Biological Papers. 229 



conscious effort many things necessary to the well-being of the in- 

 dividual; and that the ability to establish reflex activities enables 

 life to make many mechanical sequences without conscious effort 

 or direction. We must also remember that psychologists are now 

 agreed that the mainspring .of action lies in the sensibilities and 

 not in the intellect, and that the syllogism cannot be used to test 

 the truthfulness of the emotions. Therefore, an action may be felt 

 to be necessary by the lower organisms when it cannot be thought 

 to be necessary. 



How life influences energy and matter without being itself a 

 form of energy is one of the problems of philosophy for which 

 many solutions have been offered, none of which are entirely satis- 

 factory. No one, however, any longer believes in a vital force, 

 though the biologist knows of many chemical transformations 

 managed by life in protoplasmic cells which are beyond the power 

 of our most eminent chemists to effect, and no machine constructed 

 by our most skillful mechanics can approach in efficiency the hu- 

 man body built by the body-building instincts. 



It should also be explained that no attempt will be made in this 

 paper to find an explanation of the origin of the protoplasmic cell. 

 Paleontology is necessarily silent as to the origin of this biologic 

 unit, there is no known chemical laboratory where living protoplasm 

 is being elaborated, and embryology finds that the embryos of the 

 metazoa, in recapitulating the life history of their ancestors, inva- 

 riably begin their development in a single protoplasmic cell which 

 is either a conjugate of two cells or is an unfertilized cell. 



In establishing the truth of this thesis, I wish to show first that 

 it is in harmony with common experience. All are aware of the 

 fact that conscious repetition of a certain mode of activity so im- 

 presses that form of action on the individual that it becomes a habit 

 and may be repeated with a minimum of conscious direction there- 

 after. What is more natural than to believe that these habits per- 

 sisted in by succeeding generations become permanent attributes of 

 life and are established in time as race habits or instincts and re- 

 flexes. To fix an individual habit requires years of repetition; to 

 establish a race habit must evidently require many centuries of 

 effort. 



In saying that race habits are established, I do not mean to say 

 that they are fixed as a whole, but that they pass through stages of 

 development, and are first in their infancy, then in their youth, 

 then are adult, and, finally, may develop to higher levels or may 

 slowly decay when they cease being useful. 



