the influence of natural selection has not prevented actions hurtful to life being sometimes accompanied by pleasant sensations. Its tendency to do so has been much more effective in the lower orders of animal life than in the higher. The latter, especially man, possess the power of representing ideal states in the imagination, and are thus able to avoid actions hurtful to life, although these actions are pleasant at the time. For the hurtful consequences of the action may be so vividly represented in idea as to outweigh the influence of the present pleasure which could be got from its enjoyment.1

And further, the analysis of volition involved in the argument seems to be insufficient. For there are other springs of action to be taken account of than pleasure and its opposite. Habit, imitation, and interests of a more comprehensive kind than desire of pleasant feeling, are all motives to action. It is true that pleasure is always felt in the successful performance of an action, and it is also true that the inhibition of will is always painful; but it is none the less incorrect to look either upon the pleasure that follows from the action, or the pain that would be the result of its inhibition as, in ordinary cases, the motive. It is motives of a different kind than pleasure, such as

1 Cf. Fiske, Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy (1874), ii.

imitation1 and the influence of ideal ends, which
And the progress

most often lead to progress.
that is due to such motives cannot be measured
by its effect in increasing pleasure, nor assumed to
make pleasure and life correspond. Other activ-
ities less advantageous in nature in all respects
but this, might, so far as the reasoning goes, lead
to equal or to more pleasurable consequences. At
the best, therefore, the above argument only proves
a general tendency towards the coincidence of
pleasurable actions with actions which promote
life; it does not show that the increase of life
can be accurately measured by pleasure. The pro-
cess of natural selection might kill off all organisms
whose desires led them normally to action hurtful
to life. But sufficient evidence has not been
brought forward to show that it is fitted to pro-
duce an exact proportion between progress and
pleasure.

simist doc

Hartmann, however, attempts to strike a more (8) The pesfundamental blow than this at the presupposition trine that involved in the argument for evolutionist hedonism. For he contends that, throughout all life, the

1 "Imitation,” according to Kant (Grundlegung zur Met. d. Sitten, Werke, iv. 257), "has no place at all in morals ;" and this is true if the naked law of duty-or respect for it is the sole ethical motive. But if morality consists in the attainment of an ideal which is being gradually realised in man, moral value will not be denied to the motive which leads the individual to fashion his own nature after that in which morality has attained more complete realisation.

life tends to

misery:

pothesis of

the uncon

scious;

(aa) the hy great pulse of progress is neither, on the one hand, desire for pleasure, nor, on the other, the more complex and varied motives just referred to, but that it is the incessant striving towards fulness of life by a universal unconscious will, which is manifested in all things, and which is for ever pressing onwards towards conscious realisation, regardless of the increase of pain which the course of evolution implies. But this hypothesis of unconscious will is not a justifiable metaphysical principle got at by the analysis of experience, and necessary for its explanation, though lying beyond it. It is a "metempirical," or rather mythical, cause interpolated into the processes of experience. Hence the antagonism in which it stands to psychological fact its disregard of the effect of pleasure as a powerful motive in volition; and its neglect of the obvious truth that function so reacts upon organ that all actions have simply by continuance a tendency to be performed with greater ease, and therefore to yield in their performance increase of pleasure. The smoothness and precision with which it works may, indeed, lead to a function being performed unconsciously, and thus without either pain or pleasure. But the normal exercise of conscious activity is uniformly pleasurable.1

While giving up Schopenhauer's doctrine of the merely negative character of pleasure, Hartmann 1 See the concluding pages of this chapter.

ture of voli

yet contends that "eternal limits are set by the (bb) the navery nature of volition, which make it impossible tion; to have a world with more pleasure in it than

1

pain. But his arguments come very far short of proving his case. For, in the first place, to say that the stimulation and wearying of the nerves imply the necessity of a cessation of pleasure as well as of pain, is to confuse complete states of consciousness with the subjective feeling which accompanies each state. It is not true that one ever becomes weary of pleasure: to talk as if there were one class of nerves for pleasure, and another for pain, is absurd. But every mental state, however pleasurable to start with, tends to become monotonous, wearisome, or painful. Pleasure thus requires a change from one mental state to another: to say that it requires a change from pleasure to something else is a contradiction in terms. It is the objects or activity that require to be varied, not the feeling of pleasure. Again, in the second place, it is true that pleasure is to be regarded as indirect in so far as it is entirely due to the cessation of a pain, and not to instantaneous satisfaction of will. But it does not do to regard the pleasure as altogether indirect when, although the cessation of a pain is necessary for its production, it is itself something more than this cessation. The inhibition of will often prevents the realisa

1 Philosophie des Unbewussten, 6th ed., p. 660 ff.

M

tion of an object which is very much more than a recompense in pleasurable quality for the pain of the restraint; and although the pleasure only arises from the removal of this painful state of inhibition, there is a direct and positive gain over and above the gratification of having pain removed. In the third place, Hartmann argues that the satisfaction of will is often unconscious, whereas pain is eo ipso conscious. But, even admitting the reality of unconscious will or desire, which this argument involves, it does not follow that pleasure and pain are differently affected in regard to it. If pain is eo ipso conscious, so also is pleasure ; if the satisfaction of unconscious desire gives no pleasure, neither does the absence of such satisfaction give pain. It is true, as Hartmann adds in the fourth place, that desire is often long and the joy of satisfaction fleeting; but this refers not so much to mental pleasures as to those connected with physical appetite. Of them it is true that

"These violent delights have violent ends,
And in their triumph die."

But in the higher pleasures with more permanent objects of pursuit, although the desire may be longcontinued, the pleasure does not disappear in the moment of gratification.

It would seem, therefore, that the pessimist psychology, in treating pleasure in a different way from 1 Cf. Sully, Pessimism, p. 226 n.