The Province of Pain

The Province of Pain is a short essay by H.G. Wells about pain and the question of its presence within different animals or areas of the body. It was published in Science and Art 8 (February 1894): 58-59

Transcript
In spite of the activity of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in our midst, and of the zealous anemies of the British Institute of Preventative Medicine, there have been those who have doubted whether animals—or, at least, very many animals—feel pain at all. This doubt is impregnable, so far as absolute disproof goes. No scientific observer has, as yet, crept into the animal mind; no reminiscence of metempsychosis come to the aid of the humane. We can only reason that there is evidence of pain by analogy, a method of proof too apt to display a wayward fancy to be a sure guide. This alone, however, does not prevent us discussing the question—rather the reverse, for there is, at least, the charm of uncertainty about any inquiries how animals may feel pain. It is speculation almost at its purest.

Many People regard the presence of nerves as indicative of the possible presence of pain. If the surmise is correct, then every kin of animal, from the jellyfish up to man, suffers. Some will even go further, and make plants feel and figure the whole living creation as groaning and travailing together. But the probabilities are that neither is life nor nervous structure inseperably tinted by the possibility of pain. Among the considerations that point to this conclusion is the fact that many of the nervous impressions of our own bodies have no relation either to pleasure or pain. Most of the impressions of sight are devoid of any decided flavour of the kind, and most sounds, and all those many nervoud impressions that never awaken consciousness; those that mantain the tonic contraction of arteries, for instance, are, it goes without saying, painless. Then the little ganglia and nerve-threads that lie in the substance of the heart and keep it beating have nothing to do with pain. The nerves retain their irritability, too, in many cases, after death; and a frog's hind leg may be set moving after being cut off from the body. Here, again, is nerve, but no one will believe there can be pain in an amputated limb. From considerations such as these, one is forced to conclude that the quality of pain becomes affixed to an impression, not in the the nerves that conduct, but in the brain that recieves it.

Again, we may have pain without receiving nervous impressions-or, at least, we may have pain not simply and immediately arising from nervous impressions. The emotions of fear, jealousy, and even anger, for instance, have all their painful hue. Pain independent of sensation is possible, but so is sensation without pain. Pain without thought is possible, but so is thought without pain. Pain, then, though a prominent feature of our mental scheme, is not a necessary companion either to any living thing or nervous thread, on the one hand, or to any mental existence, on the other.

The end of pain, so far as we can see its end, is protection. There seems to be little or no absolutely needless or unreasonable pain in the world, though disconsolate individuals might easily be found who see no good in gout or toothache. But these, indeed, may be blessings in a still impenetrable disguise. The man in the story, at any rate, whose wish was granted, and who was released from pain, burnt first one hand and then had the other arm mortify, and was happily saved from dying of starvation through indifference by getting himself scalded to death. Pain, rightly seen, is, in fact, a true guardian angel, watching over the field of our activities, and, with harsh tenderness, turning us back from death. In our own bodies it is certainly only located where it is needed.

The whole surface of man's body has painful possibilities, and nerve-ends are everywhere on the watch against injury, but deeper the sense is not so easily awakened. In proof of this it is a common trick among medical students to thrust a pin into the thigh. There these nerve-ends are thinly scattered over the skin, and these once passed the muscle is penetrated with scarcely a pang. Again, as most people have read, the brain has often been cut in operations after injury to the head without causing pain. Internal pains are always less acute, and less definitely seated than external ones. Many grave internal disorders and injuries may manifest themselves merely as a general feverishness and restlessness, or even go on for long quite unsuspected. The province of pain, then, in man, so far as detailed government is concerned, is merely the surface of his body, with 'spheres of influence,' rather than proper possessions in the interior, and the centre seat of pain is in the mind. Many an operation which to describe gives an unpleasant thrill to the imagination-slicing away the brain, for instance, or washing away the brain with a jet of water-is, as a matter of fact, absolutely painless.

