As a mere _conception_, and so long as we confine our view to the nervous centres themselves, few things are more seductive than this radically mechanical theory of their action. And yet our consciousness _is there_, and has in all probability been evolved, like all other functions, for a use--it is to the highest degree improbable _a priori_ that it should have no use. Its use _seems_ to be that of _selection_; but to select, it must be efficacious. States of consciousness which feel right are held fast to; those which feel wrong are checked. If the 'holding' and the 'checking' of the conscious states severally mean also the efficacious reinforcing or inhibiting of the correlated neural processes, then it would seem as if the presence of the states of mind might help to steer the nervous system and keep it in the path which to the consciousness seemed best. Now on the average what seems best to consciousness is really best for the creature. It is a well-known fact that pleasures are generally associated with beneficial, pains with detrimental, experiences. All the fundamental vital processes illustrate this law. Starvation; suffocation; privation of food, drink, and sleep; work when exhausted; burns, wounds, inflammation; the effects of poison, are as disagreeable as filling the hungry stomach, enjoying rest and sleep after fatigue, exercise after rest, and a sound skin and unbroken bones at all times, are pleasant. Mr. Spencer and others have suggested that these coincidences are due, not to any preëstablished harmony, but to the mere action of natural selection, which would certainly kill off in the long-run any breed of creatures to whom the fundamentally noxious experience seemed enjoyable. An animal that should take pleasure in a feeling of suffocation would, if that pleasure were efficacious enough to make him keep his head under water, enjoy a longevity of four or five minutes. But if conscious pleasure does not reinforce, and conscious pain does not inhibit, anything, one does not see (without some such _a priori_ rational harmony as would be scouted by the 'scientific' champions of the automaton-theory) why the most noxious acts, such as burning, might not with perfect impunity give thrills of delight, and the most necessary ones, such as breathing, cause agony. The only considerable attempt that has been made to explain the _distribution_ of our feelings is that of Mr. Grant Allen in his suggestive little work, _Physiological Æsthetics_; and his reasoning is based exclusively on that causal efficacy of pleasures and pains which the partisans of pure automatism so strenuously deny.