The objection urged by Höffding and others to the primitive nature of pure feeling is that we sense before we feel pain or pleasure; thus we have the sensation of touch before we feel the pain from contact with a hot stove; we feel the pin, then the pricking sensation, then the pain. This precedence has been measured by Beau and others. But what is the significance of these well-recognised facts? Do they show that pain-pleasure originates always in sensation? What is the origin of tactile power? How and why was the first tactile effort made, if not at impulse of some pain-pleasure? When conscious life was at pre-tactile stage—before it had learned to touch—it had no pain from touch, but it had pain. We can scarcely deny that a pre-tactile stage exists, that all sensation was originally a sensing—an exertive act, that it did not _come_, but was _attained_; for all the growth of sensitive power in the race proceeds thus at present, and the law of present psychic development in this regard seems general. But it is pain-pleasure which forces all action; here is the impulse which brings exertion whether as sensing or otherwise. A doctrine of spontaneity is against the general law of development by struggle. It is certainly true that, standing with my back to the stove and inadvertently coming in contact, I, without any previous pain-pleasure impulse and without exertion, have sense of touch, then pain. But this spontaneity is not original factor; it is the result of inherited powers. When tactility has become a well-developed power and is handed down to descendants, then contact with things is immediately and spontaneously realized in the form of touch, which contact would originally have been unnoticed. That is, the severest condition—a red hot stove—would impress the lowest psychism only in terms of mere pain, and so result in general reactions of _minimum_ service. The early psychism which is just in process of achieving sense of touch would have pain, and then with effort touch the object and thus attain some more special reaction of more particular service. But the tactile, like all sensing activity is anticipatory, it is a finder, an interpreter. Suppose I bring a very fine needle toward your eye, you may see it and avoid it; but suppose your eyes are shut the eye comes in contact with the needle, and you have sensation of touch; but you are sound asleep, then pricking sensation may wake you as needle proceeds deeper, but in profoundest sleep undefined pain may be the first consciousness to result. Now the needle might be so small as to be seen with great difficulty by the waking man, or invisible, or to be touched with great difficulty; but this stage of exertive action for the sense is only relative, and in the history of mind the very grossest forms were at one time only dimly seen by intensest effort, and lower still, touched only by intensest effort. Seeing originated in looking,