248 Selective Thinking 



the world. The selective process must be one which in 

 some way concerns the active life, for it is only through 

 the life of active muscular exertion that the appropriate- 

 ness of revival processes can be tested. We have here 

 again two alternative views which have been treated in de- 

 tail in the work, Mental Development in the Child and the 

 Race; the one theory, called the 'Spencer-Bain theory,' 

 teaching that all movements showing variation stand on 

 the same footing, and that it is a matter of happy accident 

 as to which of these turns out to be adaptive. Such move- 

 -ments so found out are pleasurable ; others, giving pain, 

 .are anti-adaptational. Through the mechanism of repeti- 

 tion on the one hand, and of inhibition on the other hand, 

 the former are selected and so survive, and with them sur- 

 vive the feelings, thoughts, etc., which they accompany or 

 secure. The other alternative — advocated in the work 

 mentioned — holds that there is a difference in movements 

 from the start, due to the conditions of waxing and waning 

 vitality from which they spring ; pleasure and pain attach 

 respectively to these vital effects of stimulations, and so 

 there is, in each case of a selection of movements, a plat- 

 form or level of earlier vital adaptations from which the 

 new variations are brought to their issue. ^ This latter 

 theory would seem in so far to get support from the fact 

 brought out above, that such a platform of acquired adap- 

 tation — a level of ' systematic determination * — is present 

 in all selective thinking. This view holds also that such 

 adaptive movements it is which, by their synergy or union, 

 give unity and organization to the mental life. 



Apart from this, however, the two theories agree in 

 making the selection a matter of motor accommoda- 



1 Cf. the expositions in Chap, VIII. § 6, and Chap. IX. § 2. 



