'Those races of beings only can have survived in which, on the average, agreeable or desired feelings went along with activities conducive to the maintenance of life, while disagreeable and habitually-avoided feelings went along with activities directly or indirectly destructive of life; and there must ever have been, other things equal, the most numerous and long-continued survivals among races in which these adjustments of feelings to actions were the best, tending ever to bring about perfect adjustment.' The argument here is that the 'adjustments of feelings to actions,' when once attained, leads in turn to an adjustment of actions to feelings--or, as I have myself stated the argument in my _Mental Evolution in Animals_, 'the _raison d'etre_ of Pleasure and Pain has been that of furnishing organisms with guides to adjustive action: moreover, as in the case of direct sensation dictating any simple adjustment for the sake of securing an immediate good, so in the case of instinct dictating a more intricate action for the sake of eventually securing a more remote good (whether for self, progeny, or community); and so, likewise, in the case of reason dictating a still more intricate adjustment for the sake of securing a good still more remote--in all cases, that is, where volition is concerned, pleasures and pains are the guides of action.' But thus to affirm that pleasures and pains are the guides of action is merely another way of affirming that the Will is an agent--a cause of bodily movement, and, as such, a cause in Nature. Now, as we have seen, Mr. Spencer not only affirms this--or rather assumes it--but proceeds to render an _a priori_ explanation of the accuracy of the guidance. Yet he nowhere considers the fundamental question--Why should we suppose that the Will is an agent at all? Assuredly the answer given by physiology to this question is a simple denial that we have any justification so to regard the Will: in view of her demonstration of conscious automatism, she can see no reason why there should be any connexion at all between a subjective feeling of pleasure or pain and an objective fact of 'agreement or disagreement with the environment'--nay, one of the most eminent of her priesthood has declared that there _is_ no more connexion between the ambition of a Napoleon and a general commotion of Europe, than there is between the puff of a steam-whistle and the locomotion of a train. And, as I have now repeatedly insisted, on grounds of physiology alone this is the only logical conclusion at which it is possible to arrive. Yet Mr. Spencer, while elsewhere proceeding on the lines of physiology, whenever he encounters the question of the agency of Will, habitually jumps the whole gulf that separates Materialism from Spiritualism. And this wonderful feat of intellectual athletics is likewise performed, so far at least as I am aware, by every other psychologist who has proceeded on