XXX JOURNAL OF CoMPARATIVE NEUROLOGY. 
question of methodology does not have an important bearing upon this 
question of the distinction between the psychical and the physical, but 
this relation can not appear as long as one member of the distinction 
is taken as fixed. 
(3) The Place of Consciousness in Evolution. The place of con- 
sciousness in evolution is the same on either the Lamarckian or Dar- 
winian view. ‘This is made possible by the author's theory of organic 
selection and social heredity. One of his reviewers, indeed, thinks 
that he has not wholly escaped the fallacy of supposing that conscious- 
ness produces causal changes in the physical world of muscles. But, 
besides the author’s disavowal of such a doctrine in a reply to this re- 
view, he distinctly says in the work before us that there is a third view 
beside the theory of automatism and the theory that consciousness is a 
vera causa (p. 121). 
But what is this third view ? Does the author here intend a func- 
tional interpretation of the relation of the psychical to the physical ? 
If there is one psychophysical system, and if consciousness is simply 
the meaning of this system when it is tensional, as contrasted with the 
state of the same system when in the relatively stable equilibrium of 
habit, then consciousness can be included in the statement of the ante- 
cedent phenomena explanatory of a voluntary movement—not indeed, 
as a distinct phenomenon, but as the statement of a continuous process 
in one of its stages. To say that the same movement could take place 
without this state of consciousness is to say that the fact that it was a 
conscious movement (i. e., had this meaning as distinct, say, from an 
habitual movement) does not make it a different movement from one 
which is not conscious. Any mark or character of the movement 
makes it a different movement. In truth, no two movements are ever 
exactly alike. Of course, you may abstract from all these differences, 
but then your judgment is an hypothetical and not a descriptive one, 
and here the aim, as the author says, is to secure a scientific in the 
sense of a descriptive statement of the facts. 
The suggestion that heredity rather than variation is the fact to be 
accounted for in evolution, ‘‘that variation is normal, and that heredity 
is acquired through the operation of natural selection restricting the 
limiting variation” (p. 230), is, then, to be put alongside of this other 
contention of the author, that consciousness, in one form, is the 
growing-point of evolution from the first. Is not this tantamount to 
saying that what we call consciousness is the variable element in devel- 
opment and evolution, that consciousness represents the shifting area 
of tension in adaptation, or, to put it from the other side, the moving 
