526 THE EVOLUTION OF MIND 



regarded merely as body, is able to do in accordance with 

 its own natural laws, or what it cannot do." On the other 

 hand, we cannot accept the apsychic view, because it gives 

 a false simplicity to the facts, and because it implies a 

 gap between man and animals which our experience of 

 higher animals and lower men leads us to regard as incred- 

 ible. 



Our theoretical position is that certain pieces of behaviour 

 can be approximately formulated in terms of the organisa- 

 tion and metabolism of the animal as treated of in sound 

 physiology of a non-mechanistic type, but that there are other 

 pieces of behaviour which cannot be approximately formu- 

 lated without postulating factors like desire, conation, im- 

 agery, feeling, correlating, putting two and two together, in- 

 terpreting perception in light of memory, awareness of the 

 relation of means to end, and, in the most advanced stage, 

 deliberately thinking or experimenting with ideas. We are 

 not supposing that these expressions of mentality are inde- 

 pendent of metabolism ; we say merely that the concept 

 1 Organism ' has to be enriched by that of Body-mind or 

 Mind-body. 



Our problem, then, is to indicate the lines along which we 

 may look for indirect evidence that Mind, in the sense defined, 

 has counted in Organic Evolution, in " life's innumerable 

 venturings ". The great Russian embryologist von Baer said 

 that " the history of Nature is nothing but the history of 

 the ever-advancing victory of spirit over matter ". Was von 

 Baer right or do animals, for instance, play the game all 

 unawares and unbeknown to themselves? 



We may refer, to begin with, to the way in which some 

 creatures select their environment. If organisms were agents 

 in producing those novelties which we call variations and 



