468 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



literature or in my own experience. Omne consciens e C07iscienti is the 

 law of conduct known to the psychologist. It may be retorted that 

 the negative evidence is worth very little, since, e. g., we believe that life 

 evolved from inorganic matter, and yet no one has seen the not-living 

 pass over into the living. I reply that the evidence is at least negative, 

 that is, is not positive; and that, although we have not built up living 

 protoplasm from dead matter, we have at least gone a good way towards it. 



There is another point. The automatic actions that take shape in 

 the course of the individual life have upon them the marks of appro- 

 priateness, of 'purposive' response to stimulus. They are relatively 

 precise and clean-cut; they subserve some one end, or some set of in- 

 terrelated ends. Appropriateness and precision are also, notoriously, 

 characteristic of the physiological reflexes. They are similarly char- 

 acteristic, we are told, of the tropisms and stereotyped reactions of the 

 lowest forms of life, so that these are often spoken of as 'reflexive.' 

 Is not this item of internal evidence worth something ? Is it not prob- 

 able that things which are so much alike have had a similar history? 

 For it must be remembered that, however simple the organism which 

 we are examining, it is still not a primitive organism; its history is, 

 presumably, at least as long as the history of man. Not until we see 

 the organism take shape from its inorganic constituents, and note the 

 first reactions of the living mass, shall we have direct evidence of the 

 nature of primitive movement; but by all analogy, that movement will 

 not be precise and clean-cut, but vague and clumsy, indefinite and ir- 

 regular. It is surely reasonable to suggest that the two tendencies 

 which we find in ourselves, and which (on the testimony of expressive 

 movements) are also operative in the race — the tendency towards new 

 coordination and progressive adaptation, with consciousness, and to- 

 wards specialized and stationary adaptation, without consciousness — 

 were present from the very beginning; that the rudimentary organism 

 might, as circumstances dictated, follow either of two paths, the down- 

 ward path to static adjustment, by reflexes, or the upward path to 

 dynamic adjustment, by conscious and coordinated action; and that in 

 following the first path, it forever lost the power of higher development, 

 while, in following the second, it still retained the power of fixing stably 

 the reactions whose modification was unnecessary. Paramecium would 

 then have lost the faint fiicker of mind with which its original ancestor 

 was endowed, and, losing therewith the possibility of coordinated move- 

 ment, would have remained paramecium. But a primitive organism of 

 like endowment, living under different conditions, and retaining both 

 mind and the correlated physical adaptability, would have become man. 



Still the opposing arguments will not down. If consciousness dis- 

 appears as soon as adjustment to surroundings has become easy, why 

 may it not have appeared as soon as adjustment became difficult ? Why 



