S. E. MEZES IAN AND OTHEE ANIMALS. 
29 
the man is not responsible for the action. Actions that are not per- 
formed by effort of will, or at least consented to, are as little the man’s 
actions as is the blowing of the wind or the rise of the tide. 
It goes without saying that voluntary actions are controlled perform- 
ances, those subject to the influence of effort. An action is voluntary 
when I can perform it or not, depending only on whether or not I try, 
or put forth effort. The point is simple and familiar, but important to 
bear in mind, for, if the theory to be here advanced is sound, the ap- 
pearance of effort, and its acquisition of effective functional relations, 
determines the transition from animal to man. 
The conclusion aceordingly is that self-consciousness is consciousness 
of actions subject to control, and of such other ps}^chic phenomena as 
have, during the performance of those actions, been organized into a 
functional unity including them. And the hypothesis advanced is that 
the mental difference between man and other animals does not ulti- 
mately consist in the exclusive self-consciousness of the former, but is 
to be at once adequately and more precisely stated as consisting in man’s 
capacity for voluntary action, which is the fact, and not both the fact 
and the consciousness of self. If this hypothesis is- sound, all the labored 
writing to show how animals come to “objectify their ideas,” how in place 
of “seeing two things united,” of otherwise related, they come “to see 
them as united becomes at once unnecessary. All of this “seeing” 
grows up; but it grows up, as will appear presently, in ways quite fa- 
miliar, as a .result of voluntary action and the use of language. The rise 
to the human level does not depend on the turning inwards to ideas of 
the attention, which has before been exclusively engaged with outer ob- 
jects — a change of direction exceedingly difficult to account for except 
by means of some momentous new experience — but it depends on the 
appearance of an entirely novel inner experience, the experience' of the 
feeling of efficient effort, that has far-reaching consequences, and that 
plays beyond question the leading role in human life to-day; it is not 
new knowledge of old facts, but, in the first instance, new experiences 
and power that determines the transition. No animal can perform dif- 
ficult action. With animals impulses and habits have full and uncon- 
trolled sway, and when they conflict the issue is with the stronger ; with 
animals, the recalcitrant matter of muscles and members is not con- 
strained to the more skillful performances counselled by the ideas that 
look before and after. But volition means control and constraint of the 
lower nature in the interest of the ideal plans. Man, by trying, can rule 
his desires and his muscles. If the theory proposed is tenable, for man 
the doing of the difficult, self-mastery, is possible, and therein lies the 
essence of his superiority. 
