ABSTRACT
The painfulness of the feelings produced by forces which tend to destroy organic structures, wholly or in part, is of course common to all creatures capable of feeling. People saw it to be inevitable that during evolution there must everywhere be established such connexions between external actions and the modes of consciousness they cause, that the injurious ones are accompanied by disagreeable feelings and the beneficial ones by agreeable feelings. One who, leaving behind both primitive dogmas and primitive ways of looking at things, has, while accepting scientific conclusions acquired those habits of thought which science generates, will regard the conclusion above drawn as inevitable. He will find it impossible to believe that the processes which have heretofore so moulded all beings to the requirements of their lives that they get satisfactions in fulfilling them, will not hereafter continue so moulding them.
