We might as well speak of the presence of positive and negative electricity in the cataract, the water-power of which is employed to produce electricity. Electricity is, in such a case, transformed water-power; but can we, for that reason, say that the motion of water is either positive or negative electricity? All the motions of the objective world must be supposed to have their subjective correlates; but the simplest forms of objective phenomena cannot have those subjective correlates which, according to our experience, appear and have their conditions of appearance only in the most complex and highest developed forms of existence—in organised nature. * * * * * The physiological conditions of pleasure and pain are now just beginning to be investigated (see Goldscheider’s article in Dubois-Reymond’s _Archiv_, 1891), and most philosophical theories concerning the nature of pleasure and pain are mere assumptions. Almost all the views that are now current attempt an explanation by generalising the idea of pleasure and pain so as to regard the feelings of pleasure and pain as a universal feature of nature. This vicious method of generalisation at the cost of discrimination has produced much confusion in the world; and its influence is the more pernicious as average minds are easily satisfied with generalities. Now, the theory of making pleasure and pain universal features of existence is a palpably erroneous theory; it is a wrong generalisation. It is true that sentient beings naturally seek pleasure and avoid pain. But are we allowed, according to the laws of logic, to transfer the special feature of the case to the whole class of all processes where a seeking and an avoiding can be observed? Certainly not. Because sentient beings are repelled by pain and attracted by pleasure, we cannot say that every repulsion is due to pain and that every attraction is due to pleasure. The theory according to which pleasure and pain alone are the causes of attraction and repulsion we may fairly consider as a poetical license justifiable within certain narrow limits, and actually justified in so far as there is in every natural process some peculiar feature that is analogous to the feelings of sentient beings. This peculiar feature—viz. its subjectivity—is, as we have seen, not visible, not observable; yet it exists: it is that something which in the course of evolution becomes, in special combinations, first feeling and then consciousness. But for that reason it is not as yet either consciousness or feeling. While on the one hand the theories of pleasure and pain that regard pleasure and pain as universal features of natural phenomena, are arrived at by a wrong method of generalisation, we find on the other hand they do not agree with facts. They neither explain nor account for the appearance or disappearance of real pleasures and pains such as take place in animal life. * * * * *