I want to do; it is a vaguely
or actively unpleasant one if it is making me act against desire. In the
end, however, if I act against desire in pursuance of reason or a sense
of duty, the feeling of pleasure in the victory of my better self is
asserted. And feeling cannot be separated from will.

_Feeling Cannot Be Separated from Action._--I cannot do anything without
a feeling of comfort or discomfort, happiness or unhappiness. Try it for
yourself when you are feeding a patient, making a bed, giving a bath or
massage, preparing a hypodermic. Other things being normal, if you are
performing the task perfectly, the feeling of satisfaction, of pleasure,
of the very ability to work effectively, with speed and accuracy and
nicety, comes with the doing. If you are bungling, there is a pervading
sense of dissatisfaction, of unpleasantness. In the automatic or
semi-automatic action a great economy of nature has conservatively put
feeling at the absolute minimum; but it has not eradicated it. As you
walk across the ward, though your predominating thought and feeling may
be elsewhere, there is a sense of pleasure or displeasure in the very
movement. If your body is fresh and you are of an energetic type and in
happy frame of mind, a pervasive feeling of satisfaction is experienced.
If tired or discouraged or sore from unaccustomed exercise, every step
registers protest.

Thus we find by experiment that there is no thought we have, no single
conscious movement or action, nor any expression of the will, but is
accompanied with what the psychologist broadly terms _pleasure_ or
_pain_. So _emotion_, the first expression of mentality, is never absent
from any mental or physical act. It permeates all we do, as well as all
we think and will, with the partial exception of automatic action, above
indicated.

THE BEGINNING OF REASON

We found feeling by far the strongest factor in producing action in
babyhood and childhood. Our instinctive doing, we learned, is the result
of a race impulse. Will acts chiefly at emotion's bidding. But very
early the baby's experience operates as a partial check to feeling's
exclusive sway. It keeps him from touching the fire, no matter how its
brightness attracts. It may be merely the sense memory of _hurt_ when
fingers and that bright thing came together; and one such impression
will probably prevent him from ever again touching it. Or it may be the
brain-cell's retention of the painful feeling of s