i88i.] Comparative Psychology. 27 
these hypotheses — if we may so call them — throw any light 
upon the phenomena to be dealt with. We may refer to 
“ unconscious cerebration ” the aCtion of the violinist who 
plays a passage of music and at the same time thinks of 
something totally different, but not that of the mason-bee who 
makes and provisions a cell for the offspring she is never to 
see. We know that with the violinist the production of 
every note has been the subject of separate and conscious 
effort, which with increasing practice have become unne- 
cessary. Now in the case of the inseCt the unconscious 
aCtion is supposed not to have grown out of any antecedent 
conscious state. The two phenomena are radically dis- 
tinct. 
On the other hand, Buffon ascribes to the lower animals 
feeling and consciousness, but not memory, whilst Reaumur 
and Condillac — the former an observer, the latter not — 
ascribed their actions to self-conscious purpose, an error 
which we shall estimate the better if we reflect how great a 
part of human conduCt takes place without any knowledge 
of its final purpose. 
But it is not merely animal psychology which is in an un- 
satisfactory state. The science of the human mind has by 
no means reached the position which it ought to have done. 
In each case the cause of this imperfection is the same : 
the failure to recognise the fundamental unity of psychic 
phenomena in man and in beast; the attempt to study faCts 
torn out of connection with the whole to which they belong. 
We shall make solid and satisfactory progress when, and 
only when, we set out with the simplest manifestations of 
feeling and of will in the lowest animals and trace their 
gradual development up to man. It has long been found 
that a philosophic study of the structure of the human body is 
impossible if we repudiategeneral — or, asit is commonly called, 
“ comparative ” — morphology ; it is no less certain that the 
functions of our organs, digestion, assimilation, respiration, 
and the like, form merely a special province of the physiology 
of the whole animal kingdom. With the phenomena of mind 
it is not otherwise. This method of attacking the question 
is equally essential whether the student considers mind as 
an immaterial entity superadded to the body of man and 
beast, or whether with a body of thinkers who, as we must 
confess are increasing, he looks upon it as a function or pro- 
perty of a “ certain chemical compound.” The only in- 
quirers to whom comparative physchology is useless, or 
rather impossible, are those not over-consistent thinkers 
who, whilst regarding man as a spiritual being, pronounce the 
