266 JoURNAL oF COMPARATIVE NEUROLOGY. 
if such a mental state is conceivable at all, would be of no ser- 
vice unless or until it stimulated some adaptation on the part 
of the organism. And when the latter process takes place we 
have all the essentials of the cognitive process, involving the 
projection of purposes or ends. Of course, among lower orders 
of intelligence these ends will be projected only in a vague and 
relatively uncontrolled way, and it is for that reason that we 
characterize such a consciousness as of the effective or impul- 
sive as contrasted with the reflective or rational type. 
Furthermore, such a low type of consciousness is not to 
be interpreted in terms of our individualistic selfhood. The 
consciousness of an oyster is the focal or tensional area in a 
wider field of experience, like all consciousness; but it is 
vaguely, not definitely, focal. It is the cognitive differentiation 
of the human consciousness which makes possible the individ- 
ualism of human self consciousness. Just as the human con- 
sciousness of individuality emerged by slow degrees out of a 
sort of racial or tribal consciousness, so the higher forms of 
animal consciousness must have evolved by slow degrees out of 
that vague psychical matrix which expressed the tensional stress 
of some life problem of the species rather than any specific 
crisis in the life of an individuai. Consciousness here, as every- 
where, was the shifting focus of a wider sphere of adaptation, 
but it was focal, as yet, not for the individual organism as such, 
but rather for the species or clan or group or animal community 
of which what we should, from our point of view, call the indi- 
vidual organism, formed an integral part. This view is born 
out by the evident relation of the various instincts of animals 
to the life of the species. 
Experience probably begins, then, in the form of vague 
flashes of feeling (or what is predominantly feeling) which come 
sporadically according to the exigencies of the life history of 
the form.’ Consciousness becomes progressively organized in 
connection with the crises and emergencies of life ; not contin- 
ously from the first, but in spots or patches or streaks. Its 
1 Cf. STANLEY, Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling, p. 13. 
