The Implications of Trial and Error 163 



obviously be of no value. Lamarckism practically 

 rests upon the assumption that an organism's nat- 

 ural modes of response are teleological. But it gives 

 no account of how they came to be so. 



Can an organism that responds totally without 

 regard to its own welfare, if such an organism can 

 be imagined, ever be hammered into an adaptively 

 reacting mechanism through the influence of the en- 

 vironment? Spencer's and Bain's theories of the 

 origin of adaptive movements practically assume 

 that it can. Both Spencer's and Bain's theories 

 assume that adaptation is brought about by a process 

 of selection from among the various random activi- 

 ties performed by the organism. It is th"e acciden- 

 tally adaptive movement that comes to be repeated. 

 Both theories assume that the adaptive movement 

 is repeated because it brings pleasure to the organ- 

 ism. Hence there must be a correlation not only 

 between pleasure and welfare, but between pleasure 

 and the tendency to repeat an action by which pleas- 

 ure is secured. To the question as to how pleasure 

 came to be associated with organic well being, Spen- 

 cer falls back upon natural selection for an answer. 

 Organisms in which the pleasurable coincided with 

 the organically beneficial were preserved, while the 

 others perished, so there gradually came to be es- 

 tablished the general relationship between the pleas- 

 ant and the beneficial which we commonly find. So 

 far as I know, no other plausible account of this 

 relationship has been offered. The Lamarckian ex- 



