698 COMPARATIVE AND GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY 



analysis and abstraction were independent psychological units 

 separately given, and sought to render an account of the manner 

 in which these mental elements threaded themselves on the strands 

 of association. A biological treatment has more and more clearly 

 tended to emphasize the fact that the individual organism comes 

 into the world as a going concern, the recipient of groups of stimuli 

 giving psychological net-results, on the one hand, and capable, 

 on the other hand, on purely organic grounds, of complex modes 

 of behavior which supply also their net results, the two sets of 

 net results coalescing so as to constitute felt unity-wholes. It has 

 thus tended to relegate many of the problems of mental onto- 

 genesis to biology, and has come to regard association itself as in 

 large degree dependent on factors which are primarily organic 

 and physiological. 



If this be so, the starting-point of genetic study lies in the bor- 

 derland region where distinctively biological evolution passes up 

 into, and is increasingly influenced by, psychological develop- 

 ment. And for this reason many observers have selected the phe- 

 nomena of instinct as most likely to throw light upon some of the 

 lower phases of psychogenesis. 



From the phylogenetic point of view we are at present, I fear, 

 very much in the dark as to the earliest stages in the evolution 

 of effective consciousness as capable of exercising, in association 

 with its physiological concomitants, guidance in the course of be- 

 havior. By effective consciousness I mean that which does, in 

 some way, control organic activities. The only criterion we have 

 of its presence is the observable fact that the organism profits by 

 individual experience. It is, I admit, a difficult criterion to apply. 

 But 1 confess that I am disposed to regard the introduction of 

 consciousness into an ideal scheme of explanation without the 

 application of some such criterion the introduction it would 

 sometimes seem of a sort of consciousness which is not a mode of 

 experience as a bit of mythology, which is harmful rather than 

 helpful. Of effective consciousness, however, having demonstra- 

 bly a guiding value, there is no evidence in plants. Dr. Jennings 

 finds little or no sign of it in the lower Infusoria ; nor can Dr. Yerkes 

 find much or any proof of its presence in the Medusa. This is the 

 region of tropisms and chemism and the like. Just when and how 

 effective consciousness first comes into play we are, as yet, 

 scarcely in a position to determine. Hence the problem has to be 

 attacked in the main ontogenetically, by considering the connec- 

 tion between automatic behavior and that which affords evidence of 

 conscious control, in organisms which exhibit both, each in relation 

 to the other. 



If there is one feature which is essentially characteristic of the 



