146 Habit and Instinct. 



beings, themselves capable of directing and controlling 

 their own actions. But consciousness as drill-sergeant 

 is dealing with automatic movements or activities, 

 instinctive or random as the case may be, themselves 

 incapable of self-guidance. What the analogy here serves 

 to illustrate is this : that neither drill-sergeant, on the one 

 hand, nor consciousness, on the other, can directly produce 

 the activities which are dealt with. The activities must 

 be given. All that can be done is to stimulate some to 

 increased energy of action, and to check or repress others. 

 And just as the drill-sergeant must vigilantly watch 

 his men, since he is dependent on such observation for 

 information as to the correct performance of their 

 actions, so, too, is consciousness entirely dependent on 

 the information received through the incoming channels 

 of afferent nerves for the data upon which its guidance, 

 through the exercise of augmentation and inhibition, 

 is based. Further, just as the superior officer has 

 to bring into due relation the evolutions which are 

 carried out under the control of subordinates, so does 

 consciousness correlate the data received through many 

 groups of afferent nerves, and co-ordinate a number of 

 varied activities into a more or less definite course of 

 behaviour. It is true that the analogy here again to some 

 extent fails, since the drill-sergeant and his superior 

 officer are separate individuals, while consciousness is 

 continuous, and is drill-sergeant and superior officer rolled 

 into one. But though this continuity of consciousness 

 remains unbroken, we have abundant evidence, in the 

 course of our own experience, that, during the gradual 

 establishment of the supreme conscious control of the 

 bodily activities, the regulation of details of active 

 response is step by step relegated to sub-conscious 

 guidance, which, though constantly in touch with, requires 



