Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/700

682 seem, by virtue of their variety and multiplicity, to escape the grasp of calculation. It is not a matter of surprise that philosophers are at variance respecting the nature of these affections. There is hardly a more interesting question before investigators than that of their origin and their office as motive powers in universal evolution. We propose here to examine into what is true and what is incomplete in the explanations of these matters that have been borrowed from the doctrine of natural selection.

We can not fail to apply the biological doctrine of selection to pleasure and pain. Mr. Schneider goes to it for the inmost secret of our joys and sufferings. Not only is there a connection between pleasure and the increase of vitality, but this connection is imperatively established as a necessity of evolution. Pleasure, according to Mr. Spencer, is a feeling which we seek to bring into consciousness and retain there, and pain is a feeling which we seek to get out of consciousness and to keep out. If we could imagine beings to have ever been created by any sport of Nature, whose pleasure was connected with injurious actions and their pains with useful ones, they must have died out speedily by virtue of the vice in their constitutions. According to Darwin's principles, the essential condition of the development of life through ages is that agreeable acts be also, on the whole, favorable to development. This is a mechanical necessity.

Mr. Schneider is so confident of the accuracy of the natural mechanism, at least for the generality of cases, that he is almost ready to. believe that Nature is never mistaken when abandoned to herself. "In the normal condition," he says, "the feelings always tend to their true end; errors originate only in the morbid conditions ingrafted upon Nature by civilization. With the natural and healthy man the feelings are healthy, so that with every thought is associated a feeling of corresponding and suitable intensity." Abnormal relations appear chiefly among cultivated men, particularly among those who are diseased by their own fault or by that of their ancestors. "The passions have much less spread in the healthy and simple populations of the country than among the very artificially trained inhabitants of the large cities. Practical right and good conduct are much more dependent on health of the body than on health of the mind."

The exaggerations of the Darwinian theory begin, in our opinion, at this point. A mechanism of pleasures useful to life, once produced, is, without doubt, transmitted by heredity and becomes almost infallible in the lower species; but no infallibility can be found in the higher animals, not even in those that have the mens sana in corpore sano; for, the more the organs become complicated, the more does a purely mechanical selection become difficult for them. An idle or unintelligent man, for example, is not hopelessly condemned to death by the justice of universal mechanism, for he has more than one way of escape. If one faculty is under restraint, another one can come to