It would be beyond the scope of this Essay to examine the above view of the active side of mental phenomena. For present purposes it is enough to draw attention to the fact that the common deduction of the phenomena of desire and will from the feelings of pleasure and pain is not the only "scientific" theory of human action, and that it is rejected on its merits by writers who have no hankering after what the psychological hedonist would call the mystical element of free-will. It is of interest to note, too, that Professor Bain, in whose works the traditions of psychological hedonism find their most careful expression, has modified the doctrine so as to allow of desire of pleasure and avoidance of pain explaining less than had been formerly required of them. Outside the circle of hedonistically-determined motives, he recognises the influence of the presentation or idea as a self-realising element in the individual consciousness, apart from its pleasurable or painful characteristics.[74] Those "fixed ideas," as Mr Bain calls them, tend both to persist in the mind, and to project themselves into action, independently of pleasure and pain--or at least with a force which is out of proportion to the pleasure they bring. As has been already seen, it is by means of this doctrine that he explains "the great fact of our nature denominated sympathy, fellow-feeling, pity, compassion, disinterestedness."[75] To the same category belongs "much of the ambition and the aspirations of human beings.... A certain notion--say of power, wealth, grandeur--has fixed itself in our mind and keeps a persistent hold there." It is asserted, indeed, that the action of such fixed ideas "perverts the regular operation of the will which would lead us to renounce whatever is hopeless or not worth the cost." And, certainly, their admission among mental phenomena seems to imply the superposition of a new theory of action upon the old theory of psychological hedonism. There is no disguising the importance of the modification thus introduced. The name "fixed idea" is misleading if it be taken to imply that persistency and tendency to action are properties belonging to a certain class of ideas only. Mr Bain's doctrine is founded on the hypothesis of the identity of the nervous centres which function in representation and in sensation, and is therefore valid of all representations or ideas. The characteristics of persistency, and of tendency to action, are therefore normal characteristics of presentations, though they may belong in an unusual degree to some ideas from the relation these hold to the dominant cluster of ideas in the individual consciousness. And if we thus attribute to all ideas without exception the tendency to self-realisation, and recognise--as we must--the relation of mutual assistance or inhibition which ideas bear to one another in virtue of their being "presented" to the same subject, we have granted the material out of which, in Herbart's