2. Besides these exceptions, due to the intercurrence of social causes, there are others of an individual character, which also can be explained. Certain poisons are agreeable to the taste, and cause death; a surgical operation is painful, but beneficial; many persons intensely enjoy a _far niente_ which leads them to ruin; it is pleasant to live in the world of pure fancy, but the reaction leaves one enervated and unable to fulfil one’s daily task. Many other cases of this kind may be met with in ordinary life. All these exceptions to the rule are only apparent ones. Consciousness reveals only the _momentary_ phenomenon, and, within these limits, its verdict is accurate; it expresses the processes actually going on in the organism at the moment, as we have seen in the euphoria of the dying; it cannot tell us what will follow. The explanation reduces itself to Grant Allen’s saying, “Neither pleasure nor pain is prophetic.”[66] ----- Footnote 66: See Lehmann, _op. cit._, § 201; Höffding, _Psychologie in Umrissen_ (2nd ed.), p. 380. ----- 3. There are other facts which the partisans of final causes prudently pass over in silence, and which certain evolutionists have attempted to explain. Spencer remarks (_loc. cit._, § 127) that, “while the individual is young and not yet fertile, its welfare and the welfare of the race go together; but when the reproductive age is reached, the welfare of the individual and of the race cease to be the same, and may be diametrically opposed.... Very frequently, among invertebrate animals, the death of the parents is a normal result of propagation. In the great class Insects, the species of which outnumber all other animal species, the rule is that the male lives only until a new generation has been begotten, and that the female dies as soon as the eggs are deposited.” There is, therefore, says the English author, a qualification to be made. Schneider, in his interesting work _Freud und Leid_, inspired by the transformist hypothesis and the ideas of Spencer, gets rid of the difficulty by connecting pleasure and pain with the conditions of existence, not of the _individual_, but of the _species_: pleasure corresponding to specific utility and pain to specific injury. This statement of the problem is ingenious, but arbitrary. Pleasure and pain are essentially subjective, individual states. They can only assume a specific character by means of generalisation—_i.e._, as a conception of our minds, which has no reality or value, except so far as abstracted from particular cases.