ORIGIN AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CEREBRAL CORTEX 231 



process which will make the total experience of value for future 

 discriminative responses — for learning by experience. This, 

 which is true in the individual learning process, is also true 

 phylogenetically. The coordination centers (and their capacity 

 for the preservation of vestiges of past reactions) are the organic 

 mechanism for this synthesis. They make it possible that a 

 new stimulus may be reacted to, not as a detached element, 

 but as a component of a complex series of past and present 

 adjustments, to which it is assimilated in the association cen- 

 ters — apperception. This assimilation or apperceptive process 

 is an integral part of the receptor process in the higher centers, 

 giving the quale to the idea of the exciting object. Cotem- 

 poraneously with this stimulus-apperception process we have 

 an apperception-response-activity giving the object-or pur- 

 pose-idea, so that the entire reaction is to be regarded as 

 stimulus-apperception-response, as a functional unity rather 

 than as a sequence: stimulus > apperception > response. 



Dewey's organic circuit concept is elaborated in terms of 

 psychology. Let us see how it may be applied to biological 

 behavior. 



The simple reflex is commonly regarded as a causal sequence : 

 given the gun (a physiologically adaptive structure), load the 

 gun (the constructive metabolic process), aim, pull the trigger 

 (application of the stimulus), discharge the projectile (physio- 

 logical response), hit the mark (satisfaction of the organic need). 

 All of the factors may be related as members of a simple mechan- 

 ical causal sequence except the aim. For this in our illustration 

 a glance backward is necessary. An adaptive simple reflex is 

 adaptive because of a pre-established series of functional se- 

 quences which have been biologically determined by natural 

 selection or some other evolutionary process. This gives the 

 reaction a definite aim or objective purpose. In short, the aim, 

 like the gun, is provided by biological evolution and the whole 

 process is implicit in the structure -function organization which 

 is characteristic of the species and whose nature and origin 

 we need not here further inquire into. 



Now passing to the more complex instinctive reactions, so 

 far as these are unconscious automatisms, they may be elabora- 

 tions of chain reflexes of the type discussed above (Loeb). But 

 the aim (biological purpose) is so inwrought into the course 



