ON INSTINCT AND REASON 65 



provision is made or evolved of a rudimentary nervous 

 system which, in addition to taking advantage of the 

 inherent vital facilities provided in the earliest or uni-cellular 

 forms, affords a means of localising and circulating vital 

 energy, which in turn enlarges and intensifies the range of 

 vital action, and increases or widens the field of functional 

 activity. Such a rudimentary nervous system responds 

 spontaneously and automatically to stimuli, natural and 

 nervine, with undeviating precision, a circumstance which 

 lays the foundation of that exactitude which characterises 

 all instinctive action, and that apparently far-seeing ability 

 with which the lowest orders of sympathetically innervated 

 organisms are credited. 



Rising, by natural or sequential stages, higher in the 

 scale of animal life, we continually observe, as we ascend, 

 that this nervous system, the sympathetic, becomes more 

 differentiated from the merely vitalised or living proto- 

 plasm which constitutes the individual cell, and while 

 retaining under its charge, as an elementary part of 

 itself, each and every such cell, it, in virtue of the 

 increase in cell-production, owing to kariokinetic 

 agency, continues its connection with each cell ; as it is 

 added to the community of already existent cells, and as 

 these cells and communities of cells become arranged 

 into an organic whole, or into separate structures, it 

 ultimately establishes itself as the vital agency in the 

 administration of the cellular commonwealth, animated 

 being, or animal organism, and conducts its affairs with 

 the utmost precision and certainty. When this primary 

 and sympathetic nervous system becomes no longer 

 capable of coping with the vital conditions of increasing 

 extent and complexity, an additional nervine agency is 

 evolved, or called to its aid, of a higher order, which 

 enables it completely to cope with the increasingly com- 

 plicated condition of its immediate and more remote 

 environment, and which, in conjunction with itself, enables 

 it to meet and overcome all the difficulties due to its 

 organic limitations as the cellular life nervous system, 

 and which opens the way along which the long evolu 

 tionary process culminates in the production of mte 

 and reasoning man. 



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