336 BIOLOGICAL LECTURES. 



reduced. Not only is the door to choice thus unlocked, but 

 more varied opportunities and provocations arise, and thus the 

 internal mechanism and the external conditions and stimuli 

 work both in the same direction to favor greater freedom of 

 action. 



When choice thus enters, no new factor is introduced. 

 There is greater plasticity within and more provocation with- 

 out, and hence the same bird, without the addition or loss of a 

 single nerve-cell, becomes capable of higher action and is 

 encouraged and even constrained by circumstances to learn 

 to use its privilege of choice. 



Choice, as I conceive, is not introduced as a little deity, 

 encapsuled in the brain. Instinct has supplied the teleological 

 mechanism, and stimulus must continue to set it in motion. 

 But increased plasticity invites greater interaction of stimuli 

 and gives more even chances for conflicting impulses. Choice 

 runs on blindly at first, and ceases to be blind only in propor- 

 tion as the animal learns through nature's system of compul- 

 sory education. The teleological alternatives are organically 

 provided ; one is taken and fails to give satisfaction ; another 

 is tried and gives contentment. This little freedom is the 

 dawning grace of a new dispensation, in which education by 

 experience comes in as an amelioration of the law of elimina- 

 tion. This slight amenability to natural educational influences 

 cannot, of course, work any great miracles of transformation 

 in a pigeon's brain ; but it shows the way to the open door 

 of a freer commerce with the eternal world, through which a 

 brain with richer instinctive endowments might rise to higher 

 achievement. 



The conditions of amelioration under domestication do not 

 differ in kind from those presented in nature. Domestication 

 merely bunches nature's opportunities and thus concentrates 

 results in forms accessible to observation. Natural conditions 

 are certainly working in the same direction, only more slowly. 

 The direction and the method of progress must, in the nature 

 of things, remain essentially the same. 



Nature works to the same ends as intelligence, and to the 

 natural course of events I should look for just such results as 



