130 Habit and Instinct. 



If completely automatic, it may be either — 



A. Accovipanied by consciousness. 



B. Unaccompanied by consciousness. 



Combining these and stating them in a more convenient 

 form for the purpose of discussion — 



1. The chick may be an altogether unconscious 

 automaton. 



2. It may act under the guidance of consciousness, and 

 not altogether automatically. 



3. It may act automatically, but its automatic response 

 may give rise to consciousness, in the light of which its 

 future action may be guided and controlled. 



Let us assume, to begin with, that the first possibility 

 expresses the facts of the case, and that the chick is, so 

 far as the activity in question is concerned, a completely 

 unconscious automaton. It may be conceded that the first 

 peck can be quite adequately explained on this view ; 

 response following stimulus under conditions which are 

 purely organic and wholly within the sphere of the merely 

 automatic co-ordination of the lower centres. It may, 

 indeed, be urged that it is not reasonable to suppose that 

 the chick pecks at the grain without seeing it, and this 

 implies the presence of consciousness. But, in the first 

 place, we are not in a position to affirm that there is 

 anything more than a physiological stimulus of the retina ; 

 and, in the second place, even if we were, it would still be 

 conceivable that, though the incoming effects of the retinal 

 stimulus give rise to the sight of the grain, the outgoing 

 nerve-currents which call the muscles into co-ordinated 

 activity (and it is this co-ordinated response that con- 

 stitutes the instinctive activity as such) are not only 

 automatic, but unconscious. Indeed, there is much to be 

 said in favour of the view that the outgoing nerve-currents, 

 and the molecular processes in the lower nerve-centres to 



