194 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
compartment, but the brighter of any two compartments. It has not 
learnt to select a ‘ particular’ object. It has learnt a ‘relation.’ Surely 
evidence of this kind is contrary to any atomistic localisation of individual 
mental functions in separate cerebral areas. 
Tue RELATION BETWEEN DrrEcTIVE AND MrEcHANICAL ACTIVITY. 
The fundamental purpose of consciousness is to enable the self to 
preserve the organism by guidance and direction,—by the formation and 
satisfaction of ends and values. As in the evolution of living species 
something far more is involved than the mere blind running down-hill of 
a wound-up mechanism, so in the mental and bodily life of each organism 
the physical conceptions of ‘entropy’ and of mechanical energy are in- 
adequate. On the physical side we can form no conception of the mode 
of working, throughout life and mind, of anything resembling Clerk 
Maxwell’s directive ‘demon.’ Physiologically, that is to say physically, 
the brain-worker should need food with a far lower caloric value than he 
actually takes and requires for the successful maintenance of his purely 
mental activities. But in fact? mental work appears to make far greater 
demands on metabolism than it should according to purely physical 
considerations of the expenditure of mechanical energy. 
At present we can form no conception of the nature of the undoubted 
connection between chemical metabolism and direction in the living 
organism—between senility of body and senility of mind, between the 
rise and decay of procreativeness and the rise and decay of the creativeness 
of genius. At present we can form no bridge between mechanical and 
creative, directive activity. We can only say that both activities are 
essential to a conception of the evolution and working of life and mind. 
Mental activity is but the quintessence of the non-mechanical, directive 
activity of life ; and consciousness is but that activity raised to its highest 
power. Even lower-level mental and neural systems, even the activities 
of the lowest living organisms are characterised by unconscious creation, 
direction, guidance and purpose, in varying degrees. But conscious 
creation and direction, the consciousness of acts, is limited to the highest- 
level psycho-neural activity—the self. 
In this address I have suggested that, when the physiological activities 
of the lower-level systems meet with the highest-level activities, they — 
may become manifest as conscious presentations; these highest-level 
activities are, I believe, to be regarded as arising from the supreme 
organisation and distillation of the directive activities of the living 
organism. The acts at this highest mental level constitute the purposeful, 
directive, creative and contemplative self, and are the recipients of 
presentations from lower cortical, and also of feelings from lower, 
primordial, thalamic activity. 
The psychologist’s principle of the conservation of self, which corresponds 
to the biologist’s inevitable principle of the struggle for eaistence, is the 
fundamental function of this conscious activity. Itis as real and important 
8 Cf. ‘A Study in Nutrition.” By E. P. Cathcart and A. M. T. Murray, Medioal 
Research Council’s Special Report, No. 151. H.M. Stationery Office, 1931. 
