104 PRODUCTION OF NATIONALITY 



evil in the surroundings, transforming negative 

 tropisms and their memory into what looks like 

 fear, positive tropisms and the memory of them into 

 what looks like pleasure. But they need not be 

 conscious. A sleep-walker starts at an unexpected 

 sound or puts up a hand to ward off a blow. A 

 patient under the influence of laughing-gas may try 

 to push away the dentist's hand or may cry out with 

 a pain that he does not feel. 



To my mind it seems certain that all the qualities 

 in animals that foreshadow human qualities in- 

 stincts, experimental action, experience, memory 

 with its consequences, the competition between 

 immediate stimulus and the registered effects of past 

 stimulus, states of pleasure and pain, all may precede 

 consciousness. The separate cells and tissues of the 

 human body exhibit the phenomena that vitalists 

 claim as indications of consciousness and intelligence, 

 quite as much as the cells and tissues of lower animals 

 and of plants. In our own case we know that these 

 parts of us operate outside the field of our conscious- 

 ness ; they continue their normal behaviour whether 

 we are awake or asleep, and some of them survive 

 our death, by minutes, hours, or days. Consciousness 

 is something apart, different from these phenomena, 

 but transforming them in an astonishing fashion. 

 I am not prepared to say what it is, whether it be 

 more than the coincident presence of many different 

 factors. It may be that our difficulty about con- 

 sciousness is no more than that, being among the 

 trees, we cannot see the wood. But whatever 

 consciousness be, it is no theory, inference, assump- 

 tion, but the centre from which all human thought, 



