1 62 MIND IN EVOLUTION CHAP. 



objects of appropriate size. In the readjustments discussed 

 in the last chapter, we find these types of reaction changed 

 by experience of results, but they are changed for fresh 

 types, fresh methods of reaction. The mind in that stage 

 acquires new habits, but habits they are still. Thus a 

 child is accustomed to drink from its special mug. 

 Another mug would do quite as well, but there is a 

 domestic storm because the proper mug cannot be found. 

 As long as habit is dominant, we cannot speak of purposive 

 action, action determined by an end, but must still call it 

 adaptive action, action issuing from a structure inherited or 

 acquired in response to a stimulus which calls it forth in 

 all circumstances until the structure is further modified. 

 Where, on the other hand, we have action not based on 

 habit, but on the relation between the thing done and the 

 result of doing it, there we have purpose. In acquired 

 adaptation, though the response produces a result suited to 

 the organism, it is performed, not because the result will 

 follow in this particular case, but, in the last analysis, 

 because similar results have followed in previous cases, and 

 they have fixed the habit. In purposive action, so far as 

 it is purposive, there is no habit fixed, but the response to 

 the surroundings is determined by the effect which it will 

 have in the particular case ; that is to say, by the relation 

 between act and consequence. Hence we do not respond 

 uniformly to similar surroundings, but take into account 

 anything that, though outside the range of perception, is 

 relevant to our object. Thus, I get up and leave the room 

 to fetch a book which I left upstairs, not because anything 

 which I see or feel moves me to rise and walk, but because 

 I wish to get the book ; and I direct my steps to the room 

 where I left it just now, and not to the bookshelf from 

 which I have fetched it a hundred times before. 1 It is 

 clear that purposive action as thus defined will have a 

 much wider range and be capable of much more complex 

 and subtle application to varying circumstances than 

 adaptive action at its best. We have already distinguished 



1 Unless, indeed, in a fit of absence, I relapse into a mechanical mode 

 of action, and then very probably my feet will carry me on the more 

 accustomed path. 



