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The nerves bring to us sense of pain and pleasure: certain currents feel good to them, certain others bad. An inflow of warmth is a pleasure; increase the vibration, make it heat, it becomes pain, agony, torture. The sensory nerves bring to us their burden of impression, the consciousness we call enjoyment or dislike; but have the motory nerves no burden? Are the currents of energy going out not as perceptible as those coming in? To the individual animal they are not; he does not “feel himself work” particularly. His consciousness is in his income, not in his output.

But the social creature comes under different conditions. His range of activity increases, both in complexity and power; he has an enlarging fund of energy to discharge and a thousand complicated avenues to discharge it through. Moreover, this discharge is no longer a personal affair of his own arms and legs, but involves concurrent action of many others.

To adjust rightly this intricate mutual activity requires consciousness, and consciousness involves pleasure and pain. The whole field of distinctively human activities is under this law. We have a vast fund of energy, a vast field of exercise, and a constantly increasing consciousness of this exercise. Meanwhile the income of man, as a separate animal, remains the same. He has, as before, the pleasure of the intake, the attainment of the means to his separate welfare. He has, beyond that, his share of pleasure in the larger collective intake also, the gratification of his social desires; but he has, pre-eminently, the pleasure of action; of the conscious expression of energy.