CHAPTER II. The Origin of the Human Soul

THE ORIGIN OF THE HUMAN SOUL

§ 1. Matter and Spirit

We live in an age in which scientific specialization is stressed as the most important means of advancing the interests of human knowledge; and specialism, by reason of its many triumphs, seems to have deserved, in large measure, the prestige which it now enjoys. It has, however, the distinct disadvantage of fostering provincialism and separatism. This lopsided learning of the single track mind is a condition that verges on paranoia, leads to naïve contempt for all knowledge not reducible to its own set of formulæ, and portends, in the near future, a Babel-like confusion of tongues. In fact, the need of a corrective is beginning to be felt in many quarters. This corrective can be none other than the general and synthetic science of philosophy; it is philosophy alone that can furnish a common ground and break down the barriers of exclusiveness which immure the special sciences within the minds of experts.

Scientists readily admit the advantage of philosophy in theory, but in practice their approval is far from being unqualified. A subservient philosophy, which accepts without hesitation all the current dogmas of contemporary science, is one thing, and a critical philosophy venturing to apply the canons of logic to so-called scientific proof is quite another. Philosophy of the latter type is promptly informed that it has no right to any opinion whatever, and that only the scientific specialist is qualified to speak on such subjects. But the disqualification, which is supposed to arise from lack of special knowledge, is just as promptly forgotten, when there is question of philosophy in the rôle of a pliant sycophant, and the works of a Wells or a van Loon are lauded to the skies, despite the glaring examples of scientific inaccuracy and ignorance, in which they abound.

This partiality is sometimes carried to a degree that makes it perfectly preposterous. Thus it is by no means an infrequent thing to find scientists dismissing, as unworthy of a hearing, a philosopher like Hans Driesch, who spent the major portion of his life in biological research, and combined the technical discipline of a scientist with the mental discipline of a logician. The chemist, H. E. Armstrong, for instance, sees in the mere label “philosopher” a sufficient reason for barring his testimony. “Philosophers,” jeers the chemist, with flippant irrelevance, “must go to school and study in the purlieus of experimental science, if they desire to speak with authority on these matters.” (Smithson. Inst. Rpt. for 1912, p. 528.) Such is his comment on Driesch, yet Driesch did nothing at all, if he did not do far more than Armstrong prescribes as a prerequisite for authoritative speaking. In James Harvey Robinson, on the contrary, we have an example of the tendency of scientists to coddle philosophers who assume a docile, deferential, and submissive attitude towards every generalization propounded in the name of natural science. In sheer gratitude for his uncritical acquiescence, his incapacitation as a nonspecialist is considerately overlooked, and he can confess, without the slightest danger of discrediting his own utterances: “I am not ... a biologist or palæontologist. But I have had the privilege of consorting familiarly with some of the very best representatives of those who have devoted their lives to the patient study of the matters involved in this controversy. I think I quite understand their attitude.” (Harper’s Magazine, June, 1922, p. 68.) By his own testimony he is a scientific amateur, but this does not, in the least, prevent him from “speaking with authority” or from being lionized in scientific circles as an evolutionary “defender of the faith.” Clearly, it is the nature of their respective views, and not the possession or absence of technical knowledge, which makes Robinson a favorite, and Driesch a persona non grata, with “the very best representatives” of contemporary science. “Science,” says a writer in the Atlantic Monthly (Oct., 1915), “has turned all philosophy out of doors except that which clings to its skirts; it has thrown contempt on all learning that does not depend upon it; and it has bribed the sketches by giving us immense material comforts.”

Here, however, we are concerned with the fact, rather than the justice, of this discrimination which the scientific world makes between philosopher and philosopher. Certain it is that Robinson has received no end of encomiums from scientists, who apparently lack the literary gifts to expound their own philosophy, and that his claim to represent the views of a large and influential section of the scientific world is, in all probability, entirely correct. It is this manifest approval of scientific men which lends especial interest to the remarks of this scientific dilettante, and we shall quote them as expressing the prevalent scientific view on the origin of man, a view which, with but slight variations, has persisted from the time of Darwin down to the present day.

