550 The American Naturalist. [July, 
define positively the qualifications which do enable other or- 
ganisms to survive. Assuming the principle of Natural Selec- 
tion in any case, and saying that, according to it, ifan organism 
do not have the necessary qualifications it will be killed off, 
it still remains in that instance to find what the qualifications 
are which this organism is to have if it is to be kept alive. So 
we may say that the means of survival is always an additional 
question to the negative statement of the operation of natural 
selection. 
This latter question, of course, the theory of variations aims 
to answer. The positive qualifications which the organism 
has arise as congenital variations of a kind which enable the 
organism to cope with the conditions of life. This is the posi- 
tive side of Darwinism, as the principle of Natural Selection is 
the negative side. 
Now it is in relation to the theory of variations, and not in 
relation to that of natural selection, that Organic Selection has 
its main force. Organic Selection presents a new qualification 
of a positive kind which enables the organism to meet its - 
environment and cope with it, while natural selection remains 
exactly what it was, the negative law that if the organism does 
not succeed in living, then it dies, and as such a qualification 
on the part of the organism, Organic Selection presents several 
interesting features. 
1. If we hold, as has been argued above, that the method of 
Organic Selection is always the same (that is, that it has a 
natural method), being always accomplished by a certain 
typical sort of nervous process (i. e., being always neuro-genetic), 
then we may ask whether that form of nervous process—and 
the consciousness which goes with it—may not be a variation 
appearing early in the phylogenetic series. I have argued 
elsewhere (ref. 2, pp. 200 ff. and 208 ff.) that this is the most 
probable view. Organisms that did not have some form of 
selective response to what was beneficial, as opposed to what 
was damaging in the environment, could not have developed 
very far; and as soon as such a variation did appear it would 
have immediate preéminence. So we have to say either that 
selective nervous property, with consciousness, is a variation, 
