THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION 287 



the essential difference between instinctive and in- 

 telligent behaviour ; and it is doubtless the case that 

 reasoned experiments and observations are still too 

 few to enable us to make sound deductions. But it 

 certainly seems as if we ought to think of instinctive 

 actions as having evolved concomitantly with the 

 structure of the organs which effect them : they are 

 those inheritable adaptations of behaviour which are 

 bound up with — are indeed the same things as — inherit- 

 able adaptations of structure. In performing them the 

 instinctively acting animal is doubtless aware of its 

 own activity, but we must think of this awareness as 

 being of much the same nature as our consciousness 

 of the automatic activities of our own bodies — the 

 rhythmic activities of the heart and respiratory organs, 

 or the actions of our arms and legs in walking, for 

 instance. It is knowledge of the inborn ability of the 

 organisms to use an inborn bodily tool. 



In the intelligent action we certainly see something 

 different from this. The organ or organ-system which 

 carries out such an action functions in a manner which 

 is different from that for which it was evolved : the 

 action is the conscious adaptation of the organ for 

 some form of activity new to it, and this acquirement 

 of activity seems to be non-inheritable — at least it is 

 non-inheritable in the sense in which we speak of 

 acquired characters being non-inherited. It is accom- 

 panied, while it is being acquired, by a consciousness 

 which is deliberative, and is different from that aware- 

 ness of its own activity which accompanies the acting 

 of the instinctive animal — the knowledge that it is 

 acting in an effective manner. It does not seem as if 

 the animal in so acting is aware of the relation of the 

 bodily tool to the object on which it is acting. But 

 intelligence seems to imply more than this : it implies 



