iv THE EVOLUTIONISM OF SPENCER 387 



the lowest degree of the animal scale, in living beings 

 that are but an undifferentiated protoplasmic mass, 

 the reaction to stimulus does not yet call into play 

 one definite mechanism, as in the reflex ; it has not 

 yet choice among several definite mechanisms, as in 

 the voluntary act ; it is, then, neither voluntary nor 

 reflex, though it heralds both. We experience in 

 ourselves something of this true original activity 

 when we perform semi-voluntary and semi-automatic 

 movements to escape a pressing danger. And yet 

 this is but a very imperfect imitation of the primitive 

 character, for we are concerned here with a mixture 

 of two activities already formed, already localized in 

 a brain and in a spinal cord, whereas the original 

 activity was a simple thing, which became diversified 

 through the very construction of mechanisms like 

 those of the spinal cord and brain. But to all this 

 Spencer shuts his eyes, because it is of the essence of 

 his method to recompose the consolidated with the 

 consolidated, instead of going back to the gradual 

 process of consolidation, which is evolution itself. 



Is it, finally, the question of the correspondence 

 between mind and matter ? Spencer is right in defining 

 the intellect by this correspondence. He is right in 

 regarding it as the end of an evolution. But when 

 he comes to retrace this evolution, again he integrates 

 the evolved with the evolved, failing to see that he 

 is thus taking useless trouble, and that in positing the 

 slightest fragment of the actually evolved he posits 

 the whole, so that it is vain for him, then, to pretend 

 to make the genesis of it. 



For, according to him, the phenomena that succeed 

 each other in nature project into the human mind 

 images which represent them. To the relations between 



