Our increasing consciousness of this distress is a most gratifying fact. Consciousness always involves power. The power to feel implies the power to act. Feeling was evolved as a guide to action; in nature’s wise administration there would have been no reason for giving conscious pain and pleasure to a creature which could neither avoid the one nor seek the other. The sensory nerves are developed in careful proportion to the motory: what feels can move, what moves can feel. This law is followed all the way up through physical evolution to social, and is just as true of the social body as of any other. A comparatively inert primitive society reacts to injury or benefit as does a plant, but shows little evidence of pain or pleasure. Modern society, however, in proportion to its rapidly differentiating organism and its increase in swift, accurate, complex activity, manifests a corresponding increase in consciousness. We are now socially conscious to an acute degree; and this proves our equal ability to act, to avert injury, and seek benefit, not as individuals, but as a society. Naturally pain is the most impressive fact, for pleasure is a normal condition and only felt in contrast to pain. Pain is some interference with natural law, and as such makes itself sharply felt. Man was led to the study of physiology through pathology; the ache introduced us to the stomach. So society feels first and most what hurts it, and our study of sociology is prefaced by social pathology. And as men, in their first gropings after relief from pain, practised all manner of tricks with fetich-worship, with wild, noisy dances, with filthy medicines, with murderous leeches and lances and poisonous pills; and as still, among the ignorant, any wide-blazoned patent medicine is sure of acceptance if it promises to cure the pain, felt but not understood; so society’s first efforts at relief are superstitious, empirical, and often deadly bad for its system.