154 ANIMAL LIFE 



organised array are seven or eight only. Indeed, if 

 we extend our researches to the lowest animalcule, 

 we find that in it all the essential responses occur 

 which form the themes of the fugues in higher animals. 

 Sight, taste, touch, smell, balance, temperature, and 

 parental instincts, are distinct although there is no eye, 

 no ear, no tongue, and no specialised organ of any kind. 

 Even the element of choice is not absent, and in the 

 lowliest animal the psyche decides what to eat, what 

 to absorb, when to retire from or advance to light or 

 some counter-attraction. Indeed, we may go further 

 than this and say that plants, and even the lowest 

 plants, possess all the fundamental responses. They 

 respond to light, they perceive odours, they choose 

 what to absorb and what to reject. The}' are sensitive 

 to shock, and even possess sense-organs of a rudi- 

 mentary land. In an organism devoid of a nervous 

 system and without any organs of a specialised cha- 

 racter all the responses are present, and they direct 

 its life. The astounding diversity of animal and plant 

 life, therefore, only gives expression in a thousand ways 

 and with added clearness and fulness to the responses 

 that their most degraded member possesses ; and 

 though writers have ascribed similar ethics to the dust, 

 it is probable that tins fundamental psychical uni- 

 formity of living tilings forms one great character 

 distinguishing them from the not living. 



The reason of this uniformity does not seem hard 

 to find. The essentia] objects and conditions of life 

 are everywhere the same. Maintenance, development, 



