Purpose and Intelligence exhibited by the Protozoa. 553 



latest protagonists has thus defined the position.* " The behaviorist 

 attempts to get a unitary scheme of animal response. He recognizes 

 no dividing line between man and brute. The behavior of man 

 with all its refinement and complexity forms only a part of his 

 total field of investigation. . . . The time seems to have come when 

 psychology must discard all reference to consciousness ; when it 

 need no longer delude itself into thinking that it is making mental 

 states the object of observation." This is a passage which may be 

 considered in connexion with a much earlier observation of Huxley. 

 He says, " It seems to me that in men as in brutes there is no 

 proof that any state of consciousness is the cause of change in the 

 motion of the matter of the organism. The feeling we call volition 

 is not the cause of a voluntary act, but the symbol of that state of 

 the brain which is the immediate cause of that act." f In another 

 place he says : " I have endeavoured to show that no absolute 

 structural line of demarcation .... can be drawn between the 

 animal world and ourselves ; and I may add the expression of my 

 belief that the attempt to draw a psychical distinction is equally 

 futile, and that even the highest faculties of feeling and of intellect 

 begin to germinate in lower forms of life."J 



Dr. Chalmers Mitchell, on the other hand, lays down a con- 

 tradicting dogma. He says, " Intelligence, purpose and choice 

 are meaningless phrases unless they imply consciousness, and the 

 sense of freedom."§ Professor J. Arthur Thomson, on the other 

 hand, in the review from which I have already quoted {supra), 

 observes — and I entirely agree with him — " Just as we have rational 

 skill, and intelligent skill, and instinctive skill, so perhaps we 

 have in these Foraminifera, organic skill, when the simple individu- 

 ality, pulling itself together, acts as a unity and then perhaps feels 

 itself as one. For it is not fantastic to suppose that in such critical 

 moments of endeavour and adventure consciousness first found, and 

 still finds, its simplest glimmering expression." 



I refuse to admit that my critics have any right to make 

 use of the anthropomorphic argument. || The behaviour of men 

 and of the lower or lowest animals must not — cannot be 

 considered upon the same plane. I will not have the responsi- 



* J. B. Watson, "Behavior." New York, 1914, pp. 1, 7. 



t T. H. Huxley, Collected Essays, i. London, 1«98, p. 2i0. 



% " On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals," ibid., vii. London, 1910, 

 p. 152. 



§ " Evolution and the War." London, 1915, p. 96. Dr. Chalmers Mitchell is 

 criticizing in unmeasured terms the following passage from Professor Bergson's 

 Huxley Memorial Lecture (Birmingham, 1914) :— " With the coming of life we 

 see the appearance of indetermination. A living being, no matter how simple, is 

 a reservoir of indetermination and unforseeability, a reservoir of possible actions, 

 in a word, of choice." 



H Cf. Watson, op. cit. p. 11. " From the viewpoint here suggested, the facts 

 on the behaviorot amoebae have value in and for themselves without reference to 

 the behavior of man." 



Dec. loth, 1915 '1 Q 



