Evolution of Mind. 257 



and nervous systems, until they laid bare the whole 

 mental machinery. 



The deduction at this stage consequently is, that 

 as a church organ, in pieces, can furnish no music, so 

 a man's mind, in pieces, can furnish no intelligence. 

 As it is the motion in the complete organ which con- 

 stitutes the music, so it is the motion in the complete 

 brain and body which constitutes the intelligence. 



Some simple-minded person might, however, here 

 say that as the organ cannot play itself, and requires 

 the aid of an external agent, the organist, to produce 

 the music, so man's brain needs an external " im- 

 material agent" to produce its consciousness. True 

 enough ; but that agent is not a ghost but our uncon- 

 scious environments, which are incessantly yet uninten- 

 tionally and automatically playing upon our terminal 

 sense organs. Any other agent or cause is conse- 

 quently superfluous. 



From men and the higher animals, physiologists 



and biologists have traced down the mental mechanism 



to the almost structureless protozoon, the microscopic 



unicellular infusorium. Haeckel goes further and 



accords a special delicate "soul" to the minutest 



plant. Below this no biologist descends. Yet if we 



have no fixed definition of " consciousness," and if our 



only reason for ascribing consciousness to low animals 



or plants, is in observing them perform what are 



apparently to us " conscious actions," it follows that 



our actual though unwritten definition of consciousness 



is, the performance of apparently conscious actions. 



R 



