Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/508

492 of attacking prey at the desired time, thus profiting by the superiority of numbers. The Bodo caudatus is a voracious Flagellate possessed of extraordinary audacity; it combines in troops to attack animalculæ one hundred times as large as itself, as the Colpods for instance, which are veritable giants when placed alongside of the Bodo. Like a horse attacked by a pack of wolves, the Colpod is soon rendered powerless; twenty, thirty, forty Bodos throw themselves upon him, eviscerate him and devour him completely” (p. 60). As a result of his investigations, Binet enumerates the following traits in these microorganisms: (1) the perception of the external object; (2) the choice made between a number of objects; (3) the perception of their position in space; and (4) movements calculated either to approach the body and seize it or to flee from it.

Thus we seem to find psychic phenomena associated with unicellular beings at the very basis of organic life. Lower we cannot go. The doctrine of biogenesis, or origin of living organisms from other living organisms only, which science at present accepts as the only one permitted by known facts, shuts us off from any further pursuit of the subject. We find a sense-of-objects even in proto-organisms. Metazoa are apparently developed from these Protozoa. First they exist in colonies, each individual of which is like every other; then in colonies whose members perform specific functions; finally in correlative organs in which the separate cells have been widely differentiated into bone, muscle, nerve or other tissues, each group specialized to the performance of a single function, the whole federated into an organism whose intricacy is so great and whose components are so numerous that it has been only quite lately discovered that the human body, in common with every animal body, is built up of these living aggregates. But in this highly developed product we do not find evidence that the psychic phenomena of proto-organisms are displayed by all the constituent cells. In the process of specialization