Editorial. 6 1 



The limitations of the one method he in the incredible 

 chasm in degree (if not in kind) which must lie between my 

 complicated conscious life and that of the simplest organisms 

 (if they have any at all). This would seem to check any an- 

 thropomorphizing tendency at the start. Binet's mistake, for 

 example, lies not chiefly in his assumption that the lower organ- 

 isms have consciousness (this may or may not be true), but in 

 his uncritical use of the categories of adult human psychology 

 in describing the reactions of micro-organisms. It is, of course, 

 an inference that any organism besides my own has conscious- 

 ness, but it is an inference, in certain cases, of extreme proba- 

 bility. But that perception, association, preference, choice, 

 mean the same in these lower forms is a point to be demon- 

 strated, not to be assumed. The great need of comparative 

 psychology at the present time is the reduction of human con- 

 scious reactions to the lowest terms, especially as they are rep- 

 resented in the human infant, in the savage, and in primitive 

 man, in order to make the comparison between human and ani- 

 mal behavior more direct. 



On the other side, the difficulty lies in the fact that the 

 terminology of tropisms and animal reactions has grown up al- 

 most exclusively under the domination non-psychological sci- 

 ence, with the result that the answer to the question as to the 

 presence of mental life in these lower forms is prejudged from 

 the outstart. Evidently there is need of some common basis 

 of method in biology and psychology. This is supplied, in a 

 general way, in the conception of conscious states as themselves 

 acts, as truly as the more obvious activities of the motor organs, 

 but more subtle because remotely conditioned in the brain pro- 

 cesses. One of the common problems thus, of comparative 

 neurology and comparative psychology becomes, as has been 

 said before, the problem of the evolution of action, and par- 

 ticularly the problem of the determination of the conditions of 

 conscious action. h. heath bawden. 