“The recognition,” says Robinson, “that mankind is a species of animal, is, like other important discoveries, illuminating.” (Science, July 28, 1922, p. 74.) To refer to the recognition of man’s animality as a discovery is a conceit too stupid for mere words to castigate. Surely, there was no need of the profound research or delicate precision of modern science to detect the all too obvious similarity existing between man and beast. Mankind did not have to await the advent of an “enlightened” nineteenth, or twentieth century to be assured of the truth of a commonplace so trite and palpable. Even the “benighted” scholastics of medieval infamy had wit enough to define man as a rational animal. Indeed, it would be a libel on human intelligence to suppose that anyone, in the whole history of human thought, was ever sufficiently fatuous to dispute the patent fact that man is a sentient organism compounded of flesh, blood, bone, and sinew like the brute. The “discovery” that man is a species of animal dates from the year one of human existence, and it is now high time for the novelty of this discovery to be worn off.

Even as a difficulty against human superiority and immortality, the “recognition” is by no means recent. We find it squarely faced in a book of the Old Testament, the entire book being devoted to the solution of the difficulty in question. “I said in my heart concerning the estate of the sons of men ... that they might see they are themselves beasts. For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them; as the one dieth so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that man hath no preeminence above a beast; for all is vanity. All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all return to dust. Who knoweth the spirit of man whether it goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast whether it goeth downward to the earth?” (Ecclesiastes, III: 18-21.) The sacred writer insists that, so far as the body is concerned, man and the brute stand on the same level; but what of the human soul? Is it, he asks, resolvable into matter like the soul of a beast, or is it a supermaterial principle destined, not for time, but for eternity? At the close of the book, the conclusion is reached that the latter alternative is the true solution of the riddle of human nature—“the dust returneth to the earth whence it was, and the spirit returneth to God who gave it.” (Ch. XII, v. 7.)

Centuries, therefore, before the Christian era, this problem was formulated by Ecclesiastes, the Jew, and also, as we shall presently see, by Aristotle, the coryphæus of Greek philosophy. Nay, from time immemorial man, contrasting his aspirations after immortality with the spectacle of corporal death, has appreciated to the full the significance of his own animality. Never was there question of whether man is, or is not, just as thoroughly an animal as any beast, but rather of whether, his animal nature being unhesitatingly conceded, we are not, none the less, forced to recognize in him, over and above this, the existence of a spiritual mind or soul, differentiating him from the brute and constituting him a being unique, despite the unmistakable homologies discernible between bestial organisms and the human body. Everywhere and always mankind as a whole have manifested, by the universal and uniquely human practice of burying the dead, their unswerving and indomitable conviction that man is spirit as well as flesh, an animal, indeed, yet animated by something not present in the animal, namely, a spiritual soul, deathless and indestructible, capable of surviving the decay of the organism and of persisting throughout eternity.

But, if the human mind or soul is spiritual, it is clear that it cannot be a product of organic evolution, any more than it can be a product of parental generation. On the contrary, each and every human soul must be an immediate creation of the Author of Nature, not evolved from the internal potentiality of matter, but infused into matter from without. The human soul is created in organized matter, but not from it. Nor can the Divine action, in this case, be regarded as a supernatural interposition; for it supplements, rather than supersedes, the natural process of reproduction; and, since it is not in matter to produce spirit, a creative act is demanded by the very nature of things.

Evolution is nothing more nor less than a transmutation of matter, and a transmutation of matter cannot terminate in the annihilation of matter and the constitution of non-matter or spirit. If nothing of the terminus a quo persists in the final product, we have substitution, and not transmutation. The evolution of matter, therefore, cannot progress to a point where all materiality is eliminated. Hence, whatever proceeds from matter, either as an emanation or an action, will, of necessity, be material. It should be noted, however, that by material we do not mean corporeal; for material denotes not merely matter itself, but everything that intrinsically depends on matter. The term, therefore, is wider in its sense than corporeal, because it comprises, besides matter, all the properties, energies, and activities of matter. Hence whatever is incapable of existence and activity apart from matter (whether ponderable or imponderable) belongs to the material, as distinguished from the spiritual, order of things. The soul of a brute, for example, is not matter, but it is material, nevertheless, because it is totally dependent on the matter of the organism, apart from which it has neither existence nor activity of its own.

