The Theory of Sexual Selection. 417 
the species or bad for the species. Indeed, we may 
legitimately surmise that the reason why sentiency 
(and, @ fortior?, conscious volition) has ever appeared 
upon the scene at all, has been because it furnishes— 
through this continuously selected adjustment of states 
of sentiency to states of the sentient organism—so 
admirable a means of securing rapid, and often refined, 
adjustments by the organism to the habitual conditions 
of its life#. But, if so, not only is this state of matters 
a condition to progress in the future; it is further, 
and equally, a c.wseguence of progress in the past. 
However, be this as it may, from all that has gone 
before does it not become apparent that pleasure or 
happiness on the one hand, and pain or misery on the 
other, must be present in sentient nature? And so 
long as they are both seen to be equally necessary 
under the process of evolution by natural selection, 
we have clearly no more reason to regard the pleasure 
than the pain as an object of the supposed design. 
Rather must we see in both one and the same 
condition to progress under the method of natural 
causation which is before us; and therefore I cannot 
perceive that it makes much difference—so far as the 
argument for beneficence is concerned—whether the 
pleasures of animals outweigh their pains, or vice 
vers. 
Upon the whole, then, it seems to me that such 
evidence as we have is against rather than in favour 
of the inference, that if design be operative in animate 
nature it has reference to animal enjoyment or well- 
being, as distinguished from animal improvement or 
evolution. And if this result should be found dis- 
+ See Mental Evolution in Animals, pp. 110-111. 
* : Ee 
