Feelings

To approach or to avoid is the most elemental behavioral decision there is, and feelings seem to be the tool natural selection used to get organisms to make what, by natural selection's lights, was the right decision.

As the biologist George Romanes put it in 1884, twenty-five years after Darwin's The Origin of Species appeared, "Pleasures and pains must have been evolved as the subjective accompaniment of processes which are respectively beneficial or injurious to the organism, and so evolved for the purpose or to the end that the organism should seek the one and shun the other."

~Robert Wright, in Why Buddhism Is True