304 The Animal Mind 



"The Integrative Action of the Nervous System" (68 1, 

 pp. 324 ff.). Sherrington proposes the term "distance 

 receptors" for those receptive organs "which react to 

 objects at a distance," and declares that "the distance 

 receptors contribute most to the uprearing of the cere- 

 brum." The most important significance of the power to 

 act in response to distant objects Sherrington finds to be 

 that it allows an interval for preparatory adjustment, "for 

 preparatory reactive steps which can go far to influence the 

 success of attempts either to obtain actual contact or to 

 avoid actual contact with the object." That these pre- 

 paratory steps may also involve the germ of the memory 

 image is clearly suggested by Sherrington. "We may 

 suppose," he says, "that in the time run through by a 

 course of action focussed upon a final consummatory event, 

 opportunity is given for instinct, with its germ of memory, 

 however rudimentary, and its germ of anticipation, how- 

 ever slight, to evolve under selection that mental extension 

 of the present backward into the past and forward into 

 the future which in the highest animals forms the prerog- 

 ative of more developed mind. Nothing, it would seem, 

 could better insure the course of action taken in that in- 

 terval being the right one than memory and anticipatory 

 forecast" (p. 332). 



Secondly, if memory ideas depend on the anticipation 

 of movements, during the delay between stimulus and 

 full response, an important condition of their variety and 

 free use is the ability of the animal to perform a great variety 

 of movements, and especially of movements other than those 

 of locomotion. Locomotion gets an animal into difficulties 

 and rescues it; movements of locomotion are of the first 

 practical importance. But they have not a great deal 

 of variety. It is not merely a coincidence that the best 



