682 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tions seem, by virtue of their variety and multiplicity, to escape the 

 grasp of calculation. It is not a matter of surprise that philosophers 

 are at variance respecting the nature of these affections. There is 

 hardly a more interesting question before investigators than that of 

 their origin and their office as motive powers in universal evolution. 

 We propose here to examine into what is true and what is incomplete 

 in the explanations of these matters that have been borrowed from the 

 doctrine of natural selection. 



We can not fail to apply the biological doctrine of selection to 

 pleasure and pain. Mr. Schneider goes to it for the inmost secret of 

 our joys and sufferings. Not only is there a connection between 

 pleasure and the increase of vitality, but this connection is impera- 

 tively established as a necessity of evolution. Pleasure, according to 

 Mr. Spencer, is a feeling which we seek to bring into consciousness 

 and retain there, and pain is a feeling which we seek to get out of con- 

 sciousness and to keep out. If we could imagine beings to have ever 

 been created by any sport of Nature, whose pleasure was connected 

 with injurious actions and their pains with useful ones, they must have 

 died out speedily by virtue of the vice in their constitutions. Accord- 

 ing to Darwin's principles, the essential condition of the development 

 of life through ages is that agreeable acts be also, on the whole, fa- 

 vorable to development. This is a mechanical necessity. 



Mr. Schneider is so confident of the accuracy of the natural mech- 

 anism, at least for the generality of cases, that he is almost ready to. 

 believe that Nature is never mistaken when abandoned to herself. 

 " In the normal condition," he says, "the feelings always tend to their 

 true end ; errors originate only in the morbid conditions ingrafted 

 upon Nature by civilization. With the natural and healthy man the 

 feelings are healthy, so that with every thought is associated a feeling 

 of corresponding and suitable intensity." Abnormal relations appear 

 chiefly among cultivated men, particularly among those who are dis- 

 eased by their own fault or by that of their ancestors. " The pas- 

 sions have much less spread in the healthy and simple populations of 

 the country than among the very artificially trained inhabitants of the 

 large cities. Practical right and good conduct are much more depend- 

 ent on health of the body than on health of the mind." 



The exaggerations of the Darwinian theory begin, in our opinion, 

 at this point. A mechanism of pleasures useful to life, once produced, 

 is, without doubt, transmitted by heredity and becomes almost infal- 

 lible in the lower species ; but no infallibility can be found in the 

 higher animals, not even in those that have the mens sana in corpore 

 sano ; for, the more the organs become complicated, the more does a 

 purely mechanical selection become difficult for them. An idle or un- 

 intelligent man, for example, is not hopelessly condemned to death by 

 the justice of universal mechanism, for he has more than one way of 

 escape. If one faculty is under restraint, another one can come to 



