A UTOMA TON- THEOR T. 1 39 



ence would be tliat it came just because of its efficacy — in 

 other words, its efficacy would be inductively proved. 



Now the study of the phenomena of consciousness which 

 we shall make throughout the rest of this book will show 

 us that consciousness is at all times primarily a selecting 

 agency.* Whether we take it in the lowest sphere of sense, 

 or in the highest of intellection, we find it always doing 

 one thing, choosing one out of several of the materials so 

 presented to its notice, emphasizing and accentuating that 

 and suppressing as far as possible all the rest. The item 

 emphasized is always in close connection with some interest 

 felt by consciousness to be paramount at the time. 



But what are now the defects of the nervous system in 

 those animals whose consciousness seems most highly 

 developed? Chief among them must be instability. The 

 cerebral hemisj)heres are the characteristically ' high ' 

 nerve-centres, and we saw how indeterminate and unfore- 

 seeable their performances were in comparison with those 

 of the basal ganglia and the cord. But this very vague- 

 ness constitutes their advantage. They allow their pos- 

 sessor to adapt his conduct to the minutest alterations in 

 the environing circumstances, any one of which may be 

 for him a sign, suggesting distant motives more powerful 

 than any present solicitations of sense. It seems as if cer- 

 tain mechanical conclusions should be drawn from this 

 state of things. An organ swayed by slight impressions is 

 an organ whose natural state is one of unstable equilibrium. 

 We may imagine the various lines of discharge in the cere- 

 brum to be almost on a par in point of permeability — what 

 discharge a given small impression will produce may be 

 called accidental, in the sense in which we say it is a mat- 

 ter of accident whether a rain-droj) falling on a moun- 

 tain ridge descend the eastern or the western slope. It 

 is in this sense that we may call it a matter of accident 

 whether a child be a boy or a girl. The ovum is so un- 

 stable a body that certain causes too minute for our aj)pre- 

 hension may at a certain moment tip it one way or the 

 other. The natural law of an organ constituted after this 



* See in particular the end of Chapter IX. 



