172 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



2. Inarticulate Correlation. Feeling. 



It would be difficult to show that the social impulses 

 undergo any substantial change in the lowest grade of 

 intelligence, but there is one point to be remarked. In 

 accordance with our general hypothesis it is at this stage 

 that experienced feeling acquires decisive importance as a 

 cause of subsequent action. It is under the influence of 

 the attendant pleasure or pain that we suppose various 

 modes of action to be built up, maintained, modified or 

 annulled, and if this is so, feeling must become the pivotal 

 point of behaviour. Indeed, instinctive acts also, so far as 

 they are clearly distinct from the quasi-mechanical reflex, 

 must be attended by satisfaction in all that prospers and 

 forwards them, and by pain and distress in all that thwarts 

 them, and there must, accordingly, from the first, be a 

 broad correlation between the pleasurable and the life- 

 giving, the painful and the unhealthy. It is probable that 

 among the lower animals this correlation is closer than 

 among ourselves. With us, two sources of discrepancy 

 arise, (i) While the satisfaction of the organic cravings 

 is generally pleasurable and failure to satisfy them painful, 

 these cravings in the individual may be opposed to the 

 higher functions which membership of the social organism 

 or the mere energising of mental and spiritual activities 

 may impose. In this case, the satisfaction of the organic 

 impulse is a source of pain through the thwarting of 

 another side of our nature. (2) What is a matter of greater 

 difficulty at this stage is the existence of organic cravings 

 which are intrinsically unhealthy, e.g. gluttony, alcoholism, 

 etc. In general, these represent a hypertrophy of a normal 

 impulse which is healthy enough, furthered by the reflec- 

 tive desire for the pleasurable excitement of stimulation, 

 belonging to a higher stage of development. Man not 

 being dependent merely upon instinct and being in some 

 measure master of his life-conditions can, within limits, 

 play fast and loose with himself without undergoing 

 nature's penalty of extinction, and the existence of indi- 

 viduals with exaggerated, deficient or perverted impulses 

 does not involve the destruction of the species. Pain itself 



