Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/507

 494 H. MAUDSLEY: outside him, as it is in the relation of every living thing, is reception of impression and reaction thereto, and thereafter suitable adaptation of reaction to impression in the progres- sive development of structure and function. Variation of impression solicits necessarily a corresponding variation of reaction. In order that such further adaptation may take place in mental development, separate nerve-tracts must come into play, interact fitly with the old ones in new permutations and combinations, and so organise in the end nervous plexuses into definite patterns ; which patterns are then the organised faculties of different functions. While this is taking place while the process of adaptation is going on there is consciousness : when the process is complete, the adaptation perfected, consciousness lapses. Synergy, then sympathy, afterwards synthesis such is the ascending order of events in mental evolution, whether of the indi- vidual or of the kind. 1 The elements of mental being act together, feel together, then think together are purely reflex, then reach sensory consciousness, and lastly become intellectually conscious. Now, inasmuch as they are capable of acting together before consciousness dawns and after it has set, it is plainly not an essential part of the mechanism of the event ; it has the character rather of an accompani- ment of the event a something which appears naturally at a stage of the process of the mental organisation which is taking place, a necessary concomitant of the consolidation of the coincident or rapidly alternating activities. The process of learning a skilful movement by patient practice so well that it becomes instinctive and even uncon- scious, is manifestly then a process of consciousness lapsing into unconsciousness. We are conscious of the process while it is a becoming, unconscious of it when it has become ; conscious of the forming, unconscious of the formed, neurotic pattern. To ascertain exactly the conditions of the learning and the conditions of the learnt must be to ascertain the conditions of consciousness and of unconsciousness. The conditions of learning are, as we have seen, efforts of adapta- tion during which permutations and combinations take place until the fit adaptation is made, the proper neurotic pattern, that is, organised, when non-essential interactions 1 The complex muscles of the stomach, the intestinal tract and other internal viscera notably act together habitually and purposively without consciousness ; it is only when their action is deranged that we become dimly and painfully conscious of them. It is probably the same with the low organic creatures that possess the simplest forms of nervous structure. In both cases we attend, as it were, upon the dawn of consciousness.