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.