14-2 PSYCHOLOGY. 



knowing iilso well wliicli possibilities lead thereto and 

 wliicli away, will, if endowed with causal efficacy, reinforce 

 the favorable possibilities and repress the unfavorable or 

 indilierent ones. The nerve-currents, coursing through the 

 cells and fibres, must in this case be supposed strengthened 

 by the fact of their awaking one consciousness and damp- 

 ened b}' awaking another. Hoiu such reaction of the con- 

 sciousness upon the currents may occur must remain at 

 present unsolved : it is enough for my purpose to have 

 shown that it may not uselessly exist, and that the matter 

 is less simple than the brain-automatists hold. 



All the facts of the natural history of consciousness lend 

 color to this view. Consciousness, for example, is only 

 intense when nerve-processes are hesitant. In rapid, 

 automatic, habitual action it sinks to a minimum. Nothing 

 could be more titting than this, if consciousness have the 

 teleological function we suppose ; nothing more meaning- 

 less, if not. Habitual actions are certain, and being in no 

 danger of going astray from their end, need no extraneous 

 help. In hesitant action, there seem many alternative pos- 

 sibilities of final nervous discharge. The feeling awakened 

 by the nascent excitement of each alternative nerve-tract 

 seems by its attractive or repulsive quality to determine 

 whether the excitement shall abort or shall become com- 

 plete. Where indecision is great, as before a dangerous 

 leap, consciousness is agonizingly intense. Feeling, from 

 this point of view, may be likened to a cross-section of the 

 chain of nervous discharge, ascertaining the links already 

 laid down, and groping among the fresh ends presented 

 to it for the one which seems best to lit the case. 



The phenomena of ' vicarious function ' which we studied 

 in Chapter II seem to form another bit of circumstantial 

 evidence. A machine in working order acts fatally in 

 one way. Our consciousness calls this the right way. 

 Take out a valve, throw^ a wheel out of gear or bend a 

 pivot, and it becomes a different machine, acting just as 

 fatally in another way which w^e call the wrong way. But 

 the machine itself knoAvs nothing of wrong or right : matter 

 has no ideals to pursue. A locomotive will carry its train 



