4i 8 MIND IN EVOLUTION CHAP. 



takes two forms. There is a development in organic 

 unity or " organicity," as parts and wholes come to be 

 more and more completely interdependent. And there is 

 increase of scope, as the life or purpose of the organisation 

 becomes more and more comprehensive. The lower 

 phases of this movement are worked out by biological 

 forces. The higher are the work of mind. 



But is this antithesis final and complete ? We oppose 

 the operation of Mind to that of biological forces so far 

 as these are mechanical and, like natural selection, act 

 blindly without regard to results. But in everything 

 living we have seen traces of a principle which is not 

 mechanical, which in its most definite shape we identify 

 with conation. If conation is co-extensive with life, then 

 there is at least the germ of Mind in all life, and this is 

 what differentiates it from the inanimate. When we 

 oppose Mind to biological forces, then we mean those 

 forces taken in abstraction from the element of Mind, 

 without which it would seem nothing actually lives. 

 What part then is played in building up organic unity by 

 Mind in the lower forms of conation on the one side and 

 by mechanism on the other ? This is a question which 

 Biology does not as yet enable us to answer with definite- 

 ness or certainty. In every individual we find a mechanism 

 co-ordinating parts in subservience to the life of the whole. 

 In every individual also we find conation supplementing 

 this mechanism and perfecting it. The relationship is not 

 that of two wholly independent factors. For (a) conation 

 itself depends upon pre-existent structure and stimulus, 

 hunger, for instance, or the sex impulse arising from 

 a physical condition in response to a physical stimulus 

 and issuing in a pre-formed process which, in the lower 

 stages, the conation only modifies in minor detail. 

 () The conation that has done its work affects structure 

 and leaves a modified mechanism behind it, so that the 

 process which has been conscious and conative sinks to 

 the purely mechanical. This latter relation suggested one 

 of the earliest evolutionary theories of instinct, viz., that 

 it arose from the inheritance of habits themselves originally 

 due to intelligence. No one would now maintain this 



