aces of beings only can have survived in which, on the
average, agreeable or desired feelings went along with activities
conducive to the maintenance of life, while disagreeable and
habitually-avoided feelings went along with activities directly or
indirectly destructive of life; and there must ever have been,
other things equal, the most numerous and long-continued survivals
among races in which these adjustments of feelings to actions were
the best, tending ever to bring about perfect adjustment.'

The argument here is that the 'adjustments of feelings to actions,' when
once attained, leads in turn to an adjustment of actions to
feelings--or, as I have myself stated the argument in my _Mental
Evolution in Animals_, 'the _raison d'etre_ of Pleasure and Pain has
been that of furnishing organisms with guides to adjustive action:
moreover, as in the case of direct sensation dictating any simple
adjustment for the sake of securing an immediate good, so in the case of
instinct dictating a more intricate action for the sake of eventually
securing a more remote good (whether for self, progeny, or community);
and so, likewise, in the case of reason dictating a still more intricate
adjustment for the sake of securing a good still more remote--in all
cases, that is, where volition is concerned, pleasures and pains are the
guides of action.' But thus to affirm that pleasures and pains are the
guides of action is merely another way of affirming that the Will is an
agent--a cause of bodily movement, and, as such, a cause in Nature. Now,
as we have seen, Mr. Spencer not only affirms this--or rather assumes
it--but proceeds to render an _a priori_ explanation of the accuracy of
the guidance. Yet he nowhere considers the fundamental question--Why
should we suppose that the Will is an agent at all? Assuredly the answer
given by physiology to this question is a simple denial that we have any
justification so to regard the Will: in view of her demonstration of
conscious automatism, she can see no reason why there should be any
connexion at all between a subjective feeling of pleasure or pain
and an objective fact of 'agreement or disagreement with the
environment'--nay, one of the most eminent of her priesthood has
declared that there _is_ no more connexion between the ambition of a
Napoleon and a general commotion of Europe, than there is between the
puff of a steam-whistle and the locomotion of a train