Morals as a Factor in Organic Evolution 671 



Let us suppose that the father of a family sees the child 

 of another drowning, and rescues it. He is and can be only 

 cognizant of the danger through two sense relations, sight 

 or the heliotactic sense, and sound or the tonotactic. In other 

 words, were such a father near a drowTiing child, he would 

 be utterly unaware of its danger, were his eye and his ear sense 

 destroyed. He might still experience keen sense of smell, 

 of touch, of geotropic response, but these would avail nothing. 



Further the heliotactic stimulus is itself of such a nature 

 that the different light rays, their intensities, and their angular 

 incidences give him a compounded or resultant heliotactic 

 impression of the child's arms waving, of its face in terror, 

 of its body sinking. The tonotactic stimulus might be a double 

 compounded one, due to the high-pitched screams of the child, 

 and its lashing of the water by feet and hands. He combines 

 these into resultant responses along with others already ac- 

 quired by geotactic and thigmotactic experience that the child 

 like stone, heavy wood, etc., is heavy and will sink. 



All of these combined resultant responses are instantly 

 summated in the knowledge or experience he has already 

 acquired that (a) water kills, (b) it kills by continued immer- 

 sion, (c) that a helpless child may thus be killed, (d) that water 

 in the same relation would kill him or a child of his. Now 

 the purely heliotactic and tonotactic primary stimuli are cog- 

 nitic in energizing complexity; the latter are mental or cogitic. 

 But the last-named category (d) brings him to the transition 

 and ascending stage between the purely mental and the moral, 

 or, as it might better be termed, the mento-moral. For by 

 heliotactic, tonotactic, thigmotactic, and chemotactic stimuli 

 — all of which it would take us too far to trace here — he sum- 

 mates the complex stimulation ideas that (a) the child and 

 he are both human, (b) that both belong to the same race, 

 (c) that so they have common mental interests, (d) that both 

 might be exposed to common dangers, (e) that his child might 

 have been the drowning one, (f) that were such the case he 

 would expect any other father to help, (g) that so as a social 

 or moral act he should rescue the child. 



