122 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. III. No. 56. 



ters the point of view is all important. 

 Darwin was an cecologist, Weismann and 

 the ]N"eo-Darwinians are mostly embryolo- 

 gists and their views are influenced there- 

 by. The real history of evolution, how- 

 ever, the facts apart from any speculation 

 about them, lies in the field of the paleon- 

 tologist, and by him such questions must 

 be settled. 



After rapidly outlining the position of the 

 Neo-Darwinians, the speaker indicated the 

 sort of evidence that had led him to the op- 

 posite view. With regard to consciousness 

 he remarked that the only systems in man 

 that were abreast of evolutionary advance 

 were the nervous system (the physical rep- 

 resentative of consciousness) and the repro- 

 ductive system ; the rest is that of the 

 eocene mammals. The course of evolution 

 has, on the whole, been upward and purpose- 

 ful. For this, physical and chemical forces 

 cannot account, nor can theories of chance 

 variation which make consciousness useless ; 

 consciousness itself has been an active par- 

 ticipant. In the individual — at least in the 

 representative activities of mind — con- 

 sciousness may be conceived to affect the 

 qualitative relations of the physical energy 

 used, though not the quantitative relations. 

 In the presentative activities, on the con- 

 trary, both are physically determined. The 

 control in representative thinking is suflBi- 

 cient to make consciousness a real dynamic 

 agent. 



The next speaker was Prof. Baldwin, of 

 Princeton, who, while concurring in the 

 main with the previous speaker, deprecated 

 the conception of mind as an extraneous 

 something thrust in from without, and ad- 

 vocated the standpoint of monism. 



Prof. Minot, of the Harvard Medical 

 School, spoke for the Neo-Darwinians and 

 embryologists. Admitting the facts that 

 had been advanced by Prof. Cope in favor 

 of the Neo-Lamarckian position, the speaker 

 found himself unable to accept the infer- 



ences drawn from them, and totally unable 

 to conceive how the experiences of the 

 adult can in any way be communicated to 

 the embrj^o, the development of which he 

 was forced to look upon as regulated by 

 purely mechanical causes. With regard to 

 life itself, however, the tendency of present 

 biological thought is away from purely me- 

 chanical views ; living and non-living 

 matter are not the same thing. Conscious- 

 ness is coextensive with life. While it 

 does not break into the stream of physical 

 energy, it selects among the possible trans- 

 formations of that energy and thus has its 

 effect without being itself an}' form of en- 

 ergy. 



Prof. Ladd's position was that of an un- 

 equivocal idealist. He denied that con- 

 sciousness in the world or in the individual 

 could in any way be derived from a com- 

 bination or modification of physical things. 

 The very concepts of physics, energy and 

 the like, can be derived from consciousness 

 alone and have no meaning apart from it. 

 Consciousness plays an active part in the 

 psycho-physical partnership, and the strug- 

 gle for existence is a psychical struggle. 

 He reminded psychologists further that 

 even the physicist's cardinal principle of 

 the conservation of energy is yet far from 

 demonstrated for cerebral action, or even 

 for the action of the simple nerve-muscle 

 machine, and ventured the prediction that 

 that principle would undergo modification 

 at the hands of the physical scientists 

 themselves. 



The question was then thrown open for 

 general discussion, in which Professors Ful- 

 lerton, Hyslop, Strong, Miller and Mills took 

 part ; and the whole was finallj' concluded 

 by brief rejoinders from several of the orig- 

 inal speakers. 



At the afternoon session on Saturday, 

 Prof. Patrick, of the University of Iowa, 

 reported on An Experiment on the Effects of 

 Loss of Sleej). The subject of this experi- 



