PLAY AND INSTINCT. 67 



" Who can know whether the bird when she builds her 

 nest already has the knowledge that her young will 

 find a warm bed in it? And even as applied to man 

 this criterion is misleading. For example, when a 

 mother suckles her child the action is evidently in- 

 stinctive, though the mother perhaps cherishes the hope 

 that the child may become the support of her old age 

 and the representative of his family, thus knowing per- 

 fectly well not only the immediate end of her action, 

 but also its utmost consequences." On this account 

 Ziegler prefers not to speak of the presence or absence 

 of consciousness of end or object. But it seems to 

 me that the subject has quite a different aspect if we 

 first try to make clear just what is meant by lack of 

 consciousness of end or object. There are two widely 

 different ways of interpreting the expression. First, 

 there is the relativity of the end to be considered, as 

 Schneider has justly remarked in his later work, Der 

 menschliche Wille.* When a beast of prey scents his 

 victim, and creeps toward it with the movement pecul- 

 iar to his kind, this creeping is a means to the end of 

 approaching near enough for a spring. The spring is a 

 means to the end of seizing the animal and slaying it. 

 Rending the prey is a means to the end of eating it, and 

 this in turn serves the end of nutrition, and so on. Only 

 the last and highest end is, as far as we know, not 

 a relative one — namely, the preservation of the species. 

 But under present conditions only reflecting man can 

 be conscious of this end, and even he is scarcely con- 

 scious of it in actual everyday life. There is usually 

 only a relative consciousness of end even in our actions 

 which are not instinctive. When a man buys a new suit 



* Darwin also, in The Origin of Species, p. 328. 



