RELATIONS OF COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY 699 



popular conception of the influence of mind in the conduct of 

 affairs, it is that effective consciousness is a controlling influence 

 standing in some way apart from the organic happenings over 

 which its control is exercised. Is this popular conception wholly 

 without scientific foundation and erroneous, as some physiologists 

 would assure us? Take any simple case of accommodation to cir- 

 cumstances through a modification of behavior due to pleasurable 

 or painful experience in like cases, let us say the avoidance of 

 nauseous insects by young birds, or any other example of the 

 intelligent control of instinctive procedure. Can we conceive how 

 the feeling-tone, as the concomitant of nervous processes involved 

 in the instinctive procedure as such, could modify the direction of 

 the discharge could either augment or inhibit it. I for one am 

 completely incapable of doing so. Reduce what we may suppose 

 to take place to the simplest schematic form. A stimulus excites 

 a nerve-centre and the excited nerve-centre distributes a response. 

 I am utterly unable to see how any conscious concomitant of the 

 physiological action of that nerve-centre, per se, can in any way 

 influence the response. Something must be added which in some 

 way influences the discharge; and this is what we term experience, 

 embodied in other nerve-centres, or in parts differentiated from 

 the automatic centres. 



It seems to me, therefore, that we are inevitably forced to assume 

 that the physiological foundation of conscious guidance is, in 

 organisms possessed of a nervous system, a differentiation of control- 

 centres from the centres concerned in automatic response; and 

 that the ascent of mind is the concomitant of the evolution of a 

 differentiated control-system which, during individual life, is con- 

 stantly playing down upon the system which is concerned in merely 

 organic reflex acts biologically coordinated as instinctive procedure. 

 It is between these two systems, thus differentiated, that inter- 

 action takes place. 



According to this conception the control-system plays the part 

 of environment to the automatic system which is the physiological 

 mechanism for purely organic adjustment; and this harmonizes 

 with the popular conception of mind as a selective environment. 

 And the characteristic of this environment is that it includes, as 

 modes of experience, on the one hand the surrounding life-circum- 

 stances, and on the other hand the responsive organic activities, 

 and brings them into those relationships which we term psycho- 

 logical values. It is this controlling environment which is con- 

 stantly influencing the course of procedure due to the hereditary 

 modes of response of the automatic centres. 



I am well aware that this conception of an environment within 

 the organism itself runs counter to established usage of the term. 



