66 METAPHYSICS 



This second nervous system is evolved from and 

 produced by the first or sympathetic, or, as we have just 

 termed it, the cellular life nervous system, and it may 

 in turn be called, besides the systemic, the higher animal 

 or ultra-cellular nervous system a nervous system which 

 enables its possessors, by virtue of sense organs and 

 ultimately reason, to appreciate their distant as well as 

 immediate environment, and to more or less intelligently 

 adapt themselves to the requirements of the positions 

 in which they may be placed. At first, or in its earliest 

 stages of evolution or developmental unfolding, it (the 

 ultra-cellular) is to a great extent subordinated to the 

 requirements of the cellular nervous system, and, con- 

 sequently, acts with the almost automatic regularity and 

 exactitude of that system, responding to the ordinary 

 stimuli of external nature, and evincing the faintest be- 

 ginnings of independent and determinable, or purely 

 systemic nervine activity ; hence, any indication of this 

 latter is almost purely instinctive in its character, and 

 limited in extent to the most elementary systemic nervine 

 requirements in the fixed or immobile structural conditions 

 characterising the first examples of the compoundly or 

 dually innervated organism. 



Ascending still higher in the scale, we perceive that 

 systemic nervine conditions gradually increase in com- 

 plexity as the character of the animal form rises in point 

 of organisation, freedom of movement, and independence 

 of existence, and as the real " battle of life " and the 

 "survival of the fittest" come in to direct the formative 

 and developmental processes along the lines of continual 

 improvement and upward progress. The movements 

 evinced by the animal life of this period are necessarily 

 dominated and coloured by the sympathetic nervous 

 system, and therefore limited almost entirely to nervine 

 influence, or the instinctive and non-self-determinant 

 in nature and extent. 



Following up the stream of animal life, we continually 

 enter on new phases of advancement in type of individual 

 organisms as the conditions of life rise in difficulty and 

 complexity, and therefore necessitate the addition of 

 more highly organised and finely working neuro-muscular 