In the constitution of the sentient or animal soul, matter reaches the culmination of its passive evolution. True, its inherent physicochemical forces do not suffice to bring about this consummation, wherewith its internal potentiality is exhausted. Nevertheless, the emergence of an animal soul from matter is conceivable, given an agency competent to educe it from the intrinsic potentiality of matter; for, in the last analysis, the animal soul is simply an internal modification of matter itself. But, if spirit is that which exists, or is, at least, capable of existence, apart from matter, it goes without saying that spirit is neither derivable from, nor resolvable into, matter of any kind. Consequently, it cannot be evolved from matter, but must be produced in matter by creation (i.e. total production). To make the human mind or soul a product of evolution is equivalent to a denial of its spirituality, because it implies that the human soul like that of the brute, is inherent in the potentiality of matter, and is therefore a purely material principle, totally dependent on the matter, of which it is a perfection. Between such a soul and the sentient principle present in the beast, there would be no essential difference of kind, but only an accidental difference of degree; and this is precisely what Darwin and his successors have spared no effort to demonstrate. James Harvey Robinson is refreshingly frank on this subject, and we will therefore let him be spokesman for those who are more reticent:

“It is the extraordinarily illuminating discovery (sic) of man’s animalhood rather than evolution in general that troubles the routine mind. Many are willing to admit that it looks as if life had developed on the earth slowly, in successive stages; this they can regard as a merely curious fact and of no great moment if only man can be defended as an honorable exception. The fact that we have an animal body may also be conceded, but surely man must have a soul and a mind altogether distinct and unique from the very beginning bestowed on him by the Creator and setting him off an immeasurable distance from any mere animal. But whatever may be the religious and poetic significance of this compromise it is becoming less and less tenable as a scientific and historic truth. The facts indicate that man’s mind is quite as clearly of animal extraction as his body.” (Science, July 28, 1922, p. 95—italics his.)

This language has, at least, the merit of being unambiguous, and leaves us in no uncertainty as to where the writer stands. It discloses, likewise, the animus which motivates his peculiar interest in transformistic theories. If evolution were incapable of being exploited in behalf of materialistic philosophy, Mr. Robinson, we may be sure, would soon lose interest in the theory, and would once more align himself with the company, which he has so inappropriately deserted, namely, “the routine minds” that regard evolution “as a merely curious fact of no great moment.” Be that as it may, his final appeal is to the “facts,” and it is to the facts, accordingly, that we shall go; but they will not be the irrelevant “facts” of anatomy, physiology, and palæontology. Sciences such as these confine their attention to the external manifestations of human life, and can tell us nothing of man’s inner consciousness. It does not, therefore, devolve upon them to pronounce final judgment upon the origin of man. For that which is the distinguishing characteristic of man is not his animal nature, that he shares in common with the brute, but his rational nature, which alone differentiates him from “a beast that wants discourse of reason.” We cannot settle the question as to whether or not man’s mind is “of animal extraction” by comparing his body with the bodies of irrational vertebrates. To institute the requisite comparison between the rational mentality of man and the purely sentient consciousness of irrational animals falls within the exclusive competence of psychology, which studies the internal manifestations of life as they are presented to the intuition of consciousness, rather than biology, which studies life according to such of its manifestations as are perceptible to the external senses. Hence it is within the domain of psychology alone, that man can be studied on his distinctively human, or rational, side, and it is to this science, accordingly, that we must turn in our search for facts that are germane to the problem of the origin of man and the genesis of the human mind. How little, indeed, does he know of human nature, whose knowledge of it is confined to man’s insignificant anatomy and biology, and who knows nothing of the triumphs of human genius in literature, art, science, architecture, music, and a thousand other fields! Psychology alone can evaluate these marvels, and no other science can be of like assistance in solving the problem of whether man is, or is not, unique among all his fellows of the animal kingdom.

§ 2. The Science of the Soul

As a distinct science, psychology owes its origin to Aristotle, whose “Peri Psyches” is, in all probability, the first formal treatise on the subject. Through his father, Nichomachus, who was court physician to Philip of Macedon, he became acquainted, at an early age, with biological lore in the form of such medical botany, anatomy, and physiology as were commonly known in prescientific days. Subsequently, his celebrated pupil, Alexander the Great, placed at his disposal a vast library, together with extensive opportunities for biological research. This enabled the philosopher to criticize and summarize the observations and speculations of his predecessors in the field, and to improve upon them by means of personal reflection and research. In writing his psychology, he was naturally forced to proceed on the basis of the facts discoverable by internal experience (introspection) and unaided external observation. Of such facts as are only accessible by means of instrumentation and systematic experimentation, he could, of course, know nothing, since their exploration awaited the advent of modern mechanical and optical inventions. But the factual foundation of his treatise, though not extensive, was solid, so far as it went, and his selection, analysis, and evaluation of the materials at hand was so accurate and judicious, that the broad outlines of his system have been vindicated by the test of time, and all the results of modern experimental research fit, with surprising facility, into the framework of his generalizations, revision being nowhere necessary save in nonessentials and minor details. Wilhelm Wundt, the Father of Experimental Psychology, pays him the following tribute: “The results of my labors do not square with the materialistic hypothesis, nor do they with the dualism of Plato or Descartes. It is only the animism of Aristotle which, by combining psychology with biology, results as a plausible metaphysical conclusion from Experimental Psychology.” (“Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie,” 4te Auflage, II, C. 23, S. 633.)

