720 COMPARATIVE AND GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY 



The complete argument, restated, in accordance with this fresh 

 hypothesis is then the following: All animal activities are psychic 

 because they resemble human activities, and all human activities 

 are psychic, because they either are, or originally were, performed 

 with consciousness. 



But even in its new form the argument is invalid. In the first 

 place, admitting its premises, it does not prove of any particular 

 animal activities that they are conscious, but only that they once 

 were conscious perhaps not even in the experience of the in- 

 dividual. In the second place, the conception of unconsciousness, 

 as attained through racial practice, involves the assumption that 

 the effects of practice are transmitted, and has thus to reckon with 

 all the formidable objections brought to bear against this revival 

 of Lamarckianism. Finally, even if this difficulty be waived, the 

 continuity argument loses all its force with the appeal to racial 

 experience. For the strength of the argument lies in the analogy 

 between animal behavior and directly observed human conscious- 

 ness. When once, however, it is admitted that some human activ- 

 ities are and have remained unconscious through individual human 

 experience, then the analogy becomes futile. To call the animal 

 reactions psychic because analogous to human actions, when these 

 human actions may be conceived as psychic only on the hypothesis 

 that they once were consciously performed by the animal ancestors 

 of human beings this is an obviously circular argument. 



The admission of this radical defect in the argument of the con- 

 tinuity theory leads naturally to a consideration of the teaching 

 of the mechanists. This doctrine, it must be remembered, is less 

 sweeping than the one which it opposes; for that asserts that all 

 forms of animal life are conscious. The mechanists, on the other 

 hand, are far from teaching that all animals are unconscious. They 

 insist, however, that only those animals are conscious which be- 

 have in a non-mechanical way, those whose actions vary in such 

 wise as progressively to adapt themselves to their environment. 

 Negatively, then, the mechanists contend that those animals are 

 unconscious whose movements are repeated and unvaried reflexes; 

 and after this mechanical fashion they interpret many of the 

 activities, which their opponents regard as psychical, notably the 

 merely instinctive activities of animals. 1 Their argument also 

 is twofold, theoretical and empirical. Against the metaphysical 

 law of continuity, they array the logical law of parsimony, the 



1 This mechanistic theory must not be confounded with the utterly unjustified 

 conception of consciousness as identical with nerve-process, which is current 

 among certain modern physiologists one may instance Loeb. (Cf. Comparative 

 Physiology of the Brain and Comparative Psychology, pp. v, 12, 213.) This revival 

 of the outworn doctrine of Vogt and Btichner is obviously a result of defective 

 observation and of the unwarranted intrusion of a one-sided metaphysic into 

 psychology. 



