PSYCHIC GRADATIONS. 131 



and definitions as most other psychological notions — 

 presentation, soul, mind, and so forth. Sometimes 

 will is taken in the widest sense as a cosmic attribute, 

 as in the "World as will and presentation" of 

 Schopenhauer ; sometimes it is taken in its narrowest 

 sense as an anthropological attribute, the exclusive 

 prerogative of man — as Descartes taught, for instance, 

 who considered the brute to be a mere machine, 

 without will or sensation. In the ordinary use of 

 the term, will is derived from the phenomena of 

 voluntary movement, and is thus regarded as a 

 psychic attribute of most animals. But when we 

 examine the will in the light of comparative physio- 

 logy and evolution, we find — as we do in the case 

 of sensation — that it is a universal property of living 

 psychoplasm. The automatic and the reflex move- 

 ments which we observe everywhere, even in the 

 unicellular protists, seem to be the outcome of 

 inclinations which are inseparably connected with 

 the very idea of life. Even in the plants and lowest 

 animals these inclinations, or tropisms, seem to be 

 the joint outcome of the inclinations of all the 

 combined individual cells. 



But when the " tricellular reflex organ " arises 

 (page 117), and a third independent cell — the 

 "psychic," or "ganglionic," cell — is interposed 

 between the sense-cell and the motor-cell, we have 

 an independent elementary organ of will. In the 

 lower animals, however, this will remains unconscious. 

 It is only when consciousness arises in the higher 

 animals, as the subjective mirror of the objective, 

 though internal, processes in the neuroplasm of the 

 psychic cells, that the will reaches that highest stage 

 which likens it in character to the human will, and 



