A UTOMA TON- THEOR T. 141 



if it were an absolute end, existing as such in the physical 

 world, a sort of actual should-be, presiding over the animal 

 and judging his reactions, quite apart from the presence of 

 any commenting intelligence outside. We forget that in 

 khe absence of some such superadded commenting intelli- 

 gence (whether it be that of the animal itself, or only ours 

 or Mr. Darwin's), the reactions cannot be properly talked 

 of as ' useful ' or ' hurtful ' at all. Considered merely 

 physically, all that can be said of them is that if they occur 

 in a certain way survival will as a matter of fact prove to be 

 their incidental consequence. The organs themselves, and 

 all the rest of the j)hysical world, will, however, all the time 

 be quite indifferent to this consequence, and would quite as 

 cheerfully, the circumstances changed, compass the animal's 

 destruction. In a word, sur\ival can enter into a purely 

 physiological discussion only as an hypothesis made by an 

 onlooker, about the future. But the moment you bring a 

 consciousness into the midst, survival ceases to be a mere 

 hypothesis. No longer is it, " if survival is to occur, then 

 so and so must brain -and other organs work." It has now 

 become an imperative decree : " Survival shall occur, and 

 therefore organs micst so work ]" Beal ends appear for the 

 first time now upon the world's stage. The conception of 

 consciousness as a purely cognitive form of being, which 

 is the pet way of regarding it in many idealistic schools, 

 modern as well as ancient, is thoroughly anti-psjchologi- 

 cal, as the remainder of this book will show. Every actu- 

 ally existing consciousness seems to itself at any rate to 

 be a fighter for ends, of which many, but for its presence, 

 would not be ends at all. Its powers of cognition are 

 mainly subservient to these ends, discerning which facts 

 further them and which do not. 



Now let consciousness only be what it seems to itself, 

 and it will help an instable brain to compass its proper 

 ends. The movements of the brain per se yield the means 

 of attaining these ends mechanically, but only out of a lot of 

 other ends, if so they may be called, which are not the 

 proper ones of the animal, but often quite ojoposed. The 

 brain is an instrument of possibilities, but of no certainties. 

 But the consciousness, with its own ends present to it, and 



