386 KANSAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 



from this time forward some are instinctive, some are subconsciously 

 done, some are the result of habits, and most are consciously guided 

 and controlled by the will. 



Among those animals which reach stages of complexity higher 

 than the gastrula, but come short of the complexity attained by civil- 

 ized man, some enter the conscious stage of development as worms 

 and remain such all their lives ; others become fish ; others are con- 

 scious first as tadpoles and go a step farther and become frogs; some, 

 possibly, are marsupials ; some are herbivores or carnivores ; some are 

 apes, and some are barbarian bipeds. 



The embryo of man forms in its development peculiar structures 

 which show various places where instincts became buried. At one 

 stage it exhibits gill slits and a well-developed tail ; later it cannot be 

 distinguished from the embryo of a fellow mammal ; and even in adult 

 life man carries in his body dozens of structures, inside and out, which 

 are no longer functional or consciously used by him. 



In the mind are various functions not so deeply buried beneath 

 later acquisitions of race experience. Some are of service in food- 

 getting, others are useful in defense, and others, as do rudders to 

 ships, serve to guide the wavering mind to a safe harbor. The pres- 

 ence of these inherited race tendencies, serving as promptings from 

 the subconscious self to conscious activity, may have led Plato to 

 suppose a previous, personal existence of the human soul, may have 

 caused Buddha to teach the possibility of soul transmigration, and 

 may have caused Kant, who had only faint glimmerings of the doc- 

 trine of evolution and of the transmission of the wisdom of the race 

 through heredity, to maintain that man knows many things a jpriori — 

 that is, previous to individual experience. 



In conclusion, I merely repeat what I have maintained in this 

 paper, that heredity, instinct, subconscious promptings, habits and 

 conscious activity are all related problems of life, not of matter, force, 

 or energy, and are incapable of solution except by using the metliod 

 taken by life in solving the problems of its own existence on earth. 

 Following this method, we must conclude that the first activities of 

 life were consciously performed, and that in the course of the ages 

 these became in turn habits, subconscious activities, and then instincts. 

 This is true of all life, including man, the king of creation. 



