Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/494

 480 W. B. BOYCE GIBSON : fact. It is the attempt, as I take it, to pass straight from Physics to Psychology with a blind leap over the facts of Biology. This may be a consistent illustration of the prin- ciple of Least Effort but it is unjust to Psychology. Before any mental process whatsoever can take place the organism must have taken in its necessary nourishment, digested and assimilated it. This assimilation brings with it internal changes of one kind and another which issue frequently in spontaneous movements. Thus the movements of an amoeba, to take the humblest of organisms, take place usually without any external cause, being determined from within by the ceaseless fluctuations of its unstable jelly-like substance. These fluctuations are themselves no doubt excited by the stimulating effect of the food it has taken in, but this is not an argument in favour of M. Ferrero. The apparent dilemma that food becomes nourishment only through the digestive activities of the organism and that these activities are made possible only through the stimulat- ing effects of food, is not for the psychologist to solve. The biological fact is that the spontaneity of the organism and the dependence of this spontaneity on food supply are always found together. M. Ferrero seems, by implication, to ignore the fact that so long as the stimulus is ' external,' it cannot affect the organism in any way, and that the irritability of the organism is needed in order to make the stimulus effective. But this irritability is precisely the sign of the non-inertness of the organism. What is true of the amoeba is true of all organisms. Spontaneous movement and assimilation of food are found everywhere, e.g. in the human foetus, to be inseparable con- comitants. In so far then as life is prior to consciousness, does spontaneous movement precede sensuous perception. The impulse to action, as Hoffding says, 1 ' is given before the consciousness of the actual world and cannot be derived from it '. In a word the purely biological fact of spontaneous movement precedes the psychical fact of sensation. We start our psychical life with inherited tendencies to movement, and these of two kinds ; (1) the definitely co- ordinated congenital activities, usually called instincts, and (2) those random, undifferentiated impulses to movement which, in virtue of a certain inherited organic plasticity, are perhaps the most effective factors in the acquisition of individual experience and skill. Consciousness comes obscurely into being amid the play of inherited instincts and inherited impulses. 1 Outlines of Psychology, p. 310.