358 THE BODY AT WOEK 



In golfing terminology, a successful drive is always " an awful 

 fluke "; but the fluke once accomplished, nothing is easier for 

 the golfer than to drive equally well on all succeeding occasions. 

 He need merely remember exactly what it felt like to give the 

 club a perfect swing, and exclude all other sensations while he 

 is passing these memories through his sensori-motor arcs ! 



The fact that we can deliberately improve an action, fitting 

 it to the attainment of the object of desire, by suppressing 

 wrong and emphasizing right sensations, shows how large a part 

 consciousness plays in the affairs of the nervous system. This 

 brings us to the frontier of physiology. At this boundary the 

 authority of the physiologist ends. He cannot define conscious- 

 ness ; he cannot investigate it. Yet he naturally asks whether 

 the machine which he is investigating is a machine and nothing 

 more. When the possibilities of reflex action were first recog- 

 nized, thought tended to dethrone feeling and Will in favour of 

 automatism. If the actions of a spinal frog exhibit so distinct 

 a purposive character, why, it was asked, should we assume 

 that the frog with a brain is anything more than a reflex 

 machine ? Light, heat, sound are playing upon its sense- 

 organs ; surely these stimuli suffice to set going all the sensori- 

 motor currents which lead to the various movements which in 

 their totality constitute the frog's behaviour ! And why 

 assign to a mammal a self -directing authority which we deny 

 to a frog ? The increased complexity of its behaviour is more 

 than accounted for by the greater variety of its nervous arcs. 

 All animals, it was argued, including Man, are reflex machines. 

 Their thoughts and actions are the effects of the play upon 

 their nervous systems of forces from the outer world. Each 

 inherits a nervous system of a certain pattern. Its individual 

 development is conditioned by the sensations which pass 

 through it. The sensations are impressed by the environment. 

 Therefore the individual is a puppet, his activities the dance of 

 circumstance. Consciousness is an " epiphenomenon." Few 

 physiologists or students of animal behaviour take this material 

 view of life at the present day. The fact that it leads inevitably 

 to the conclusion that consciousness is an " epiphenomenon " 

 (Huxley's term) is its reductio ad absurdum. It is not in 

 harmony with the economy of Nature that an animal should be 

 endowed with the capacity of feeling pain and pleasure, if such 



