MIND IN EVOLUTION 523 



our mind more free for its own adventures, so the consum- 

 mate registration that the organism exhibits is a device for 

 the emancipation of mind. 



The second fallacy is the assumption that what now takes 

 place reflexly, tropistically, or instinctively never required 

 mental control. Without accepting the theory that reflexes 

 have been organised by habituation, we may recall such 

 experiences as learning to ride a bicycle, which show how 

 extraordinarily automatic movements may become which 

 originally required all our attention and a good deal of 

 strong will. In cases like playing the violin the original 

 efforts often require a good deal of intelligence, for 

 those learn best who see clearly the relation of means to 

 end. 



Of reflexes, Professor Sherrington writes (p. 388) : " Per- 

 fected during the course of ag<>s, they have during that course 

 attained a stability, a certainty, and an ease of performance 

 beside which the stability and facility of the most ingrained 

 habit acquired during an individual life is presumably small. 

 But theirs is of itself a machine-like fatality. . . . To 

 these ancient invariable reflexes, consciousness, in the ordi- 

 nary meaning of the term, is not adjunct. The subject as 

 an active agent does not direct them and cannot introspect 

 them." 



But he goes on to show that, in higher animals especially, 

 reflexes are under some control. We know this in connec- 

 tion with coughing, eye-closing, and smiling. Some people 

 can slow down their heart and suppress the pharyngeal re- 

 flex of swallowing. " Certain it is," he continues (p. 390), 

 " that if we study the process by which in ourselves this 

 control over reflex action is acquired by an individual, 

 psychical factors loom large, and more is known of them 



