ways efficacious, as everyone
knows who has tried to govern children or cities by the rod; suffering
does not bring wisdom nor even memory, unless intelligence and docility
are already there; that is, unless the friction which the pain betrayed
sufficed to obliterate permanently one of the impulses in conflict. This
readjustment, on which real improvement hangs and which alone makes
"experience" useful, does not correspond to the intensity or repetition
of the pains endured; it corresponds rather to such a plasticity in the
organism that the painful conflict is no longer produced.

[Sidenote: Preformations involved.]

Threatened destruction would not involve pain unless that threatened
destruction were being resisted; so that the reaction which pain is
supposed to cause must already be taking place before pain can be felt.
A will without direction cannot be thwarted; so that inhibition cannot
be the primary source of any effort or of any ideal. Determinate
impulses must exist already for their inhibition to have taken place or
for the pain to arise which is the sign of that inhibition. The child's
dread of the fire marks the acceleration of that impulse which, when he
was burned, originally enabled him to withdraw his hand; and if he did
not now shrink in anticipation he would not remember the pain nor know
to what to attach his terror. Sight now suffices to awaken the reaction
which touch at first was needed to produce; the will has extended its
line of battle and thrown out its scouts farther afield; and pain has
been driven back to the frontiers of the spirit. The conflicting
reactions are now peripheral and feeble; the pain involved in aversion
is nothing to that once involved in the burn. Had this aversion to fire
been innate, as many aversions are, no pain would have been caused,
because no profound maladjustment would have occurred. The surviving
attraction, checked by fear, is a remnant of the old disorganisation in
the brain which was the seat of conflicting reactions.

[Sidenote: Its untoward significance.]

To say that this conflict is the guide to its own issue is to talk
without thinking. The conflict is the sign of inadequate organisation,
or of non-adaptation in the given organism to the various stimuli which
irritate it. The reconstruction which follows this conflict, when it
indeed follows, is of course a new and better adaptation; so that what
involves the pain may often be a process of training whi