posed the name recept, and Prof. Lloyd Morgan the name construct, for the idea of a vaguely abstracted and generalized object-class. A definite abstraction is called an isolate by the latter author. Neither construct nor recept seems to me a felicitous word; but poor as both are, they form a distinct addition to psychology, so I give them here. Would such a word as influent sound better than recept in the following passage from Romanes ?

"Water-fowl adopt a somewhat different mode of alighting upon land, or even upon ice, from that which they adopt when alighting upon water; and those kinds which dive from a height (such as terns and gannets) never do so upon land or upon ice. These facts prove that the animals have one recept answering to a solid surface, and another answering to a fluid. Similarly a man will not dive from a height over hard ground or over ice, nor will he jump into water in the same way as he jumps upon dry land. In other words, like the water-fowl he has two distinct recepts, one of which answers to solid ground, and the other to an unresisting fluid. But unlike the water-fowl he is able to bestow upon each of these recepts a name, and thus to raise them both to the level of concepts. So far as the practical purposes of locomotion are concerned, it is of course immaterial whether or not he thus raises his recepts into concepts; but . . . for many other purposes it is of the highest importance that he is able to do this."*

A certain well-bred retriever of whom I know never bit his birds. But one day having to bring two birds at once, which, though unable to fly, were alive and kicking,' he deliberately gave one a bite which killed it, took the other one still alive to his master, and then returned for the first. It is impossible not to believe that some such abstract thoughts as 'alive-get away-must kill,' . . . etc., passed in rapid succession through this dog's mind, whatever the

*Mental Evolution in Man, p. 74.

sensible imagery may have been with which they were blended. Such practical obedience to the special aspects of things which may be important involves the essence of reasoning. But the characters whose presence impress brutes are very few, being only those which are directly connected with their most instinctive interests. They never extract characters for the mere fun of the thing, as men do. One is tempted to explain this as the result in them of an almost entire absence of such association by similarity as characterizes the human mind. A thing may remind a brute of its full similars, but not of things to which it is but slightly similar; and all that dissociation by varying concomitants, which in man is based so largely on association by similarity, hardly seems to take place at all in the infra-human mind. One total object suggests another total object, and the lower mammals find themselves acting with propriety, they know not why. The great, the fundamental, defect of their minds seems to be the inability of their groups of ideas to break across in unaccustomed places. They are enslaved to routine, to cut-and-dried thinking; and if the most prosaic of human beings could be transported into his dog's soul, he would be appalled at the utter absence of fancy which there reigns. Thoughts would not be found to call up their similars, but only their habitual successors. Sunsets would not suggest heroes' deaths, but supper-time. This is why man is the only metaphysical animal. To wonder why the universe should be as it is presupposes the notion of its being different, and a brute, who never reduces the actual to fluidity by breaking up its literal sequences in his imagination, can never form such a notion. He takes the world simply for granted, and never wonders at it at all

CHAPTER XXIII.

CONSCIOUSNESS AND MOVEMENT.

All consciousness is motor. The reader will not have forgotten, in the jungle of purely inward processes and products through which the last chapters have borne him, that the final result of them all must be some form of bodily activity due to the escape of the central excitement through outgoing nerves. The whole neural organism, it will be remembered, is, physiologically considered, but a machine for converting stimuli into reactions; and the intellectual part of our life is knit up with but the middle or 'central' part of the machine's operations. We now go on to consider the final or emergent operations, the bodily activities, and the forms of consciousness consequent thereupon.

Every impression which impinges on the incoming nerves produces some discharge down the outgoing ones, whether we be aware of it or not. Using sweeping terms and ignoring exceptions, we might say that every possible feeling produces a movement, and that the movement is a movement of the entire organism, and of each and all its parts. What happens patently when an explosion or a flash of lightning startles us, or when we are tickled, happens latently with every sensation which we receive. The only reason why we do not feel the startle or tickle in the case of insignificant sensations is partly its very small amount, partly our obtuseness. Professor Bain many years ago gave the name of the Law of Diffusion to this phenomenon of general discharge, and expressed it thus: "According as an impression is accompanied with Feeling, the aroused currents diffuse themselves over the brain,

leading to a general agitation of the moving organs, as well as affecting the viscera."

There are probably no exceptions to the diffusion of every impression through the nerve-centres. The effect of a new wave through the centres may, however, often be to interfere with processes already going on there; and the outward consequence of such interference may be the checking of bodily activities in process of occurrence. When this happens it probably is like the siphoning of certain channels by currents flowing through others; as when, in walking, we suddenly stand still because a sound, sight, smell, or thought catches our attention. But there are cases of arrest of peripheral activity which depend, not on inhibition of centres, but on stimulation of centres which discharge outgoing currents of an inhibitory sort. Whenever we are startled, for example, our heart momentarily stops or slows its beating, and then palpitates with accelerated speed. The brief arrest is due to an outgoing current down the pneumogastric nerve. This nerve, when stimulated, stops or slows the heartbeats, and this particular effect of startling fails to occur if the nerve be cut.

In general, however, the stimulating effects of a senseimpression proponderate over the inhibiting effects, so that we may roughly say, as we began by saying, that the wave of discharge produces an activity in all parts of the body. The task of tracing out all the effects of any one incoming sensation has not yet been performed by physiologists. Recent years have, however, begun to enlarge our information; and we have now experimental proof that the heartbeats, the arterial pressure, the respiration, the sweatglands, the pupil, the bladder, bowels, and uterus, as well as the voluntary muscles, may have their tone and degree of contraction altered even by the most insignificant sensorial stimuli. In short, a process set up anywhere in the centres reverberates everywhere, and in some way or other affects the organism throughout, making its activities

either greater or less. It is as if the nerve-central mass were like a good conductor charged with electricity, of which the tension cannot be changed at all without changing it everywhere at once.

Herr Schneider has tried to show, by an ingenious zoölogical review, that all the special movements which highly evolved animals make are differentiated from the two originally simple movements of contraction and expansion in which the entire body of simple organisms takes part. The tendency to contract is the source of all the self-protective impulses and reactions which are later developed, including that of flight. The tendency to expand splits up, on the contrary, into the impulses and instincts of an aggressive kind, feeding, fighting, sexual intercourse, etc. I cite this as a sort of evolutionary reason to add to the mechanical a priori reason why there ought to be the diffusive wave which a posteriori instances show to exist.

I shall now proceed to a detailed study of the more important classes of movement consequent upon cerebromental change. They may be enumerated as

1) Expressions of Emotion;

2) Instinctive or Impulsive Performances; and
3) Voluntary Deeds;

and each shall have a chapter to itself.