A Limit to Evolution 291^ 



panded on account of rain ; but these associated images may 

 iirise hefore such thoughts, and images of the kind will often 

 persist in spite of our efforts to expel them. In hearing, after 

 an interval of many years, some melody of early days, very 

 vivid images may be aroused. The old man may become in 

 imagination a youth once more, and seem to feel his feeble 

 limbs again treading the rhythmical measures of the waltz 

 and his arm sustaining the pressure of a form dear to his 

 memory. Thus we come to have those complex associa- 

 tions of pleasurable or painful feelings which we call senuous 

 emotions, some of which may be occasionally aroused in us 

 apart from the exercise of our reason. 



We have, moreover, not only these pleasurable and painful 

 feelings. We also possess an innate spontaneous tendency to 

 rest in, or to pursue and plunge deeper into, whatever we 

 find to be pleasurable, and also to avoid whatever is 

 pa inful. 



Again, when we act, we have a certain vague feeling of 

 our self -activity. Our intellectual consciousness of what we 

 may be doing is not here referred to, but that feeling which 

 accompanies our actions when our attention is quite turned 

 away from them — as when we walk unconsciously along, 

 immersed in thought. It is plain that we do have this 

 feeling, for if our progress is accelerated by something 

 external — as a gust of wind — we immediately have a different 

 and contrasted feeling. We have, indeed, a feelii^ of our 

 passivity as well as of our activity ; a power of feeling (apart 

 from the intellect), the violent action upon us of anything 

 external, and therefore a power of feeling (as well as of 

 intellectual perceiving) a difference between our activity and 

 our passivity — i.e. a feeling resulting from that difference. 



If we draw a chain across our hand, we have feelings 

 which correspond with the succession of its parts as they 

 pass, and a feeling corresponding with the termination of 



