Exhihitioii of Purpose and Intelligence hy Foraminifera. 135 



to me to apply to the examples recently brought to our notice 

 by Mr. Heron- Allen, as well as to those known in 1874 ; and for 

 my own part I could not, and should not, wish to modify them. 

 Mr. Heron-Allen has, however, been tempted, as the result of a 

 consideration of the facts observed, to ascribe what he at first 

 called " Purpose and Intelligence," and now calls " faculties ahin 

 to Purpose and Intelligence," or (by further modification of his 

 terms) " Purposive Intelligence," to the Foraminifera. In the 

 present communication I avail myself of Mr. Heron-Allen's state- 

 ment of his views and opinions read to the Society on October 

 20, 1915, and published in our Journal for December (p. 547). 

 I agree with Mr. Haynes in the opinion, quoted by Mr. Heron- 

 Allen, that " our human vocabulary is at present most inadequate 

 for discussing problems of this kind." And I am not assisted by 

 Mr. Heron-Allen's latest statement in coming to a conclusion as to 

 what he thinks he has discovered, or how he supposes that his 

 terms are more than a re-statement in dubious phraseology of the 

 facts familiar to all biologists since the days of Carpenter and 

 Huxley. He says that he repudiates the inference that the " Pur- 

 posive Intelligence " displayed by a Protozoon " is in any way 

 comparable to that displayed by a man or by animals, vertebrate or 

 invertebrate." Finally, he declares that his conclusion is that there 

 is no organism in the animal kingdom, however simple be its struc- 

 ture, " which is not capable of developing functions and behaviour 

 which in the Metazoa might be called (and would properly be so 

 called) ' Phenomena of Purpose and Intelligence.' " That is precisely 

 the point from which we started in 1874, as stated in the citation 

 from Dr. Carpenter given above. Mr. Heron-Allen has already 

 told us that what he alludes to as " Purposive Intelligence " in the 

 Protozoa is not, in his opinion, in any way comparable to that 

 displayed by man or by any animal, vertebrate or invertebrate. 

 How, then, do we get further by the aid of Mr. Heron-Allen's 

 " postulates " than the position already reached by Dr. Carpenter, 

 and the long line of his and Huxley's followers ? It is difficult 

 to admit that the words " Purpose " and " Intelligence," which are 

 primarily applied to certain mental activities exhibited by man, 

 can be applied with any advantage to phenomena which are at 

 the same time explicitly declared to be not comparable with those 

 human phenomena. 



It appears to me that Mr. Heron-Allen gains nothing by 

 describing the architectural and selective proceedings of the 

 Protozoa in otlier terms than those which have long been current 

 — namely, that they are surprising exhibitions of constructive and 

 selective activity. To say that they are due to Purpose which is 

 not Purpose as the word is ordinarily understood, and to Intel- 

 ligence which is not Intelligence in the usual acceptation of the 

 term, seems to me to tend to misconception, and to a mistaken 



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