Literally translated, the title of Aristotle’s work signifies a treatise concerning the soul. It set a precedent for the scholastic doctors of the thirteenth century, and de anima became with them a technical designation for all works dealing with this theme. In the sixteenth century the selfsame usage was embalmed in the Greek term psychology, which was coined with a view to rendering the elliptic Latin title by means of a single word. Melanchthon is credited with having originated the term, which, in its original use as well as its etymology, denoted a science of the psyche or soul.

Towards the close of the seventeenth century, however, the meaning of the term in question began to undergo a marvelous evolution, of which the end is not yet. The process was initiated by Descartes, under whose auspices psychology was changed from a science of the soul into a science of the mind. Then, under the influence of Hume and Kant, the noumenal mind disappeared, leaving only phenomenal consciousness. Recently, with the advent of Watson, even consciousness itself has been discarded and psychology has become a science of behavior. And here, for the time being, at any rate, the process has come to a stop, just one step short of complete nihilism. Woodworth quotes the following waggish comment: “First psychology lost its soul, then it lost its mind, then it lost consciousness; it still has behavior of a kind.” (“Psychology, the Science of Mental Life,” p. 2, footnote.) This gradual degeneration of psychology from animism into behaviorism is one of the greatest ironies in the history of human thought. All of this, however, was latent in the corrosive Cartesian principle of “scientific doubt.” Facilis descensus Averni! It is easy to question the validity of this or that kind of human knowledge, but difficult to arrest, or even foresee, the consequences which the remorseless logic of scepticism portends.

Disintegration set in, as has been said, when Descartes substituted his psychophysical dualism of mind and matter for Aristotle’s hylomorphic dualism of soul and body. The French philosopher, in an appendix to his “Meditations,” which dates from 1670, expressly rejects the Aristotelian term of soul or psyche, and announces his preference for mind or spirit, in the following words: “The substance in which thought immediately resides is here called mind (mens, esprit). I here speak, however, of mens (mind) rather than anima (soul), for the latter is equivocal, being frequently applied to denote what is material” (“Reply to the Second Objections,” p. 86). Henceforth psychology ceased to be a science of the soul, and became, instead, a science of the mind.

Descartes, one must bear in mind, divided the universe into two great realms of being, namely: the conscious and the unconscious, the psychic world of mind and the physical world of matter, unextended substance which thinks and extended substance which moves. In man these two substantial principles were conceived as being united by the tenuous link of mere contact, the spirit or mind remaining separate from, and unmingled with, its material partner, the body. The main trouble with this dualism is that it draws the line of demarcation at the wrong place. Reason and sense-consciousness are bracketed together above the line as being equally spiritual; physiological processes and processes purely physicochemical are coupled below the line as being equally mechanical. Now, when a brain-function such as sense-perception is introduced, like another Trojan Horse, into the citadel of spiritualism, it is a comparatively easy task for materialism to storm and sack that citadel by demonstrating with a thousand neuro-physiological facts that all sensory functions are rigidly correlated with neurological processes, that they are, in short, functions of the nervous system, and therefore purely material in nature. On the other hand, once we retreat from the trench of distinction between the processes of unconscious or vegetative life and the physicochemical processes of the inorganic world, that moment we have lost the strategic position in the conflict with mechanism, and nothing avails to stay its triumphant onrush. Hence, from first to last, it is perfectly clear that the treacherous psychophysical dualism of Descartes has done far more harm to the cause of spiritualism than all the assaults of materialism. There is a Latin maxim which says: Extrema sese tangunt—“Extremes come in contact with each other.” The ultraspiritualism of Descartes by confounding spiritual, with organic consciousness, leads by the most direct route to the opposite extreme of crass materialism.

