BIOPSYCHOLOGICAL 649 



Clifford was one of the first to state this open secret: "It is the 

 peculiarity of living things not merely that they change under the 

 influence of surrounding circumstances, but that any change in 

 them is not lost, but retained and, as it were, built into the organism 

 to serve as a foundation for future actions." 



It is one of Bergson's services to have emphasised the same idea. 

 Of the living creature he says: "Its past, in its entirety, is prolonged 

 into its present, and abides there, actual and acting." Or again, 

 in discussing the behaviour of the starfish. Prof. Jennings says: 

 "The precise way in which each part shall act under the influence 

 of the stimulus must be determined by the past history of that 

 part; by the stimuli that have acted upon it, by the reactions which 

 it has given, by the results which these reactions have produced (as 

 well as by the present relations of this part to other parts), and by 

 the immediate effects of its present action. We know as solidly 

 as we know anything in physiology that the history of an organism 

 does modify it and its actions — in ways not thoroughly understood, 

 doubtless, yet none the less real." This is part of what is meant by 

 "organic memory". Nothing is more distinctive of the organism 

 than its compound-interest enregistration, which is true even if 

 there is no transmission of acquired characters. 



(c) In the third place, organisms stand apart because in their 

 higher forms they give clear evidence of a mental aspect, which 

 does not find distinct expression in the domain of things. We may 

 perhaps believe that the mental aspect is potential or implicit in 

 the inorganic, as in the diamond or the dewdrop; we may perhaps 

 believe that the mental aspect sleeps and dreams in the plant ; but 

 what we are sure of is that many living creatures profit by experience 

 and control their life-events. They remember what is past, they anti- 

 cipate the concrete future, they enjoy the present. All is, as it were, 

 on a great inclined plane — not more than flashes of mind in the 

 Amoeba, a slender slow-flowing rill in the jellyfish, a somnolent mind 

 in the corals whose beauties are their dream-smiles, an instinctive 

 mind in ants and bees whose behaviour is but dimly suffused with 

 awareness and but vaguely backed by endeavour, an intelligent 

 mind in many a bird and mammal, a rational mind in man — but 

 some mind through and through. And what is true of the grades 

 of being is true in the individual becoming, as is so familiar in the 

 development of a child from an awakening that cannot be dated 

 to an awareness that is hailed with parental pride, and from a 

 foretaste of pleasure revealed in the eye to an evidently deliberate 

 plan to enjoy. It is certain that psychosis and biosis are intimately 

 correlated; it is probable that every organism is at once embodied 

 mind and enminded body. In any case, the first organisms were 

 new "wholes" or syntheses as distinguished from non-living 

 things. 



