed by virtue of its
inner nature or of any art it can initiate, but merely by virtue of
mechanical associations between its cause and its remedy. The burned
child dreads the fire and, reading only the surface of his life, fancies
that the pain once felt and still remembered is the ground of his new
prudence. Punishments, however, are not al