A general survey from the point of view of self-conservation leads us then to regard the original psychic state as a pain-effort form. There is first a purely undifferentiated sense of pain and closely consequent a purely undifferentiated _nisus_. There is neither sense of objectivity in general, nor in any special mode, nor is there feeling of pleasure. And the study of what seem to be the earliest forms of mental life in the child and in the lower animals points toward this conclusion. Preyer, in his studies on the mind of the child, expresses his conviction that the feelings “are the first of all psychical events to appear with definiteness,” and that at first in no manifold forms. He adds, “The first period of human life belongs to the least agreeable, inasmuch as not only the number of enjoyments is small, but the capacity for enjoyment is small likewise, and the unpleasant feelings predominate until sleep interrupts them” (_Mind of the Child_, Part I., New York, 1888, p. 143, _cf._ p. 185). Since in the embryology of the mind as in that of the body the individual repeats in condensed manner the evolution of life, we judge that these observations point toward the genesis of consciousness in a single feeling state, pure undifferentiated pain. The earliest consciousness we can discover seems to approach this type. The close observer of very young infants must feel that the meagre psychic life they may have consists mainly of intermittent pains interrupted by comparatively long periods of unconsciousness in sleep. Of course, the earliest psychic life of the infant is not absolutely primitive both on account of heredity and on account of pre-natal experience; but in its general form it, no doubt, reverts toward the original _status_ of mind. This original state, to which that of a very young infant is akin, was merely pain, which knew not itself nor its relation to other states, nor its relation to the external world, but was a wholly central subjective fact, and so was expressed only in wild and blind general movements. The very lowest types of psychic life which we can interpret seems to feel and nothing more. They do not feel _at_ anything, and do not feel because they know, nor do they have definite kinds of feeling. Pure feeling as bare pain and as undifferentiated pleasure is certainly far removed from our ordinary conscious experience, yet it may sometimes appear in a survival form, especially in sluggish states, in waking from sleep, and in recovering from anæsthetics. We are sometimes awakened by a dull pain which was evidently in its inception mere bare pain without differentiation. But in all such cases the pure pain or pure pleasure is but momentary, and is quickly swallowed up in a flood of manifold sensations. Many objects by many modes of sense at once invade and possess consciousness, and the early indefinite mode vanishes so quickly that we very rarely have time to note it by reflective consciousness.