Pleasure^ Pain^ and the Circular Reaction 125 



with it, the question : How does the organism keep those 

 movements going which are thus selected, and suppress 

 those which are useless or damaging ? 



Now these two questions are the ones which the biolo- 

 gists fail to answer. And the force of the facts leads to 

 the hypotheses of * conscious force ' of Cope, ' self-develop- 

 ment ' of Henslow, and 'directive tendency' or 'deter- 

 minate variation ' of the Neo-Lamarckians — all aspects of 

 the new vitalism which just these positions and the facts 

 which they rest upon are now forcing to the front. Have 

 we anything definite, drawn from the study of the indi- 

 vidual on the psychological side, to substitute for these 

 confessedly vague biological phrases } Spencer gave an 

 answer in a general way long ago to the second of these 

 questions, by saying that in consciousness the function of 

 pleasure and pain is just to keep some actions or move- 

 ments going and to suppress others. The evidence of this 

 seems to me to be coextensive, actually, with the range 

 of conscious experience, however we may be disposed to 

 define the physiological processes which are involved in 

 pleasure and pain. Actions which secure pleasurable expe- 

 riences to the organism are determined by the pleasure to 



doctrine of ' Germinal Selection ' {Monist, January, 1896). Why are not such 

 applications of the principle of natural selection to variations in the parts and 

 functions of the single organism just as reasonable and legitimate as is the 

 application of it to variations in separate organisms? As against 'germinal 

 selection,' however, I may say, that in the cases in which individual accom- 

 modation sets the direction of survival of congenital variations (as supposed 

 in earUer pages) the hypothesis of germinal selection is in so far unnecessary. 

 Our view finds the operation of selection on functions in ontogeny the means 

 of accounting for 'variations' seeming to occur 'when and where they are 

 wanted,' while Weismann supposes competing germinal units. Cf. the com- 

 parison of the two hypotheses, both considered as supplementary to natural 

 selection, made by Conn, Method of Evolution, pp. 332-333. 



