APPENDIX D 221 



the case is often very different. There the inborn is often sharply 

 marked off from the acquired, and we shall find it emphatically 

 true that low animals are infinitely less capable of acquiring 

 mental traits than high animals. Whence, reasoning by analogy, 

 we may, with some confidence, assert that if, as regards mind 

 the statement is true, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, 

 it is probably true also as regards the physical parts. 



Mind, doubtless, owes its origin to movement — to the 

 necessity for co-ordinated movement in the various parts of the 

 complex cell-community which we call a multicellular animal. 

 Neither mind nor nervous tissue, the organ of mind, exists in 

 plants, among which there is little or no movement. So, also, 

 low in the animal scale, as among sponges, in which cells are not 

 co-ordinated to perform movements en masse, there is no mind 

 nor any need for it. Higher in the scale, as among ccelenterates, 

 in which masses of the cells combine to perform macroscopic 

 movements, we begin to find traces of nerve tissue, but as yet 

 there is, so far as we are aware, no mind. All movement 

 apparently is purely reflex. Yet higher in the scale, as among 

 the mollusca in which the increasing complexity of the environ- 

 ment necessitates increasingly complex co-ordinated movements 

 of masses of the cell-community, the nervous mechanism by 

 means of which this co-ordination is carried out becomes still 

 more developed and complex, and mind apparently dawns. So 

 far as we know, consciousness then first appears, and with 

 consciousness the first rudiments of instinct. 



I have elsewhere defined instinct as "the faculty which is 

 concerned in the conscious adaptation of means to ends by 

 virtue of inherited knowledge and ways of thinking and acting." 

 In other words, instinct depends wholly on congenital characters, 

 and not in the least on those which are acquired. This definition 

 of instinct is far different from those which have hitherto found 

 acceptance, but I think, on consideration, it will be found that it 

 more correctly describes what we commonly mean by the term 

 than any other hitherto put forth. By instinctive action do we 

 not mean action which is independent of all previous experience 



