Page:Principles of Psychology (1890) v1.djvu/98

78 78 PSYCHOLOGY. sphereless pigeon is iu the highest degree tame, and fears man as little as cat or bird of prey." * Putting together now all the facts and reflections which we have been through, it seems to me that ive can no longer hold strictly to the Meynert scheme. If anywhere, it will apply to the lowest animals ; but in them especially the lower centres seem to have a degree of spontaneity and choice. On the whole, I think that we are driven to sub- stitute for it some such general conception as the following, which allows for zoological differences as we know them, and is vague and elastic enough to receive any number of future discoveries of detail. CONCLtrSION. All the centres, in all animals, whilst they are in one aspect mechanisms, probably are, or at least once were, organs of consciousness in another, although the conscious- ness is doubtless much more developed in the hemispheres than it is anywhere else. The consciousness must every- where prefer some of the sensations which it gets to others ; and if it can remember these in their absence, however dimly, they must be its ends of desire. If, moreover, it can identify in memory any motor discharges which may have led to such ends, and associate the latter with them, then these motor discharges themselves may in turn become desired as means. This is the development of ivill ; and its realization must of course be proportional to the possible complication of the consciousness. Even the spinal cord may possibly have some little power of will in this sense, and of effort towards modified behavior in consequence of new experiences of sensibility, t f Naturally, as Schiff long ago pointed out (Lehrb. d. Muskel-u. Ner- venphysiologie, 1859, p. 213 ff.),tbe 'Riickenmarksseele,' if it now exist, can have no higher sense-consciousness, for its incoming currents are solely from the skin. But it may, in its dim way, both feel, prefer, and desire. See, for the view favorable to the text: G. H. Lewes, The Physiol- ogy of Common Life (1860), chap. ix. Goltz (Nervencentren des Frosches, 1869, pp. 102-130) thinks that the frog's cord has no adaptative power. This may be the case in such experiments as his, because the beheaded frog's
 * Pfltlger's Archiv, vol. 44, p. 230-1.