The External World 249 



tion.i The system of truths about the world is a system 

 which it zvill do to act upon, both when we take it as a 

 whole and when we go into its details. 



Another thing follows, however, — and follows more natu- 

 rally from the second of the two theories mentioned than 

 from the first, — /.t'., that novelty, variety, detail of expe- 

 rience, can be organized in the mental life only in so far 

 as it can be accommodated to by action ; if this cannot 

 take place it must remain a brute and unmeaning shock, 

 however oft repeated the experience of it may be. It itself, 

 considered as a thought-variation, as well as the variations 

 in it, would be as if non-existent — altogether without sig- 

 nificance for the individual's growth in knowledge. The 

 seat of productive variations, of variations, that is, from 

 which selections are possible, must be on the motor side, 

 in the active life.^ Only thus could * internal relations' be 

 established which should be true to or should reproduce 

 ' external relations.' 



The point of contrast noted above between the two the- 

 ories has, however, an additional interest in connection with 

 our present topic : the point that on my theory there is a 

 platform of earlier habitual adjustments from which the 

 variations are always projected. For this transfers the 

 first selective function from the environment to the organ- 



1 I am not sure, however, whether Professor Bain does not here leave Mr. 

 Spencer behind. The latter nowhere, to my knowledge, discusses selection in 

 the sense of mental determination, but his insistence upon the direct action of 

 the environment on an organism would seem to require him to hold that the 

 stimulations compelled the organism to accommodate in this direction or that, 

 the motor selection simply coming in after the fact of determination. 



2 By 'motor' is meant vaso-motor and glandular as well as muscular 

 experiences ; all of these considered as giving a reflex body of organic con- 

 tents which cluster up upon incoming stimulations from the external world. 

 It is all afferent, kinesthetic, in its actual mechanism. 



