432 Animal Life and Intelligence, 



we have those activities which are performed in special 

 adaptation to special circumstances. These are intelligent 

 activities. 



All of these may be, and the last, the intelligent actions, 

 invariably are, accompanied by consciousness. The habitual 

 activities, and those which are incompletely instinctive, are 

 also, we may presume, accompanied by consciousness 

 during the process of their organization and establishment. 

 It is possible, however, that some of the perfectly instinctive 

 activities may be performed unconsciously. When we 

 consider how perfectly organized such activities are, and 

 when we also remember that perfectly organized habitual 

 activities are frequently in us unconscious, we shall see 

 cause for suspecting that instinctive activities may, at any 

 rate in some cases, be unconscious. No doubt the con- 

 ditions of consciousness are not well understood. But let 

 us accept Mr. Romanes's suggestion, that a physiological 

 concomitant is ganglionic delay. "Now what," he asks,* 

 " does this greater consumption of time imply ? It clearly 

 implies," he answers, " that the nervous mechanism con- 

 cerned has not been fully habituated to the performance of 

 the response required, and therefore that, instead of the 

 stimulus merely needing to touch the trigger of a ready- 

 formed apparatus of response (however complex this may 

 be), it has to give rise in the nerve-centre to a play of 

 stimuli before the appropriate response is yielded. In the 

 higher planes of conscious life this play of stimuli in the 

 presence of difficult circumstances is known as indecision ; 

 but even in a simple act of consciousness such as signalling 

 a perception more time is required by the cerebral 

 hemispheres in supplying an appropriate response to a 

 non-habitual experience, than is required by the lower 

 nerve-centres for performing the most complicated of reflex 

 actions by way of response to their habitual experience. 

 In the latter case the routes of nervous discharge have 

 been well worn by use ; in the former case these routes 

 have to be determined by a complex play of forces amid 



* " Mental Evolution in AuiinuL," |>ji. 73, 71. 



