ORGANIC MOVEMENTS 61 



of our analysis of action will have to show us how new 

 combined specificities may be formed on the foundation of 

 the elements of the historically received ones. 1 



But a second fundamental difference between the 

 " historical basis of reacting " of a phonograph and of an 

 organism may at once be discovered as easily as the first 

 difference was. The phonograph receives vibrations of the 

 air and gives off vibrations of the air ; in other terms, 

 previous stimulus and later reaction are of the same nature. 

 The organism receives impressions on its sensory organs 

 whilst acquiring " experience/' and gives off movements. 

 That is to say, the events which have created the 

 organism's history, and the events which occur on the basis 

 of this history, belong to two absolutely different classes 

 of phenomena. 



We now must insist more fully on the analysis of 

 our " historical basis," and shall in the first place justify 

 a certain phrase that we have used in our definition. We 

 have said that actions not only depend on all the stimuli 

 received in the past but also on the effects of those stimuli. 

 The word " stimuli " is to include here everything 

 that has affected the sense organs of the acting 

 subject in any form whatever ; the word " effects >: is to 

 embrace the final consequences of any previous moving 

 that had been caused by any stimulus. The second half 

 of this explanation now may seem to want some further 

 interpretation, and this interpretation may advantageously 

 be founded upon a short discussion of a fundamental 



1 There would be a strict analogy between the "historical basis" of a 

 phonograph and the "historical basis" of action if all human speech were 

 like reciting a story or a poem learnt "by heart." But a conversation, 

 for example, is something very different from this. 



