And now although acts of greater animation and greater advantage succeeded one another, and although the new total of the sensation in the act of a being was very nearly equalled by that in a subsequent act, still there was not—they had to confess there was not—a complete equality. Some of the sensation had certainly gone from the sphere in which the inhabitants could feel it. We see that this sensation which was gone was in reality the pain-bearing of the king, which set all their life going. But they knew nothing of this, and formed a very different conclusion. They said: “If some of the sensation is continually going and disappearing from the life of the inhabitants of the valley—if this is the case, although the sensation may not be destroyed, it is certainly lost to us.” And then they thought: “Surely the amount of sensation must be always the same; if some of it continually goes off into a form in which we cannot feel it, that portion which is left behind, and which we feel, must be continually growing less.” Hence they concluded that the sensation in the valley was gradually running down. Less and less was being felt. After a time, which they calculated with some show of precision, all feeling will have left the inhabitants and gone off in some irrecoverable form. All the beings of the valley will sink into apathy. Thus coming in the course of their investigations upon the action of the king, which was the continual cause of all life, they apprehended it as the gradual annihilation of life. The small building between the two council halls remains to be noticed. Now when the king had connected pleasure and pain with different acts to be performed by the inhabitants of the valley, he had of necessity to let the pleasant one be the one that came first in the order of its possible performance. And then by the device of the curved rays he had brought it about that the inhabitants went through the painful act consequent on the pleasurable one, the two together forming the complete action which the king had designed. But this chain was not very secure. The inhabitants had a tendency to go through the pleasurable act and leave the painful act undone.