692 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



development of the organs, not their exercise and the development 

 of their functions. Hunger, regarded by him as the primary and 

 universal feeling, has for its object the appropriation of matters 

 coming from without. It is a force of concentration and absorption 

 into itself. But, as we have seen, nutrition and the restoration of the 

 organs, which simply store up the forces of tension by a kind of nega- 

 tive work, are not the real source of positive pleasures or of positive 

 pains. It is in expending the energy of materials already appropriated 

 that we feel pleasures and pains. In that way are brought about the 

 development of the being and evolution toward new conditions of life : 

 the living being acts upon the medium, and the medium is in turn 

 modified by the increasing power of the being. There is, therefore, 

 in animated nature a development from within to without, and not 

 only a kind of envelopment and absorption from without by that which 

 is within. The acquisition and restoration of the tissues suppose a cer- 

 tain activity already present, an anterior outbreak of life manifested 

 by movement ; and it is plausible to suppose beneath this vital move- 

 ment, preceding the rudimentary pain caused by the exterior resist- 

 ance, the rudiment of pleasure attached to the interior action. 



The conclusions to which our study appears to have brought us are 

 not less important for the theory of morals than for the theory of man 

 and of the world. The first is, that natural selection, a wholly mechan- 

 ical and exterior process, presupposes an internal principle of evolu- 

 tion, which principle is an activity capable of enjoying and suffering. 

 A second conclusion is, that pleasure is immediately connected with 

 action, and comfort with existence and the unfolding of life. Hence 

 it follows that pain is not, as some of the pessimists believe, the prin- 

 ciple of internal action and desire, but only that of the reaction on the 

 external world. 



Extending these results to the general theory of the world, we can 

 infer from them that pain is not the sole motive of universal evolu- 

 tion. It is only at the origin of evolution that uneasiness, pain, or 

 hunger, is the principal spur of which Nature avails herself. But in 

 a higher degree in the scale of beings, pleasure, through the interven- 

 tion of the thought that anticipates it, becomes the certain stimulus 

 to activity. Hence, we have seen the higher senses effecting rapid 

 condensations of an infinity of delicate and subtile pleasures, objects 

 of luxury rather than of the necessities of material life ; and evolution 

 becoming a child of wealth, and not a child of poverty only. For 

 this reason evolution does not seem to us to be solely " preservation of 

 self," according to Darwin's term, or "maintenance of the normal 

 equilibrium " ; but it is, or may become, a progress. Pain, therefore, 

 is not, as Schopenhauer and Yon Hartmann maintain, the eternal and 

 irremediable condition of beings, a kind of damnation, or a hell from 

 which the world can not escape except by annihilation of itself. 



Still other moral consequences, no less important, are brought out. 



