MIND IN EVOLUTION 519 



the result of progressive germinal variations and, of course, 

 the personal testing of these. For the line between develop- 

 ment and the expression of instinctive capacity is hard to 

 draw. Both are actualisations of the implicit, the ingrained, 

 the enregistered. Both are expressions of * organic memory '. 

 As M. Joussain says (1912, p. 156), "Instinct is a pro- 

 longation of the organising work : the effort by which the 

 chick breaks its shell, frees itself from the debris, and be- 

 gins to walk, is a continuation of the development by which 

 its organs have been built up in the egg." He proceeds to say, 

 though the speculation is not necessary for our point : " If the 

 final stroke of the beak is conscious and voluntary, the work 

 immediately antecedent must likewise be so, and thus back- 

 wards. It is, then, by its own effort that the egg is developed 

 into a bird." . . . But this will sound absurd to those who 

 are satisfied with the simplicist formulae of the mechanical 

 school. 



Organic Memory. In his interesting Esquisse d'une Phi- 

 losophie de la Nature (1912), M. Joussain makes much of 

 the conception of organic memory. " The transition from 

 mechanism (tropism?) to instinct and from instinct to intelli- 

 gence, as likewise from automatism to spontaneity and from 

 spontaneity to freedom, is correlated with the extension of 

 memory. In the animal, the complexity and differentiation 

 of the organism are correlated with the extension of specific 

 memory. . . . The relative independence of the organism in 

 respect to its environment increases with its complexity and 

 differentiation, and consequently with the specific memory. 

 The higher the animal's degree of organisation, the more it 

 is capable of altering its reactions in answer to stimuli from 

 without, the more reserve of energy it has and freedom in 

 using it. The independence of the creature is thus greater 