Aristotle’s dualism of matter and form, which is but a physical application of his transcendental dualism of potency (dynamis) and act (entelechy), is very different from the Cartesian dualism of the physical and the psychic. According to the Aristotelian view, as we have seen in the last chapter, all the physical entities or substantial units of nature (both living and inorganic) are fundamentally dual in their essence, each consisting of a definitive principle called entelechy and a plastic principle called matter. Entelechy is the integrating determinant, the source of the unit’s coherence and of its differentiation from units of another type. Matter is the determinable and quantifying factor, in virtue of which the unit is potentially-multiple and endowed with mass. In the electro-chemical reactions of non-living substances (synthesis, analysis, and transmutation), entelechy is the variant and matter is the constant; in the metabolic activities of living substances (assimilation and dissimilation), matter is the variant and entelechy is the constant. This persistent entelechy of the living unit or organism is what Aristotle terms the psyche or soul. The latter, therefore, may be defined as the vital principle or primary source of life in the organism.

But in using such terms as “soul” and “vital principle” we are employing expressions against which not merely rabid mechanists, but many conservative biologists as well, see fit to protest. The opposition of the latter, however, is found on closer scrutiny to be nominal rather than real. It is the name which offends; they have no objection to the thing signified. Wilson, to cite a pertinent example, rejects as meaningless all such terms as “vital principle,” “soul,” etc. “They are words,” he avers, “that have been written into certain spaces that are otherwise blank in our record of knowledge, and as far as I can see no more than this.” (“Biology,” p. 23, 1908.) Yet he himself affirms again and again the existence of the reality which these terms (understood in their Aristotelian sense) denote. In discussing the relation of the tissue cell to the multicellular body, for instance, he speaks of “a formative power pervading the growing mass as a whole.” (“The Cell,” 2nd ed., p. 59), and, in his recent lecture on the “Physical Basis of Life,” he makes allusion to “the integrating and unifying principle in the vital processes.” (Science, March 9, 1923, p. 284.) It would seem, therefore, that Wilson’s aversion to such terms as soul and vital principle is based on the dynamic sense assigned to them by the neo-vitalists, who, as we have seen, regard the vital principle as a force sui generis or a unique agent, which operates intrusively among physicochemical factors in the rôle of an active or efficient cause of vital functions. That such is really the case, appears from his rhetorical question: “Shall we then join hands with the neo-vitalists in referring the unifying and regulatory principle to the operation of an unknown power, a directive force, an archæus, an entelechy or a soul?” (Loc. cit., p. 285—italics mine.) The objection, however, does not apply to these terms used in their Aristotelian sense. In the philosophy of the Stagirite, the soul, like all other entelechies, is a cause in the entitive, but not in the dynamic, order of things. Its efficacy is formal, not efficient. It is not an agent, but a specifying type. The organism must be integrated, specified, and existent before it can operate, and hence its integration and specification by the soul is prior to all vital activity. The soul is a constituent of being and not an immediate principle of action. The soul is not even an entity (in the sense of a complete and separate being), but rather an incomplete entity or constituent of an entity. It takes a complete entity to be an agent, and the soul or vital entelechy is not an independent existent, which is somehow inserted into the organism, but an incomplete being which has no existence of its own, but only coexistence, in the composite that it forms with the organism. Nor is there any such thing as a special vital force resident in the organism. The executive factors in all vital operations of the organic order are the physicochemical energies, which are native to matter in general. These forces, as we have seen, receive a reflexive orientation and are elevated to a higher plane of efficiency by reason of their association with an entelechy superior to the binding and type-determining principles present in inorganic units, but they are not supplanted or superseded by a new executive force. Wilson’s fear, therefore, that the experimental analysis of life is discouraged by vitalism, inasmuch as this conception subtracts something from the efficiency of the physicochemical forces, is groundless in the case of hylomorphic vitalism, but is well-founded in the case of such systems as the neo-vitalism of Driesch and the spiritualism of Descartes.

