Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 60.djvu/476

468 literature or in my own experience. Omne consciens e conscienti is the law of conduct known to the psychologist. It may be retorted that the negative evidence is worth very little, since, e. g., we believe that life evolved from inorganic matter, and yet no one has seen the not-living pass over into the living. I reply that the evidence is at least negative, that is, is not positive; and that, although we have not built up living protoplasm from dead matter, we have at least gone a good way towards it.

There is another point. The automatic actions that take shape in the course of the individual life have upon them the marks of appropriateness, of 'purposive' response to stimulus. They are relatively precise and clean-cut; they subserve some one end, or some set of interrelated ends. Appropriateness and precision are also, notoriously, characteristic of the physiological reflexes. They are similarly characteristic, we are told, of the tropisms and stereotyped reactions of the lowest forms of life, so that these are often spoken of as 'reflexive.' Is not this item of internal evidence worth something? Is it not probable that things which are so much alike have had a similar history? For it must be remembered that, however simple the organism which we are examining, it is still not a primitive organism; its history is, presumably, at least as long as the history of man. Not until we see the organism take shape from its inorganic constituents, and note the first reactions of the living mass, shall we have direct evidence of the nature of primitive movement; but by all analogy, that movement will not be precise and clean-cut, but vague and clumsy, indefinite and irregular. It is surely reasonable to suggest that the two tendencies which we find in ourselves, and which (on the testimony of expressive movements) are also operative in the race—the tendency towards new coordination and progressive adaptation, with consciousness, and towards specialized and stationary adaptation, without consciousness—were present from the very beginning; that the rudimentary organism might, as circumstances dictated, follow either of two paths, the downward path to static adjustment, by reflexes, or the upward path to dynamic adjustment, by conscious and coordinated action; and that in following the first path, it forever lost the power of higher development, while, in following the second, it still retained the power of fixing stably the reactions whose modification was unnecessary. Paramecium would then have lost the faint flicker of mind with which its original ancestor was endowed, and, losing therewith the possibility of coordinated movement, would have remained paramecium. But a primitive organism of like endowment, living under different conditions, and retaining both mind and the correlated physical adaptability, would have become man.

Still the opposing arguments will not down. If consciousness disappears as soon as adjustment to surroundings has become easy, why may it not have appeared as soon as adjustment became difficult? Why