Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/449



CIENCE views the world as an assemblage of objects having mutual relations. In this cosmos of interacting elements certain objects are endowed with mental powers by which they accomplish self-conservation. Just what these objects are and how they attain mental quality is beyond our direct investigation. However, assuming consciousness as a purely biological function, as a mode for securing favorable reactions, we can discuss the probable course of its evolution under the law of self-conservation. Mind, like all other vital function, must originate in some very simple and elementary form as demanded at some critical moment for the preservation of the organism. It is tolerably obvious that this could not be any objective consciousness, any cognitive act, like pure sensation, for this has no immediate value for life. It was not as awareness of object or in any discriminating activity that mind originated, for mere apprehension would not serve the being more than the property of reflection the mirror. The demand of the organism is for that which will accomplish immediate movement to the place of safety. The stone pressed upon by a heavy weight does not react at once to secure itself, but is crushed out of its identity; but the organism reacts at once through pain. It is certainly more consonant with the general law of evolution that mind start thus in pure subjective act rather than in mere objective acts, like bits of presentation or a manifold of sense. We shall now endeavor to elucidate this conception of pure pain as primitive mind, first from the general point of view of the law of self-conservation, and secondly from particular inductive considerations.

It is very difficult to conceive what this bare undifferentiated pain as original conscious act was, it being so foreign to our own mental acts. Our psychoses have a certain connection one with the other, and a connection which is cognized as such, 433