XXXViill JoURNAL OF COMPARATIVE NEUROLOGY. 
in which the animal persists despite their inefficiency. This is what 
Professor BALDWIN has called functional selection from excess move- 
ments or over-production of variations in the individual. Important 
questions arise at once to some of which an answer is given in chapter 
XIII. Why are these tropisms not immediately adaptive, and why do | 
animals persist in making these non-adaptive movements ? Why should 
such conscious processes as attention develop thus at the points of dis- 
adaptation in experience ? What is the psychology of this disadapta- 
tion or break inthe experience? And, even more important, the 
psychology of the reconstruction or readjustment after the break, by 
means of the conscious attention thus evolved. Professor ROoycE an- 
swers the first of these questions by saying that ‘‘this factor, this pecu- 
liar persistence, belongs to the temperament of the animal” (315). He, I 
suppose, would hasten to add that this is no real explanation, since 
‘‘temperament” is something itself to be explained rather than the 
- explanation of anything. Would it be in line with his own argument 
to suggest that the approximate reason is that the ordinary inhibitory 
effect of the regular routine of habitual acts is removed. The animal 
is, so to speak, reduced to a state of psychoplasm or impulse because 
of the ineffectiveness of the customary modes of activity. The rest- 
lessness and persistence in unadaptive movements represent simply 
the releasing of tendencies which are ordinarily inhibited. Relative 
freedom from ordinary restraints results in a relapse into a compara- 
tively primitive state of unmediated impulse, until new restraints can 
be established, new habits built up. This gives us a hint, at the same 
time, as to the true nature of the break or disadaptation and a sugges- 
tion as to the law of the readjustment or reconstruction. Apart from 
some such interpretation, one is impelled constantly, throughout this 
whole discussion of initiative, to ask the old question, whether there 
is ever any absolutely novel element in experience, and, if not, how 
there can be any real progress. 
(6) One’s feeling, after reading this delightful book, is one of satis- 
faction in finding the emphasis thrown once again upon the unity and 
continuity of experience, after so much analysis and dissection in re 
cent psychology, but with this, perhaps out of it, springs a desire that 
the author had carried out his organic view of experience a little further 
and shown us, not only that action is the natural consummation of feel- 
ing and thinking, but also how feeling and thinking first appear because 
of the interruption of action. It is just the full appreciation of the 
significance of this emergence of consciousness within action, as itself 
a phase of action—that consciousness not only leads over into action 
