178 THE STUDY OF ANIMAL LIFE 'CHAP. 



But in the case of human life in its higher reaches, 

 there is no possibility of making sense of it unless we 

 recognise that conduct is often dominated by conceptual 

 purpose. We may have our opinions as to the worth 

 of the purpose that is quite another question ; but we 

 cannot give an intelligible description of even relatively 

 simple human affairs without supposing that the agents 

 were actuated by ideas of an end to be attained. 



Thus the difficulty as to when and where we may 

 speak of Purpose narrows itself a little to the area 

 between man and the inorganic. It seems possible to 

 narrow it further. For when we see a dog going off on 

 an excursion to reinvestigate (we think) a turn of a 

 distant road where he was yesterday disappointed of a 

 rabbit ; when we see a mother stoat, overtaken on the 

 links, with her youngster loping beside her, take him in 

 her mouth, race on ahead, deposit him in a scraping, 

 and look round challengingly ; when we see the rooks 

 dropping freshwater mussels on the stones by the side 

 of the river, and so on, we feel that it is impossible to 

 make sense of the facts unless we credit the creatures 

 with at least perceptual purposefulness. 



Without elaborating the argument, we would suggest 

 that the term instinctive purposiveness be used for cases 

 like the digger-wasps that expend so much energy on be- 

 half of offspring that they never survive to see ; and that 

 the term organised purposiveness be used for cases like 

 that, previously described, of the combat between gang- 

 lionless starfish and ganglionless sea-urchins. The ques- 

 tion is whether we can make sense of the behaviour of 

 the agents in these cases without the recognition of 

 purpose, though it may be idea-less. 



It goes without saying that we cannot credit with 

 conceptual purposefulness an Amoeba on the hunt 

 (of the reality of which we should not have any doubt 

 were we small Amceba3 with human intelligence), nor 

 a Foraminifer with a heavy shell of sand-grains which 

 saves itself from sinking into the ooze by building round 

 the precise centre of a long sponge-spicule. But the 

 question presses, whether these do not show something 



