Still more obviously in the higher æsthetic sentiments and volitional processes is there a spiritual activity which transcends the mechanical and physical order. Æsthetic joy depends upon a spiritual power to combine many elements of experience to form an object of a higher order than any object given to sense. It is particularly true of the highest æsthetic joy, for example, enjoyment of poetic creations where the ideal and intellectual element vastly overtops the sensuous, and where the words and imagery really carry the reader on into another world than the one of sight and sound. Here in a very high degree we attain a unified whole of consciousness that has no physical correlate among the brain-processes. It is further apparent that the higher forms of pleasure somehow exert an effective influence upon the physical system itself as though some new and heightening energy poured back from consciousness into the cerebral processes and drained down through the system. William James has given a very successful account of the way in which pleasure and pain as spiritual energies reinforce or damp the physical activities, so that the personal soul seems to take a unique part from within in determining the physical process. Here are his words: “Tremendous as the part is which pleasure and pain play in our psychic life, we must confess that absolutely nothing is known of their cerebral conditions. It is hard to imagine them as having special centres; it is harder still to invent peculiar forms of process in each and every centre, to which these feelings may be due. And let one try as one will to represent the cerebral activity in exclusively mechanical terms, I, for one, find it quite impossible to enumerate what seem to be the facts and yet to make no mention of the psychic side which they possess. However it be with other drainage currents and discharges, the drainage currents and discharges of the brain are not purely physical facts. They are _psycho-physical_ facts, and the spiritual quality of them seems a codeterminant of their mechanical effectiveness. If the mechanical activities in a cell, as they increase, give pleasure, they seem to increase all the more rapidly for that fact; if they give displeasure, the displeasure seems to damp the activities. The psychic side of the phenomenon thus seems somewhat like the applause or hissing at a spectacle, to be an encouraging or adverse _comment_ on what the machinery brings forth.”[14]