We believe--and even our philosophers believe it still--that pleasure and pain are the causes of reactions, that the very purpose of pleasure and pain is to occasion reactions. For hundreds of years, pleasure and pain have been represented as the _motives_ for every action. Upon reflection, however, we are bound to concede that everything would have proceeded in exactly the same way, according to precisely the same sequence of cause and effect, if the states "pleasure" and "pain" had been entirely absent; and that we are simply deceived when we believe that they actually cause anything:--they are the _attendant phenomena,_ and they have quite a different purpose from that of provoking reactions; they are in themselves effects involved in the process of reaction which takes place. _In short:_ Everything that becomes conscious is a final phenomenon, a conclusion--and is the cause of nothing; all succession of phenomena in consciousness is absolutely atomistic.--And we tried to understand the universe from the _opposite_ point of view--as if nothing were effective or real, save thinking, feeling, willing! ... 479. _The phenomenalism of the "inner world!" A chronological inversion takes place,_ so that the cause reaches consciousness as the effect.--We know that pain is projected into a certain part of the body although it is not really situated there; we have learnt that all sensations which were ingenuously supposed to be conditioned by the outer world are, as a matter of fact, conditioned by the inner world: that the real action of the outer world never takes place in a way of which we can become conscious.... That fragment of the outer world of which we become conscious, is born after the effect produced by the outer world has been recorded, and is subsequently interpreted as the "cause" of that effect.... In the phenomenalism of the "inner world," the chronological order of cause and effect is inverted. The fundamental fact of "inner experience" is, that the cause is imagined after the effect has been recorded.... The same holds good of the sequence of thoughts: we seek for the reason of a thought, before it has reached our consciousness; and then the reason reaches consciousness first, whereupon follows its effect. All our dreams are the interpretation of our collective feelings with the view of discovering the possible causes of the latter; and the process is such that a condition only becomes conscious, when the supposed causal link has reached consciousness.[1]