PSYCHOLOGY. 



Consciousness and Evolution.— The quotation by Professor 

 Cattell in Science, July 26, of Professor Cope's table (from the Monist, 

 July, 1895) shows that he was equally struck by it with myself. Prof. 

 Cope gives in this table certain positions on points of development, in 

 two contrasted columns, as he conceives them to be held by the two 

 camps of naturalists divided in regard to inheritance into Preformists 

 and the advocates of Epigenesis. The peculiarity of the Epigenesis 

 column is that it includes certain positions regarding consciousness, 

 while the Preformist column has nothing to say about consciousness. 

 Being struck with this I wrote to Professor Cope — the more because 

 the position ascribed to consciousness seemed to be the same, in the 

 main, as that which I myself have recently developed from a psycho- 

 logical point of view in my work on Mmtal Dm 'torment (Macmillan 

 & Co.). I learn from him that the table 1 is not new ; but was pub- 

 lished in the the • annual volume of the Brooklyn Ethical Society in 

 1891 ; ' and the view which it embodies is given in the chapter on 

 « Consciousness in Evolution ; ' in his Origin of the Fittest (Apple- 

 tons, 1887). 



Apart from the questions of novelty in Professor Cope's positions — 

 and that Mr. Cattell and I should both have supposed them so can only 

 show that we had before read hastily ; I myself never looked into 

 Professor Cope's book until now— I wish to point out that the placing 

 of consciousness, as a factor in the evolution process, exclusively in 

 the Epigenesis column, appears quite unjustified. It is not a question, 

 as Mr. Cattell seems to intimate in his note referred to in Science, 

 July 26, of a causal interchange between body and mind. I do not 

 suppose that any naturalist would hold to an injection of energy in any 

 form into the natural processes by consciousness ; though, of course, 

 Professor Cope himself can say whether such a construction is true in 

 his case. The psychologists are, as Mr. Cattell remarks, about done 

 with a view like that. The question at issue when we ask whether con- 

 sciousness has had a part in the evolutionary process is, I think, m to 

 whether we say that the presence of consciousness— say in the shape of 

 sensations of pleasure and pain— with its nervous or organic correlative 

 processes, has been an essential factor in evolution ; and if so, further, 



1 This table is given in the issue of Science for July 26, p. 100. The three 