Summing up, therefore, we may say that the soul, like other entelechies, is consubstantial with its material substrate, the body. True it is more autonomous than are the inflexible entelechies of inorganic nature, inasmuch as it is independent of any given atom, molecule, or cell in the organic aggregate. Such a degree of freedom, for example, is not possessed by the most complex molecules, which show no other flexibility than tautomerism, even this small readjustment involving a change in their specificity. But this autonomy does not preclude the essential dependence of the soul upon the body. Generally speaking, the soul is incapable of existence apart from its total substrate, the organism. We say, generally speaking, because, as previously intimated, an exception must be made in the case of the human soul, which, being, as we shall see, a self-subsistent and spiritual entelechy, is by itself, apart from its material substrate, a sufficient subject of existence, and is therefore capable of surviving the dissolution of its complementary principle, the organism. Nevertheless, even in man, the soul forms one substance with the organism, and the organism participates as a coëfficient factor in all his vital functions, both physiological and psychic, excluding only the superorganic or spiritual functions of rational thought and volition, whose agent and recipient is the soul alone. In man, then, soul and body unite to form a single substance, a single nature, and a single person. Apart from the body, the human soul is, indeed, a complete entity, in the sense that it is capable of subsistence (independent existence), but, in another sense, it is not a complete entity, because apart from the body it cannot constitute a complete nature or complete personality. It is this essential incompleteness of the discarnate human soul that forms the natural basis of the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection of the Dead.

Here, however, it is important to note the difference between the hylomorphic spiritualism of Aristotle and the psychophysical spiritualism of Descartes. By the latter all conscious or physic functions are regarded as spiritual. The former, however, recognizes the fundamental difference which exists between the lower or animal, and the higher or rational functions of our conscious life. Sense-perception and sensual emotion belong to the former class, and must be regarded as organic functions, whose agent and subject is neither the soul alone nor the organism alone, but the soul-informed organism or substantial composite of body and soul. Rational thinking and willing, on the contrary, are classified as superorganic or spiritual functions, inasmuch as they exclude the coägency of the organism and have the soul alone for their active cause and receptive subject.

The soul, in fine, is the formal principle or primary source of the threefold life in man, namely, the metabolic life, which man shares with plants, the sentient life, which he shares with animals, and the rational life, which is uniquely human. The human soul is often spoken of as the mind. In their dictionary sense, both terms denote one and the same reality, namely, the human entelechy or vital principle in man, but the connotation of these terms is different. The term soul signifies the vital principle in so far as it is the primary source of every kind of life in man, that is, vegetative, sentient, and rational. The term mind, however, connoting conscious rather than unconscious life, signifies the vital principle in so far as it is the root and ground of our conscious life (both sentient and rational). Here, however, the distinction is of no great moment, and the terms may be regarded as synonymous. The definitions which we have given are, of course, blasphemous in the ears of our modern neo-Kantian phenomenalists, whose preference is for a functional, rather than a substantial, mind or soul; but we will pay our respects to them later.

It is clear, however, from what has been said, that, for evidences of the superiority and spirituality of the human soul, we must recur, not to the external manifestations of our nutritive life, but to the internal manifestations of our conscious life. The latter are wholly inaccessible to the external senses and perceptible only to the intuition of consciousness, introspection, or internal experience, as it is variously called. All our self-knowledge rests on the basis of introspection, and without it the science of psychology would be impossible. In fact, not only psychology, but the physical sciences as well, depend for their validity on the testimony of consciousness; for the external world is only knowable to the extent that it enters the domain of our consciousness. Recently, as we have seen, a tendency to discredit internal experience has arisen among materialistic extremists. This “tendency,” to quote the words of Keyser, “most notably represented by the behaviorist school of psychologists (like Professor Watson, for example), is manifest in the distrust of introspections as a means of knowledge of mental phenomena and in the growing dependence of psychology upon external observation of animal and human behavior and upon physiological experiment, as if matter were regarded ‘as something much more solid and indubitable than mind’ (Bertrand Russell).”—C. J. Keyser, Science, Nov. 25, 1921, p. 520. Since, however, all our knowledge depends on the validity of consciousness, such a tendency is suicidal and destructive of all science, whether physical or psychological. The attempts, therefore, of mechanists, like Loeb, and behaviorists, like Watson, to dispense with consciousness overreach themselves. For how can the mechanists know that there are such things as tropisms, tactisms, or reaction-systems, how can the behaviorist study such things as “situations,” “adjustments,” and S-R-bonds, how can the materialist become aware of the existence of molecules and atoms, except through the medium of their own conscious or psychic states? States of matter can be known only by means of states of mind, and the former, therefore, cannot be any more real than the latter. “What, after all,” asks Cardinal Mercier, “is a fact of nature if the mind has not seized, examined, and assimilated it? True, the information of consciousness is often precarious. For this reason we do well to aid and control it by scientific apparatus. These apparatus, however, can only aid, never supplant, introspection. The telescope does not replace the eye, but extends its vision.” (“Relation of Exp. Psych. to Philosophy,” pp. 40, 41—Trans. of Wirth.)

