INTRODUCTORY 19 



that the brutes are conscious can do no harm, while belief that 

 they are unconscious might, if mistaken, bring untold misery upon 

 dumb brutes from brutal men, it seems well that we should con- 

 tinue to describe their actions in subjective language ; although 

 nothing is more obvious than that, while we know their actions, 

 we only infer the existence of mental accompaniments. For all 

 any one knows to the contrary young chicks may learn what is 

 good to eat and what is unpleasant, and may readily associate the 

 appearance with the taste, and those who hold that they are un- 

 conscious may justly be called upon by Morgan to prove their 

 opinion ; but I cannot agree with him that his studies show that 

 they are conscious, for in sober and scientific truth all they show 

 is that the chicks rapidly acquire power to respond to certain 

 optical stimuli by actions which are adjusted to those flavors 

 which in course of nature are associated with certain optical 

 properties. 



They who live in the hope that the actions which the chick 

 performs only after what we call experience, will sometime be 

 proved as mechanical as the response of the growing seedling 

 to gravitation, may appeal to the rapid progress which physiol- 

 ogists are making in the localization of the functions of the 

 brain, as evidence that their hope is well founded. They may 

 say that there is good reason to believe that, if the localized and 

 specialized brain-cells which are stimulated through the eyes and 

 the optic nerves by the yellow and black rings of the cinnabar 

 caterpillar, could be stimulated by electricity or in any other way 

 with sufficient delicacy and skill, all the other changes which 

 make up the response would follow mechanically ; that the nervous 

 discharge from these cells would be accompanied, as it has been 

 before, by the stimulation of those localized cells which were origi- 

 nally stimulated by the pernicious flavor, and that the nervous 

 discharge from them would inhibit the seizing movements, and 

 that whether the chick is conscious or not, the establishment of 

 the response by experience is no more than might have been 

 expected from our knowledge of the functions of the nervous 

 system. 



If we answer that this is as yet unproved, inasmuch as no one 

 is able now, or is at all likely to soon be able, to even demon- 



