48 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 



whether in the case of reflex action, of sensation, perception, 

 reception, conception, or reflection, on the side of the nervous 

 system, the method of evolution has been uniform: "it has 

 everywhere consisted in a progressive development of the 

 power of discriminating between stimuli, joined with the com- 

 plementary power of adaptive response." * But although 

 this is a most important truth to recognize (as it appears to 

 have been implicitly recognized — or, rather, accidentally 

 implied — by using a variant of the same term to designate 

 the lowest and the highest members of the above-named 

 series of faculties), for the purposes of psychological as 

 distinguished from physiological inquiry, it is convenient to 

 disregard the objective side of this continuous process, and 

 therefore to take up our analysis at the place where it is 

 attended by a subjective counterpart — that is, at Perception. 



So much has already been written on what is termed the 

 " unconscious judgments" or " intuitive judgments " incidental 

 to all our acts of perception, that I feel it is needless to occupy 

 space by dwelling at any length upon this subject. The 

 familiar illustration of looking straight into a polished bowl, 

 and alternately perceiving it as a bowl and a sphere, is enough 

 to show that here we do have a logic of feelings : without any 

 act of ideation, but simply in virtue of an automatic grouping 

 of former percepts, the mind spontaneously infers — or uncon- 

 sciously judges — that an object, which must either be a bowl or 

 a sphere, is now one and now the other.f From which we 



* Mental Evolution in Animals, p. 62. 



t Special attention, however, may be drawn to the fact that the term 

 " unconscious judgment " is not metaphorical, but serves to convey in a technical 

 sense what appears to be the precise psychology of the process. For the dis- 

 tinguishing element of a judgment, in its technical sense, is that it involves an 

 element of belief. Now, as Mill remarks, "when a stone lies before me, I am 

 conscious of certain sensations which I receive from it ; but if I say that these 

 sensations come to me from an external object which I perceive, the meaning of 

 these words is, that receiving the sensations, I intuitively believe that an external 

 cause of those sensations exists" {Logic, i., p. 58). In cases, such as that 

 mentioned in the text, where the "unconscious judgment" is wrong — i.e. the 

 perception illusory — it may, of course, be over-ridden by judgment of a higher 

 order, and thus we do not end by believing that the bowl is a sphere. Neverthe- 

 less, so far as it is dependent on the testimony of our senses, the mind judges 



