460 Animal Life and Intelligence, 



simplest expression. It is really more complex. For 

 volition involves an antagonism of motives, one or more 

 prompting to action, one or more prompting to restraint. 

 The organism yields to the strongest prompting, acts or 

 refrains from acting [according as one motive or set of 

 motives or the other motive or set of motives prevails ; in 

 other words, according as the stimuli to action or the in- 

 hibitory stimuli are the more powerful. 



And then we must remember that the perceptual 

 volition of animals becomes in us the conceptual volition 

 of man. An animal can choose, and is probably conscious 

 of choosing. This is its perceptual volition. Man not 

 only chooses, and is conscious of choosing, but can reflect 

 upon his choice ; can see that, under different circumstances, 

 his choice would have been different ; can even fancy that, 

 under the same circumstances (external and internal), his 

 choice might have been different. This is conceptual 

 volition. Just as Spinoza said that desire is appetence 

 with consciousness of self ; so may we say that the volition 

 of contemplative man is the volition of the brute with con- 

 sciousness of self. No animal has consciousness of self; 

 that is to say, no animal can reflect on its own conscious 

 states, and submit them to analysis with the formation of 

 isolates. Self-consciousness involves a conception of self, 

 persistent amid change, and isolable in thought from its 

 states. It involves the isolation in thought of phenomena 

 not isolable in experience. We can think about the self 

 as distinct from its conscious states and the bodily organi- 

 zation ; but they are no more separable in experience than 

 the rose is separable from its colour or its scent. Such 

 isolation is impossible to the brute. An animal is con- 

 scious of itself as suffering, but the consciousness is per- 

 ceptual. There is no separation of the self as an entity 

 distinct from the suffering which is a mere accident thereof ; 

 no conception of a self which may suffer or not suffer, may 

 act or may not act, maybe connected with the body or may 

 sever that connection. Just as there is a vast difference 

 between the perception of an object as here and not there. 



