EVOLUTION OF FEELING AND EMOTION 289 
born with a rooted hereditary aversion to everything nutritious 
and an inherited hunger for anything harmful and unfit for 
food. Under what conceivable conditions could such an animal 
acquire a complete change of its affective nature ? Animals 
like things or they do not like them ; only to a very limited 
extent, if at all, under natural conditions, can they learn to 
like them. We, indeed, can in some degree learn to take 
pleasure in that which at first, and by nature, is distasteful ; 
but we do so by some external constraint, or from some motive 
of ideational origin. We put pressure upon ourselves, or have 
pressure put upon us, repeatedly to perform some irksome task ; 
we fall into routine and custom ; and the performance becomes 
so far second nature that its discontinuance produces an un- 
comfortable sense of something lacking in the daily round. 
Perhaps domestic animals learn to like the good offices we force 
them to perform for us. But here we have the element of 
external constraint, which is wholly, or almost wholly, absent 
under na‘ural conditions. And there is no evidence that such 
acquired likings are inherited. That, however, is another 
question. Our present point is that, under nature, the condi- 
tions of such acquisition are lacking ; so that, there being no 
acquisition, there is, in this case, nothing acquired to be 
transmitted. 
But, so far as behaviour is concerned, “functionally 
caused alterations” are those due to the exercise of intelli- 
gence, by which the behaviour acquires direction and character 
in reference to the meaning introduced into the situations. 
See, then, the position to which we are logically driven. The 
acquisition of that which has beneficial value in behaviour 
depends on a consonance between psychological and biological 
end. But this consonance is dependent on survival, and, 
apart from special creation, or some kindred hypothesis such 
as Leibnitzian harmony, can be due to nothing else. Even if 
we grant, therefore, that the effects of acquisition are inherited, 
the conditions of beneficial acquisition are dependent on 
natural selection. And thus the inheritance of acquired 
characters, which is so often urged as a principle of evolution 
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