Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/506

490 answer it in his little book on The Psychic Life of Micro-organisms.

Before we pass on to state some of the results of observation upon these infinitesimal beings, it may be well to point out the difficulties that have arisen from the supposition that living cells are wholly devoid of psychic life. Herbert Spencer, in his synthetic philosophy, has undertaken to unify our knowledge by analytically reducing conscious experience to its lowest terms and then building up synthetically an explanation of this experience. The lowest terms of consciousness he finds in sensation. But he begins his synthesis, not with sensations, as we might naturally expect, but with reflex actions primarily devoid of sensation. This inconsistency has led Siciliani, the Italian anthropologist, in his Psychogénie Moderne, to ask, “Why, after having arrived by the process of analysis at the elementary form of perception, that of difference, do you stop there; while you rise by the process of synthesis from reflex action as a point of departure? Why, in a word, does analytical psychology arrive at a conscious act, however rudimentary, while synthetic psychology starts from an unconscious and automatic activity?” (p. 84). This is a pertinent criticism, which applies equally to Romanes’s endeavor to trace the evolution of psychic phenomena, since he denies them altogether to the lowest beings in the zoölogical series, and marks their appearance, one after another, in the ascending scale of life, in what seems a very arbitrary manner.

The thesis of Binet supplies Spencer and Romanes with a more satisfactory starting-point. Binet maintains “that, in these simplest forms of life (the proto-organisms), we find manifestations of an intelligence which greatly transcends the phenomena of cellular irritability. Even on the very lowest rounds of the ladder of life, psychic manifestations,” he says, “are very much more complex than is believed” (p. 3). The lowest form of protozoön known to us is the Amœba. It appears to be a simple undifferentiated protoplasmic cell. “The following,” says Binet, “is what occurs when the Amœba, in its rampant course, happens to meet a foreign body. In the first place, if