DEVELOPMENT OF PLEASURE AND PAIN 63 



arrangement, and not really duties at all, in the strict sense 

 of the word. The existence of harmful pleasures does not 

 offend in the same way against the optimistic bias, and is 

 more readily allowed. For these an explanatory principle 

 has been found in the supposed survival of tendencies, 

 which were useful when they first came into existence, 

 but which, though their satisfaction still causes pleasure, 

 are now unsuited to the environment, and therefore noxious. 

 Unfortunately, this principle is itself in as little accordance 

 with the facts, as far as they can be ascertained, as the 

 theory in aid of which it is invoked. It requires us to make 

 the assumption, among many others equally improbable, 

 that, at some remote period, alcoholic intoxication was of 

 advantage to the individual, or to the species. And it is 

 directly contradicted by the fact that we find the same 

 unwholesome tendencies at the first beginnings of life. 

 * Not all substances that exert an attraction have a nutritive 

 value for the organisms (Bacteria and Infusoria), or are 

 even harmless. Many lead presently to the destruction of 

 the organisms they attract. For example, Sodium Salicyli- 

 cate, Strychnine, and (strange to say) Morphia. 1 In 

 Morphia hunger we have a tendency which was as noxious 

 at the first dawn of life as it is now. However low we may 

 descend, we shall be as far as ever from the discovery of an 

 organism with no impulses but what are wholesome. If 

 we did make the discovery, we should find perfection at the 

 root of the ladder instead of at the top, and evolution would 

 lose all meaning as a purposive process. Finally, it is 

 clear that the worst of the vices to which humanity is liable 

 are of recent development, and not inherited from a remote 

 ancestry. 



An attempt to meet this objection, and tone down the 

 teleological features of the original explanation, has been 

 made in the hypothesis that the connexion between pleasure 

 and advantage is not primordial, but derivative, and itself 

 one of the products of evolution. In the beginning the 

 distribution of pleasure and pain over useful and noxious 

 1 0. Hertwig, Die Zdle und die Gewebe, p. 99. 



