BIOPSYCHOLOGICAL 665 



Hence, too, our comparative psychology has begun later than 

 human psychology; and is obscurer also. For when our own so 

 largely animal-like babes perplex us, what of incomparably more 

 babe-like animals? It is a great step to be reaching an understanding 

 of the higher ape-minds, as more or less on a level with the child's 

 in very early years; but how much harder to make much out of the 

 behaviour of creatures simpler and simpler still ! 



Yet something (indeed, often much) of senses are manifest in 

 them ; and experience is claimed even for Protozoa, beyond Loeb's 

 mere tropisms. Though the old stories of animal intelligence are 

 being critically investigated, and often with serious abatement of 

 their wonders, there yet remains, as the biopsychologic evolutionist 

 must indeed be prepared for, some readjustment of experience 

 towards purposiveness and action. As for the feelings, and even 

 their expression, the path opened by Darwin's classic "Expression 

 of the Emotions" has been followed downwards; and though he, 

 of course, dealt only with higher animals, no one has fixed any limit 

 on the descending scales of life, for their existence, any more than 

 for their origin. 



Here we are greatly helped by the psychology of the subconscious, 

 which has long been in progress; and which even arose among the 

 physiologists, before the psychologists took hold of it. Yet no 

 advance in our conceptions of the mental aspects of life is more 

 characteristic of our time; witness the step from that mere dim 

 perception (if not merely reception) almost grudgingly granted to 

 the lowest forms of life, to the elan vital of Bergson, and again to 

 the active libido of the psycho-analysts, and so on : in short an urge 

 of life, and this viewed as psychic, and not merely as plasmic, 

 though this as well. Nunn's horme also seems a convenient term, 

 and likely of widening adoption. 



Whatever be the mysteries of life, it is undeniable that life is not 

 something in the organism isolated from its environment, for such 

 organisms are dead ; its essential condition is that of traffic with the 

 environment, in incessant alternation of give and take. Its response 

 to stimulus is not merely like the heating of iron by the hammer, 

 nor yet indefinite, like the flickering and spreading of a flame: it 

 exhibits special activities, but these as part of the association of 

 organism and environment together as life. All these functions are 

 maintained in their relation as definite life-processes or sub-processes 

 and their functionings all combine, thus successfully resisting death 

 as long as may be. Every organism's general life-process, life-history, 

 is thus a succession of complex yet unified scenes, which combine 

 into its life-drama. And this is of no small complexity; since all the 

 advances of biology are but partial, though increasing, discernments 

 of it. 



So here, and in the conception of the urge of life, was the profound 



