tion to enable them to function properly and would have little capacity to store or to use stored force, and little ability, therefore, to function pleasurably. For such organs, practically any hypernormal stimulus would produce the conditions of painfulness. This may account for the fact that certain organs appear to be incapable of pleasurable stimulations, although in such cases the lack may be connected with the nature of the stimulus, as above suggested; it certainly accounts, without too great a stretch of the hypothesis, for the common observation that the functioning of certain internal organs scarcely appears in consciousness unless in the painful phase.
3. If it could be shown that an organ, when stimulated with such excess that it resulted in its deterioration, produced its specific sensation and yet no pain in connection with the stimulation, a valid argument would certainly be had against the theory I defend; but as I have already shown, the evidence is not decisive and the observed facts may be accounted for on other grounds; and when we consider, as I hope to show, that the preponderance of evidence favors my view, it makes it highly probable that a reinterpretation of the facts will some day be presented.
In my consideration of arguments 4 and 5 in themselves, I have shown how it is possible to explain the observed facts in a manner other than that adopted by those holding the sensational theory, and the reader will readily perceive that the explanation there given is in accord with the theory now before us.
4. The fact that the pain of pricking arises after the sensation of touch, when one operation produces both, is explicable if we suppose that a second set of nerves, viz. those producing the sense differentiation known as pricking or cutting, are brought into action after those of touch, and that they do not appear in pleasurable form under the method of experiment, and, maybe, that they have practically little storage capacity and are therefore little liable to appear in pleasurable phase at all. Analgesia in terms of this hypothesis becomes a very commonplace phenomenon; for it is very frequent in morbid cases, whether
