The function of the consciousness of value must now be very briefly considered. The phenomenon is a striking one, and apparently, as the economists especially have insisted, of much practical importance in the conduct of life.[159] And yet on our account of the phenomenon, as it may appear, the problem of assigning to it a function must be, to say the least, difficult. For the consciousness of value is, we have held, emotional, and, on the conception of emotion in general which we have taken for granted throughout our present discussion, this mode of being conscious is merely a reflex of a state of tension in activity. As such it merely reports in consciousness a process of motor co-ordination already going on and in the nature of the case can contribute nothing to the outcome. Now if it were in a direct way as immediately felt emotion that the consciousness of value must be functional if functional at all, then the problem might well be given up; but it would be a serious blunder to conceive the problem in this strictly psychological way. A logical statement of the problem would raise a different issue--not the question of whether emotion as emotion can in any sense be functional in experience, but whether the consciousness of value and emotion in general may not receive reflective interpretation and thereby, becoming objective, play a part as a factor in subsequent valuation-processes. Indeed, the psychological statement of the problem misses the entire point at issue and leads directly to the wholly irrelevant general problem of whether any mode of consciousness whatever can, _as consciousness_, put forth energy and be a factor in controlling conduct. The present problem is properly a logical one. What is the agent's apprehension of the matter? In his subsequent reflective processes of valuation does the consciousness of value, which was a feature of the survey on a past occasion, receive recognition in any way and so play a part? This is simply a question of fact and clearly, as a question relating to the logical content of the agent's reflective process, has no connection with or interest in the problem of a possible dynamic efficacy of consciousness as such. The question properly is logical, not psychological or metaphysical.