396 Appendix 
lations, such as exists also in every other accumulation 
of potential energy, and that therefore pain and pleasure, 
pleasant and painful states, can be nothing but the super- 
ficial and subjective side of this activation or of its 
inhibition. 
VI. 
Before terminating these few notes upon the nature 
of affective tendencies, we shall add a few remarks, 
which seem to us indispensable, on the fundamental 
character of these tendencies, according to which they 
constitute a force, so to speak, with a definite end to be 
attained but with the path to be followed left unde- 
termined. 
Affective tendencies owe this property of gravitating 
toward an end while the means remain undecided, to the 
circumstance that they depend on the existence in a 
potential state of a certain general or local physiological 
system or state, which was determined in the past by the 
outside world as a whole or by individual particular rela- 
tions to this outside world, and which now like every 
other potential energy simply endeavors to reactivate 
itself as soon as it is released by the persistence or recur- 
rence of even a small part of this environment or these 
environmental relations. For the result of the existence 
of this tendency is that the organism gravitates toward 
this environment or these environmental relations ren- 
dering possible the recurrence of this physiological state, 
but it does not imply any “impulse” toward or “impinge- 
ment” upon any one of the series of passing physiological 
states or movements which, even if they were capable of 
eventually bringing the organism back to the desired en- 
vironment, nevertheless have nothing in common with 
