In a general way the influence of feeling and emotion upon cognitive act in higher psychical life is acknowledged by common observation. The wish is father to the thought—we see what we want to see. What we observe depends upon prepossession, interest, and the whole pleasure-pain tone. The mind must be determined to cognitive act by interest of some kind, and even for advanced consciousness with all its strength of inherited aptitude total loss of interest ultimately leads to loss of perceptive power. The _impetus_ of all previous cognitive effort will carry on cognition, of any high order, at least, but a comparatively short time. Blot feeling out of life and all nature would soon become a dumb show and quickly fade into nothingness. Absolute passionless receptivity is impossible under the conditions of reality, and pure presentation forms never _come_ as antecedent and causative to feeling. We have constantly to bear in mind that in the nature of the case the simplest elements and fundamental laws are hidden and certainly far from conspicuous in highly developed mind, which is an intricate _nexus_ of feeling, will, and cognition constantly acting and reacting on each other. As a general statement, then, impliedly as to mind in general, and implicitly as to the developed human mind, the proposition that consciousness is fundamentally aware of changes in itself as the basis and cause of all feeling is an assertion which may well be questioned. Certain it is that being “pleased or pained with the change” is not feeling in general, but a particular kind of feeling, namely, feeling of variety and novelty. Further, to be pleased with a thing for itself alone is not to be referred to pleasure or pain “with the change.” There is intrinsic pleasurableness and painfulness which does not come under the head of pleasure or pain of change. From both an _a priori_ point of view of the law of self-conservation, and also from a brief survey of certain forms in comparative and human psychology, we incline towards accepting pure pain as the original consciousness which is very soon differentiated into excess and lack pain with evolution of pure pleasure. Will exists throughout as incited by feeling. Much, indeed, is to be done before this theory of the nature of mind is either fully elucidated or proved; but I believe that the assumption of mind as life function leads toward such a theory. Sensationalism and intuitionalism are both mistaken as to the origin and essence of mentality. Consciousness is not at bottom any mode of cognition, either as more or less freely accomplished by a “mind,” or as more or less mechanical impression from “things,” but it is primitively and fundamentally pain and pleasure as serving the organism in the struggle for existence. It is strange that evolutionary psychologists have so generally missed this point of view, and maintain sensationalism.