Page:Philosophical Review Volume 12.djvu/463

No. 4.] for this situation, but it certainly constitutes a serious limitation of the significance for contemporary biology of his formulation of organic selection. The rank and file of biologists insist on attempting to find their real explanations in the physiological series of events where physical causation presumptively holds sole sway. This may indicate a narrow and unphilosophic provincialism of mind on their part, but it is at present the uncontrovertible fact, a fact rendered more conspicuous by an occasional illustrious exception. For example, one learned American biologist has recently said that " consciousness stands in immediate causal relation with physiological processes."

Psychologists have for a long time consciously faced this difficulty, but it does not appear to have taken an important place among the puzzles of biological theory until very recently. It is not to the reviewer's mind at all obvious that the difficulty need be raised, so far as concerns the value of organic selection. Let it be granted that in some way (frankly we do not know just how, Mr. Baldwin nor the rest of us) organisms do make accommodatory movements, which serve to tide them over times of environmental menace, until useful modifications have become firmly established. Let it be also admitted that consciousness is in some manner concerned in these operations. The effort to determine its exact place may well be postponed until "æsthonomic idealism," or some other equally mellifluous 'ism,' is generally accepted as cosmic theory. In the interim we shall be just as far ahead for all essential purposes of scientific theory, and we shall have been spared much needless wrangling. Moreover, even on Mr. Baldwin's own showing, "æsthonomic idealism" does not for a moment exonerate us from the necessity of finding the physiological counterparts of the conscious processes concerned in the selection of adaptive movements.

When one comes to Mr. Baldwin's account of the mode in which pleasure and pain influence the selection of movements, one opens up a more purely psychological question than those previously adverted to, and one which has already been treated in a similar manner in the author's preceding works. The formula baldly stated is this: Pain, depression, cessation of movements; pleasure, expansion, profusion of movements; selection and continuation of useful reactions. To my mind there are probably essential fallacies in this position, despite the wide endorsement among psychologists of several of the premises upon which it rests. In the first place, there is an erroneous estimate of the motor values attaching respectively to pleasure and pain psychoses. Pain is by no means to be described merely in terms of depression and constriction. A view which does this cannot rest upon ordinary