126 Mind and Body 



be repeated, and so to secure the continuance of the pleas- 

 urable conditions ; and actions which get the organism into 

 pain are by the very fact of pain inhibited and suppressed. 



But as soon as we inquire more closely into the actual 

 working of pleasure and pain reactions, we find an answer 

 suggested to the first question also, i.e., the question as to 

 how the organism comes to make the kind and sort of 

 movements which the environment calls for — approxi- 

 mately those movement variations which are required. The 

 pleasure or pain produced by a stimulus — and by a move- 

 ment also, for the utility of movement is always that it 

 secures stimulation of this sort or that — does not lead to 

 diffused, neutral, and characterless movements, as Spencer 

 and Bain suppose ; this is disputed no less by the infant's 

 movements than by the actions of unicellular organisms. 

 There are characteristic differences in vital movements 

 wherever we find them. Even if Mr. Spencer's undiffer- 

 entiated protoplasmic movements had existed, natural se- 

 lection would very soon have put an end to it. There is 

 a characteristic antithesis between movements always. 

 Healthy, overflowing, favourable, outreaching, expansive, 

 vital effects are associated with pleasure ; and the contrary 

 — withdrawing, depressive, contractive, decreasing vital 

 effects are associated with pain. This is exactly the state 

 of things which a theory of the selection of movements 

 from overproduced movements requires, i.e,^ that increased 

 vitality, represented by pleasure, should give excessive 

 movements, from which new adjustments are selected ; and 

 that decreased vitality, represented by pain, should do the 

 reverse — draw off energy and suppress movement. 



If, therefore, we say that here is a type of reaction 

 which all vitality shows, we may give it a general descrip- 



