The displacement of mental attention corresponding to the transference of energy from one organ to another in the inevitable search for a channel of outlet causes arrested activity to be felt as an unbearable massive pain; but this process implies at the same time a possibility of relief. If the sufferings of restriction can be considered as brought about by arrested impulses which have turned inwards, then it is evident that any outward activity may overcome the obstruction. Pleasure can perhaps not be achieved before the checked organ resumes its functions; but even a vicarious activity in some related organ may relieve the pain. Hence the diffused, undirected movements by which we instinctively try to get rid of a feeling of restriction. Every high-strung emotional state which has not yet found its appropriate expression affords an instance of this sensation. Exalted delight therefore often manifests itself in ecstatic dances and songs, which, properly speaking, rather relieve an incipient pain than express a pleasure. Violent movements act as unconscious expedients by which the organism restores itself to its normal balance. A similar instinct ought, one would expect, to operate in sensations of acute pain. In point of fact, an obscure consciousness of the limitation of functional energy, or, to put it in psychological terms, of attentive power, leads us to seek and find relief from pain in violent movement. Some of the frantic dances of savage tribes undoubtedly serve to deaden the sufferings inflicted by ritual tortures. But it is, of course, only in exceptional cases that these anæsthetic expedients are intentionally resorted to. As a rule they are to be considered as a radiation of nervous tension, and are so little conscious that we can scarcely even call them instinctive. Besides all the motor manifestations which thus follow upon a sensation of severe pain in almost direct physiological sequence, some pantomimic activity of defence or avoidance will generally be called forth by the notion of an objective source of pain. Owing to associations derived from earlier similar states, this reaction may often appear even when there is no definite object which can be assigned as the cause of the feeling. Among primitive people the pantomime of pain undoubtedly has its ground in a mythological conception of the nature of feeling. Pain is regarded as a concrete thing which the body may be capable of shaking off or avoiding. Crude as it may seem, this illusion is so closely bound up with our instinctive reactions that even the most enlightened man can never completely emancipate himself from its influence. There is thus nearly always an intellectual factor which co-operates with the physical tendency towards energetic reaction to pain.