THE MEANING OF PERCEPTION 181 



first time, shooting, drilling, or steering a boat, the conditions 

 are, most obviously, different. There is trial and error, and 

 repeated trials with increasing success. There is hesitation, 

 embarrassment, deliberation, and choice. There is full and 

 vivid consciousness of all the conditions; in short, full percep- 

 tions of the enviroment, of the results of our action upon it, and 

 memory of past actions that are relevant. While the unfamiliar 

 action is being learned there is indetermination of behaviour, and 

 some true freedom, and what we can only call creative activity. 

 This indetermination, expressing itself as hesitation, deliberation, 

 and choice, is our perception ; but now it is perception that 

 involves the factor of memory, and which in turn is going to 

 leave behind it both memory and habit. 



And so an evolutionary process is essentially a creative one, a 

 notion that need not alarm anyone who thinks about art as 

 creative, as evolving something new. Of course, it can be 

 argued that, just as the evolution of a planetary system from an 

 original nebula is a physical process which is strictly determined, 

 so also must an organic evolutionary process be a determined 

 one. That means that there is nothing new; that if we knew 

 the differential equations that described the state of the nebula 

 we could predict the orbits and masses of the planets and nebula 

 that are to be evolved. Now does this strict physical deter- 

 minism apply to the process of evolution of species ? 



For any evolutionary hypothesis always starts by assuming the 

 existence of variations, and the latter must be shown to be physi- 

 cally determined. But between the simple, muscle-nerve pre- 

 paration and the behaviour of a higher animal we cannot make 

 any absolute distinction, and variations of form and functioning 

 and habit — that is, the materials, so to speak, on which evolu- 

 tion works — are activities which are essentially the same as 

 muscular responses, tropisms, reflexes, instinctive and habitual 

 and spontaneous actions. And if the proof that the actions of 

 an animal are not really free, but are determined, breaks down 

 (as we believe that it does under Bergson's analysis), how can 

 we maintain that organic variability is physically determined 

 rather than indeterminate, and thus new ? Generally an action 

 is not wholly free, we saw, and generally also a variation is not 

 wholly new. But just as action may generally show some inde- 

 terminism, so variations generally show something new. These 

 new things (mutations) are the sources of evolutionary change. 