The relation of physical pain to the imagination and the emotions is worthy of consideration. There seems to be a direct relation between emotional and physical sensibility, the one varying inversely, to borrow a convenient technicality, as the other. Professor Lombroso recently raised all the militant feminine by asserting that women felt physical pain less acutely than men. He hardly deserved the severely sarcastic retorts that appeared in the ladies' papers. His critics, from want of practice or other causes, failed to observe the compliment he was paying them. But a man must have been singularly unobservant if he has failed to notice that, while women are more sensitive to fear and to such imaginary terrors as reside in the cockroach and the toad, they can, when physical pain has secured its grasp upon them, display a silent fortitude quite impossible to ordinary men. Their pains are more intense mentally, but less so physically. This is quite in accordance with the view that needless pain does not exist; where the quickness of imagination guards against danger there is evidently a lessened need for the actual physical smart.

Emotional states are anæsthetic. A furious man feels neither fear nor bodily pain, and there is even the clearest antagonism of pain and calm mental occupation. Do not let your mind dwell upon it is the advice of common sense. The Ingoldsby Legends were the outcome of the struggle of one sturdy spirit against bodily pain. This is not the only way in which men can avoid the goad. In the use of anæsthetics we have men anticipating and meeting the warning. So far as pnysical pain goes, civilised people not only probably do not need it so much, but probably do not feel it so much, or, at any rate, so often as savages. Moreover, the civilised man evidently feels the spur of passion far less acutely than his less advanced brother. In view of the wise economy of nature, it is not immaterial to ask whether this does not open a probability of man's eventual release from pain. May he not so grow morally and intellectually as to get at last beyond the need of corporal chastisement, and foresight take the place of pain, as science ousts instinct? First, he may avoid pain, and then the alarm-bell may rust away from disuse. On the other hand, there is a quantitative relation between feeling and acting. Sit still, inhibit every movement, your sensations are at a maximum. So you behave when you would hear low music, and lose nothing. Struggle violently, the great wave of nervous energy flowing out neutralises the inward flow of feeling. A man when his 'blood is up,' when he is pouring out energy at every point, will fail to notice the infliction of a wound, which, if he were at rest, would be intensely painful. The struggles and outcries of animals being wounded have their merciful use-they shunt off so much energy that would register as pain. So the acts of sobbing and weeping are the proper channels of escape from a pressure that would otherwise be intolerable. Probably a great proportion of the impressions that would register as pain in man are immediately transmitted into impulses of movement in animals, and therefore cause no pain. With the development of the intelligence in animals there is, however, a diminution of the promptness with which an animal reacts to stimuli. The higher animals, like man, look before they act; with the distinction of approaching man in being less automatic and more intelligent, it seems credible that they also approach him in feeling pain. Probably, since their emotions are less subtile and their memories less distinct, the actual immediate smart of pain may be keener while it lasts than in man. Man being more intelligent, needs less severity, we may infer, from the hands of his great teacher, Nature, just as the woman needs less than the man.

Hence we may very well suppose that we have, as it were, a series among living things with respect to pain. In such an animal as the dog we may conceive that there is a fairly well-developed moral and intellectual rule, and a keen sense of pain. Going downwards, the mental factor diminishes, the smart of the pain becomes greater and greater in amount, but less and less enduring, until at last the mental disappears and the impression that would be pain is a momentary shock, translated into action before it is felt. On the other hand, as we ascend from the dog to the more complex human, we find physical pain becoming increasingly subordinate to the moral and intellectual. In the place of pains there come mental aversions that are scarcely painful, and an intellectual order replaces the war of physical motives. The lower animals, we may reasonably hold, do not feel pain because they have no intelligence to utilise the warning; the coming man will not feel pain, because the warning will not be needed.

Such considerations as these point to the conclusion that the province of pain is after all a limited and transitory one; a phase through which life must pass on its evolution from the automatic to the spiritual; and, so far as we can tell, among all the hosts of space, pain is found only on the surface of this little planet.

The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)
This essay and The Limits of Individual Plasticity is paraphrased in chapter 13, Doctor Moreau Explains, of The Island of Doctor Moreau. Doctor Moreau uses the same needle in the thigh trick mentioned in the essay. Moreau also brings up the explanatory gap when he mentions how Prendick is only thinking of visible pain and therefore is a materialist.