THE PURPOSES OF BEHAVIOUR 129 



or ether — though it will be found, on reading contemporary 

 physics, that the investigator rests uneasily on this bed of relations. 



He is apt either to roll over on to the ether of space, or on to 

 consciousness as the substance of nature, or more satisfactorily, 

 to find in that passage of nature which manifests itself in the 

 increase of entropy the substance of the universe. 



The Law of Conservation. Plainly, this is just the operator 

 of substance. There is something underlying all physical 

 phenomena that is conserved. It is not matter, or mass, or even 

 energy in the ordinary sense. But it cannot change in total 

 quantity. 



iv. Beauty, goodness, truth, etc. What these mental operators 

 are, biologically, we consider in Section 58. 



45. ON PERCEPTIONS 



We see, then, (i) that the animal has states of consciousness, 

 or sensations, when the receptor organs, or the afferent nerves, 

 or the ganglionic centres are stimulated ; (2) that rarely, or not 

 at all does it have pure sensation ; (3) that even then the sensations 

 are inserted, or intuited into frameworks of space and duration. 

 Having " Frames " of space and time are a priori and the animal 

 has them before it acquires experience. 



(4) It also has a mental mechanism that is arbitrarily decom- 

 posable into operators and it has this before it acquires experience 

 just as it has lungs before it breathes, or an alimentary canal before 

 it eats. The elementary mental operators are a priori. It has 

 instincts (see Section 54^), before it behaves and these potential 

 agents of behaviour are also a priori. 



(5) It acquires, or may acquire the secondary mental operators. 



(6) And all these operators work upon the states of conscious- 

 ness that are dependent on stimulation of the sense-organs and 

 that have been intuited in space and duration. The results of 

 the elaboration of the sense-space-duration data are perceptions. 

 It is perceptions that we think about. 



///. THE PURPOSES OF BEHAVIOUR 



By the behaviour of an animal is meant all its activities that we 

 can observe merely by inspection. Those activities are reactions 

 with the things of the environment just as an inanimate system of 



K 



