56 The Place of Consciousness in Evolution 



Must he not say in substance that the nervous material of 

 these creatures has been * set ' in the creatures' ancestors ? 

 Then why are not all constant functions thus set ? But the 

 question of instinct is touched upon under the next point. 



2. (6 of Cope's table.) ' Habitual movements are de- 

 rived from conscious experience.' This may mean move- 

 ments habitual to the individual or to the species in question. 

 If it refers to the individual it may be true on either doc- 

 trine, provided we once get the child started on the move- 

 ment — a point discussed in other connections.^ If, on the 

 other hand, habitual movements mean movements charac- 

 teristic of species, we raise the question of race habits, best 

 typified in instinct. Agreeing that many race habits arose 

 as conscious functions in the first place, and making that 

 our supposition, again we ask : Can one who believes it 

 still be a Darwinian.? It would appear that he could. 

 The problem set to the Darwinian would not in this case 

 differ from that which he has to solve in accounting for 

 evolution generally ; it would not be altered by the pos- 

 tulate that consciousness is present in the individual. He 

 may say that consciousness is a variation, and what the 

 individual does by it follows from this variation. And 

 then what later generations do through their consciousness 

 is all given with the variations which they constitute on 

 the earlier variations.^ In other words, I do not see that 

 the case is made any harder for the Darwinian by the pos- 

 tulate that consciousness with its nervous correlate is a 

 real factor. 



1 Chap. VII. § 3; Chap. VIII. § 6; Chap. IX. § 2; Chap. XVII. § 5. 



2 This is said by thorough-going preformists (Weismannists). But I think 

 this case is much simplified by the hypothesis of * organic selection ' (devel- 

 oped in the following papers) of which the following paragraphs are a sum- 

 mary statement (notably the lines now italicized). 



