in FUNCTION OF MIND AND BRAIN 39 



as the basis of a feeling or a judgment is, in short, the 

 result of an effort of analysis, and analysis is a partial 

 attempt to crystallise what is fluid, or to distinguish and 

 map out what is originally present in consciousness as a 

 whole. Now this process of distinction and systematisa- 

 tion is the basis of all the higher developments of mind. 

 But it is at the same time to be understood that it arises and 

 performs its functions within the sphere of the ' mother- 

 sense, 5 and its business is to replace the unreflective deliver- 

 ance of the mother-sense by an articulate system of thought. 

 In one sense the defined idea is from the first an advance 

 upon the obscurer reactions of the mother-sense. It is 

 more articulate, more rational. It is a necessary step 

 towards the full consciousness of developed mentality. 

 But in its use there lurks from the first a source of fallacy 

 the danger of being guided by a partial and incomplete 

 analysis, a danger which may lead to practical mistakes 

 from which the simple confidence in the untroubled mother- 

 sense might be free. What we can satisfactorily formulate 

 being seldom more than a part of the reasons really influ- 

 encing us may omit something that is essential, and so we 

 get all the errors of the c abstract ' type of mind. Of these 

 we shall have something to say at a later stage. In the 

 study of mental evolution they may best be guarded 

 against by bearing constantly in mind that explicit con- 

 sciousness does not suddenly arise in full definiteness out 

 of the void, but emerges within the sphere of the mother- 

 sense and remains until the highest stage of its growth 

 under the influence of forces which it comprehends imper- 

 fectly or not at all. 



Our argument then has led us to conceive Mind, whether 

 in man or brute, as part of a psycho-physical structure 

 which grows under the conditions of heredity and is modi- 

 fied in each individual by experience. This structure reacts 

 in accordance with the laws of its constitution to that part 

 of the environment with which it comes in contact, in such 

 a way generally as to adapt the actions of the organism 

 to the needs of race-maintenance. The method of adapta- 

 tion in which Mind is specially concerned is the correlation 

 of one experience or one act with others, and we may 



