Address to the British Association 221 



but as guides and directing agencies intervening in the 

 circle of its actions, and as facts in a chain of physical 

 causation. The sight of a stick may change the course of 

 actions which a dog would otherwise have pursued — that is, 

 the feeling of the moment, together with the faint recurrence 

 of various past feelings and emotions therewith associated, 

 which the sight of the stick calls up, may cause such change. 

 Besides its feelings, the general and the organic movements 

 of the dog are, like our own, governed by a multitude of 

 organic influences which are not felt, but which operate 

 through the nervous system, and so must be taken as parallel 

 with those which are felt, i.e. as unfelt, nervous psychoses. 

 The animal, then, like each of us, is a creature of activities^ 

 partly physical, partly psychical, the latter — both the felt 

 and the unfelt — being directing and controlling. 



As we descend to the lowest animals, the evidence as to- 

 sentience fades. Yet from the resemblances of the lowest 

 animals and plants, and from the similarity of the vegetative 

 functions in all living creatures, we may, I think, analogically 

 conclude that activities also take place in plants which are 

 parallel with, and analogous to, the unfelt psychoses of 

 animals. As Asa Gray has said with respect to their move- 

 ments : ' Although these are incited by physical agents (just 

 as analogous kinds of movements are in animals), and cannot 

 be the result of anything like volition, yet nearty all of them 

 are inexplicable on mechanical principles. Some of them at 

 least are spontaneous motions of the plant or organism itself, 

 due to some inherent power which is merely put in action by 

 hght, attraction, or other external influences.' 



I have already adverted to insectivorous plants, such as 

 Dioncea. In such plants we have susceptibilities strangely 

 Hke those of animals. An impression is made, and appropriate 

 resulting actions ensue. Moreover, these actions do not take 

 place without the occurrence of electrical changes similar to 



