If we substitute for the word Pleasure the equivalent phrase--a
feeling which we seek to bring into consciousness and retain there,
and if we substitute for the word Pain the equivalent phrase--a
feeling which we seek to get out of consciousness and to keep out;
we see at once that if the states of consciousness which a creature
endeavors to maintain are the correlatives of injurious actions, and
if the states of consciousness which it endeavors to expel are the
correlatives of beneficial actions, it must quickly disappear through
persistence in the injurious, and avoidance of the beneficial. In
other words, those races of beings only can have survived in which,
on the average, agreeable or desired feelings went along with
activities conducive to the maintenance of life, while disagreeable
and habitually avoided feelings went along with activities directly
or indirectly destructive of life; and there must ever have been,
other things equal, the most numerous and long-continued survivals
among races in which these adjustments of feelings to actions were
the best, tending ever to bring about perfect adjustment.
Fit connections between acts and results must establish themselves in
living things, even before consciousness arises; and after the rise
of consciousness these connections can change in no other way than
to become better established. At the very outset, life is maintained
by persistence in acts which conduce to it, and desistance from acts
which impede it; and whenever sentiency make its appearance as an
accompaniment, its forms must be such that in the one case the produced
feeling is of a kind that will be sought--pleasure, and in the other
case is of a kind that will be shunned--pain. Observe the necessity of
these relations as exhibited in the concrete.
A plant which envelops a buried bone with a plexus of rootlets, or
a potato which directs its blanched shoots toward a grating through
which light comes into the cellar, shows us that the changes which
outer agents themselves set up in its tissues are changes which aid the
utilization of these agents. If we ask what would happen if a plant's
roots grew not toward the place where there was moisture, but away from
it, or if its leaves, enabled by light to assimilate, nevertheless
bent themselves toward the darkness, we see that death would result
in the absence of the existing adjustments. This general relation is
still better shown in an insectivorous plant, such as the _Dionoea
muscipula_, which keeps its trap closed round animal matter, but not
round other matter. Here it is manifest that the stimulus arising from
the first part of the absorbed substance itself sets up those actions
by which the mass of the substance is utilized for the plant's benefit.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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