1896.] Psychology. 427 



It may very justly be asked; if his view be not true, how then can 

 new movements which are adaptive ever be learned at all ? This is one 

 of the most important questions, in my view, both for biologists and 

 for psychologists ; and my recent work on Mental Development is, in its 

 theoretical portion (chap., Vllff), devoted mainly to it, i. e., the problem 

 of ontogenetic accommodation. I can not go into details here, but it may 

 suffice to say that Spencer (and Bain after him) laid out what seems to 

 me, with certain modifications urged in my book, the only theory which 

 can stand in court. Its main thought is this, that all new movements 

 which are adaptive or " fit " are selected from overproduced movements 

 or movement variations, just as creatures are selected from overproduced 

 variations by the natural selection of those which are fit. This process, 

 as I conceive it, I have called " organic selection," a phrase which em- 

 phasizes the fact that it is the organism which selects from all its over- 

 produced movements those which are adaptive and beneficial. The part 

 which the intelligence plays is "through pleasure, pain, experience, 

 association, etc., to concentrate the energies of movement upon the limb 

 or system of muscles to be used and to hold the adaptive movement, 

 " select " it, when it has once been struck. In the higher forms both 

 the concentration and the selection are felt as acts of attention. 



Such a view extends the application of the general principle of selec- 

 tion through fitness to the act'u iti - o ' tl,, organism. To this problem 

 I have devoted some five years of study and experiment with children, 

 etc, and I am now convinced that this " organic selection " bears much 

 the same relation to the doctrine of special creation of ontogenetic 

 adaptations by consciousness which Prof. Cope is reviving, that the 

 Darwinian theory of natural selection bears to the special creation 

 theory of the phylogenetic adaptations of species. The facts which 

 Spencer called " heightened discharge " are capable of formulation 

 of the principle of " motor excess " : " the accommodation of an 

 organism to a. new stimulation is secured — not by the selection of 

 this stimulation beforehand (nor of the necessary movements)— but by 

 the reinstatement of it by a discharge of the energies of the organism, 

 -concentrated, as far as maybe, for the excessive stimulation of the 

 organs (muscles, etc.), most nearly fitted by former habit to get this 

 stimulation again," 6 in which the word " stimulation " stands for the 

 condition favorable to adaptation. After several trials with grotesquely 

 excessive movements, the child (for example) gets the adaptation aimed 

 at more and more perfectly, and the accompanying excessive and use- 

 6 Mental Development, p. 179. Spencer and Bain hold that the selection is of 

 purely chance adaptations a: 



