640 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



of employment, like an artist without a commission, because the 

 body is sufficient unto itself. We must rather think of the creature 

 as running according to an engrained bodily rule, and running so 

 automatically that the mental side of its l>ehaviour is not in any 

 hii^h degree activated. 



Along with the finely integrated nervous system of higher animals 

 there is a corresponding integration of the inner life, helped by 

 memory and perceived purpose; and the result is an adumbration 

 of what in ourselves we call "self" or personality. In the lower 

 reaches of the animal kingdom there is probably no such psychical 

 integration, no unified and unifying mind, but only the ever-flowing, 

 though often slender, psychic rill that probably accompanies all 

 life. To ignore this altogether would be the other extreme, that of 

 reducing the animal to an automatic machine. That is to say dog- 

 matically that mind does not count. But we should note that 

 while the mental aspect may not be needed to guide behaviour by 

 forming images and inferences, it may be an indispensable factor in 

 the unifying of the hfe. It may be the literal esprit de corps. More- 

 over, feeling is a mental activity as truly as inference is. 



6. In describing animal behaviour we must not be too generous, 

 reading the man into the beast, and making every creature a Brer 

 Rabbit. On the other hand, we must not be too stingy, trying to 

 make out that the animal is no more than an automatic machine, 

 or never more than a big bundle of reflex actions. We must follow 

 what is sometimes called the "Lloyd Morgan principle" — that in 

 describing any particular case we must not assume higher mental 

 qualities than are necessary for a satisfactory description. In so 

 doing we may do the animal an injustice; for we know that in our 

 own case the simplest explanation or description is not always the 

 true one. But it is safer to err on the side of scientific parsimony 

 than on the side of credulous generosity. Yet again, because we can 

 describe without using psychological terms a particular action like 

 drawing our finger back from a hot coal, or like the earthworm 

 jerking itself back into its hole on the approach of a thrush, it would 

 be unwarrantable to conclude from this that the organism has no 

 mind. A particular piece of behaviour may be apsychic; and yet 

 the mental aspect of feeling, of desire, of memory, of imaging, may 

 count for much in the life of the creature as a whole. 



7. Another caution has to do with cases where an animal goes 

 through an instinctive routine in a wooden sort of way and in 

 circumstances which make the performance futile, or when it fails 

 to adjust itself to a slight change in the circumstances, as when the 

 Procession Caterpillars go round and round in a circle, or when a 

 pigeon fails to retrieve its eggs which have been removed from the 

 nest to a distance of two inches. On seeing such exhibitions we must 

 not think of the animal as "unutterably stupid"; we must remember 



