262 JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE NEUROLOGY. 
Developing this suggestion of ROMANES, we may say that 
the condition of consciousness is found in organic tension and 
the criterion of consciousness lies in the ability to vary the use 
of means in the attainment of an end. Experience may be 
viewed as an ongoing activity. When the process of coordina- 
tion or adaptation of that activity is hindered in any way, con- 
sciousness supervenes as the process of removing the obstacle 
to free unimpeded adjustment. This wrestling with the diff- 
culty as with an opponent, this endeavor to surmount the ob- 
stacle, this attempt to solve the problem which the difficulty 
presents, gives rise to a state of resistance or tension. Stated 
psychologically, this is attention. Attention is the ‘mental 
“aspect or name for organic adaptation, and is developed at the 
point where new habits are being acquired or where old habits 
are being modified in accommodation to some new situation. 
The conscious act is the relatively novel act on the part of the 
organism, the act which expresses the variant as opposed to the 
constant factors in its growth. Consciousness expresses the 
mobility of function as habit expresses the stability of struc- 
ture. Consciousness, as Professor BALDWIN says, ‘‘is the new 
thing in nature—the thing by which organisms show in all cases 
their latest and finest adjustments. And the central fact of 
consciousness, its prime instrument, its selective agent, its seiz- 
ing, grasping, relating, assimilating, apperceiving—in short, its 
accomodating element and process—is attention.”” ‘‘Whenever 
there is accomdation—the breaking up of habit, the effort to 
learn, the acquirement of new movements and coordinations of 
movement—there consciousness is present, and present in vivid 
and heightened form according as the habit fought against is 
fixed, and the road to the new acquisition is an uphill road. 
The things most new, difficult, imperfect, hard to effect, these 
dwell in the very focus of . . . attention.’’ 
Consciousness, then, is born in friction, in the stress and 
1 Menta! Development in the Child and the Race, 168, 233. 
