CHAP. XIV.] ITS NATURE AND ORIGIN. 223 



The mode in which states of viscera operate in deter- 

 mining an organism's activities is not difficult to under- 

 stand. It has been previously pointed out that the 

 Stomach is always in direct communication with the Brain, 

 and that the Generative Organs are also, either directly or 

 indirectly, in close connection therewith. Impressions, 

 therefore, may emanate from either of these organs, which 

 habitually pass on to the principal nervous centres, and 

 there come into some kind of relation with one or more 

 of the special sense-centres, whose activity they serve to 

 heighten. That there is an intimate correlation between 

 visceral needs and sensorial activity cannot be denied. 

 An appetite for food, or a desire to find a mate, commonly 

 suffices to call certain sense-centres into a state of keen 

 receptivity to impressions, and thus affords conscious 

 intelligence an opportunity to come into play for the im- 

 mediate guidance of the animal in its search for what it 

 needs, and in its execution of all those acts to which it is 

 prompted for the gratification of this or that appetite. 



From what has been previously said, it will be seen to 

 be almost an inevitable necessity that all acts which are 

 immediately responsive to visceral needs, as well as all 

 which daily and habitually succeed some recurring impres- 

 sion, should be the most deeply automatic in nature. The 

 mode in which the representatives of each kind of organism 

 seize and swallow their food, should, for instance, like the 

 action of the viscera, be more or less common to the whole of 

 them, and performed with machine-like regularity. And so 

 with other actions which have, during succeeding ages, been 

 taking place in response to particular sensorial impressions 

 throughout the lives of untold generations of animals. 



It would follow, therefore, for the same reason, that if, 

 with any organisms, the acts more remotely prompted by 



