Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/459

Rh and stormy sea, and is never too late or too early in his arrival. In like manner the female fur seal goes two hundred miles to her feeding grounds in summer, leaving the pup on the shore. After a week or two she returns to find him within a few rods of the rocks where she had left him. Both mother and young know each other by call and by odor, and neither are ever mistaken though ten thousand other pups and other mothers occupy the same rookery. But this is not intelligence. It is simply instinct, because it has no element of choice in it. Whatever its ancestors were forced to do, the fur seal does to perfection. Its instincts are perfect as clockwork, and the necessities of migration must keep them so. But if brought into new conditions it is dazed and stupid. It has no choice among different lines of action.

The Bering Sea Commission once made an experiment on the possibility of separating the young male fur seals from the old ones in the same band. The method was to drive them through a wooden chute or runway with two valvelike doors at the end. These animals can be driven like sheep, but to sort them in this way is impossible. The most experienced males will beat their noses against a closed door, if they have seen one before them pass through it. That this door had been shut, and another beside it opened, passes their comprehension. They can not choose the new direction. In like manner a male fur seal will watch the killing and skinning of his mates with perfect composure. He will sniff at their blood with languid curiosity. "So long as it is not his own it does not matter." That it may be his own in a minute or two it is beyond his power to foresee.

The study of the development of mind in animals and men gives no support to the mediæval idea of the mind as an entity apart from the organ through which it operates.

The "Clavier theory" of the mind, that the ego resides in the brain, playing upon the cells as a musician upon the chords of a piano, finds no warrant in fact. There is no ego except that which arises from the co-ordination of the nerve cells. All consciousness is "colonial consciousness," the product of co-operation. It stands related to the action of individual cells much as the content of a poem with the words or letters composing it. Its existence is a phenomenon of co-operation. The I in man is the expression of the co-working of the processes and impulses of the brain. The brain is made of individual cells, just as England is made of individual men. To say that England wills a certain deed, or owns a certain territory, or thinks a certain thought, is no more a figure of speech than to sav that "I will," "I own," or "I think." The "England" is the expression of union of the individual wills, thoughts, and ownerships of