GENESIS OF MAN, MORALLY 



ually seek baneful actions as pleasurable, and 

 shun useful actions as painful, natural selection 

 would immediately exterminate it. Our suppo- 

 sition is therefore a hibernicism : under the op- 

 eration of natural selection no such race could 

 ever come into existence. Only those races can 

 exist whose feelings, on the average, result in 

 actions which are in harmony with environing 

 relations. Accordingly we may rest upon a still 

 deeper and firmer basis our doctrine of pleasure 

 and pain, and assert that Pleasure is a state of 

 consciousness accompanying the relatively com- 

 plete adjustment of inner to outer relations, 

 while Pain is a state of consciousness attendant 

 upon the discordance between inner and outer 

 relations. 



We may now consider a class of facts which 

 at first seem inconsistent with the theory, but 

 which in reality serve further to illustrate it. 

 Animals now and then perform self-destructive 

 actions under circumstances which make it dif- 

 ficult to suppose that the performance is not 

 pleasurable. Though the majority of vegetable 

 poisons are disagreeable to the taste, yet this is 

 not always the case ; and hence animals have 

 been known to perish after a greedy meal upon 

 some noxious herb. But here, as in the case 

 of the moth which, in Tennyson's phrase, is 

 " shrivelled in a fruitless fire," there is a new 

 relation in the environment for whicli there is 



