20 BIOLOGY AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 



reflexes, he is not so much within the grip 

 of these agents as a fly is under the dominance 

 of its own reflexes. From the standpoint of 

 his nervous organization he is a much more 

 truly balanced organism than a fly. His acts 

 are not so abundantly purely reflex, but the 

 state of his higher nervous activities suggests 

 not only a condition of balanced reflexes, but 

 v one that might be conceived to have resulted 

 from the disintegration of reflexes. The higher 

 nervous life of man, his intellectual life, seems 



1 built upon two processes, the reception of im- 

 pressions through the sensory mechanism of 

 the body, and the production of voluntary acts. 



\ These two operations represent in a way the 

 two parts of a reflex, and since they are abun- 

 dantly present in the higher nervous activities 

 of the human being in an essentially independ- 

 ent way, it is possible that the phylogenetic 

 beginnings of this form of intelligence may 

 have been associated with a disintegration of 

 reflexes. Certain it is that our sense organs 

 are almost continuously pouring into the cen- 

 tral organ a varied stream of impulses indica- 

 tive of the changes in the outside and yet with- 

 out calling forth any obvious responses in our 

 musculature. In a like manner, our central or- 