§ 3. The Nature of the Human Soul

Now our inner consciousness bears unmistakable witness to the existence within us of an abiding subject of our thoughts, feelings, and desires. In biology, the soul is revealed to us as a binding-principle, that obstructs dissolution of the organism, and a persistent type that maintains its identity amid an incessant flux of matter and flow of energy. Clearer still is testimony of introspective psychology, which reveals all our psychic activities and states as successive modifications of this permanent “I,” “self,” “personality,” or “mind,” according as we choose to express it. Human language proves this most forcibly; for the intramental facts and data of our conscious life simply cannot be so much as intelligibly expressed, much less, defined, or differentiated from the extramental facts of the physical world, without using terms that include a reference to this selfsame persistent subject of thought, feeling, and volition. Even inveterate phenomenalists, like Wundt, James, and Titchener, are obliged to submit to this inexorable linguistic law, in common with their unscientific brethren, the generality of mankind, although they do so only after futile attempts at a “scientific revision” of grammar, and with much grumbling over the “barbarous conceptions” of the gross-headed aborigines who invented human language. Be that as it may, no formulation of mental facts is possible except in terms that either denote or connote this permanent source and ground of human thought and feeling, as is apparent, for example, from such phrases as: “I think,” “I wish,” “I hear”; “mental states” (i. e. of the mind); psychic functions (i. e. of the psyche); subjective idealism (i. e. of the subject); a conscious act (from con-scire: “to know along with,” because in conscious acts the subject is known along with the object). The phenomenalists occasionally succeed, in their “most precise” passages, in omitting to mention the person, knower, or thinker behind thought, but they do so only at the cost of substituting personal pronouns, and of thus bringing back through the window what they have just ejected by way of the door. Our consciousness, therefore, makes us invincibly aware of the existence of a superficially variable, but radically unchangeable, subject of our mental life. It does not, however, tell us anything concerning the nature of this primary ground of thought, whether, for example, it is identical with the cerebral cortex, or something distinct therefrom, whether it is phenomenal or substantial, dynamic or entitive, spiritual or material. To decide these questions the unanalyzed factual data of internal experience do not suffice, but they do suffice to establish the reality of the ego or subject of thought. Later we shall see that the analysis of these data, when taken in conjunction with other facts, forces us to predicate of the soul such attributes as substantiality, simplicity, and spirituality, but here they are cited solely for their factual force and not for their logical implications.

The phenomenalistic schools of Interactionism and Psychophysical Parallelism deny the substantiality of the soul, and seek to resolve it into sourceless and subjectless processes. A phenomenal mind or soul, however, could not be the primary ground of mental life, for the simple reason that phenomena presuppose a supporting medium (otherwise they would be self-maintaining, and therefore, substantial). Now that which presupposes cannot be a primary principle, but only a secondary, or tertiary principle. Consequently, a functional mind could not be the primary and irreducible ground of mental life, but only that of which it is a function, whether that something is a material, or a spiritual substance. For the present, we are not interested in the nature of this ultimate substrate, we are content with the fact that it really exists. Phenomenalists (like Wundt, Paulsen, and James) are very inconsistent when they admit material molecules as the extended substrate of extramental or physical phenomena, while denying the existence of the mind or ego as the inextended substrate of intramental or psychic phenomena. All substance, whether material or spiritual, is inaccessible to the senses. Even material substrates are manifested only by their phenomena, being in themselves supersensible and “metaphysical.” If, then, the human understanding is inerrant in ascribing a material substrate to extramental phenomena, then it is equally inerrant in attributing to intramental phenomena the intimate substrate called mind, whether this substrate be a spiritual substance, or a material substance like the substrate of physical phenomena and that of organic life. As a matter of fact, the Psychophysical Parallelists actually do reduce mental phenomena to a material substrate (viz. the cerebral cortex). Their phenomenalism, which we will refute presently, is but a disingenuous attempt to gloss over their fundamental materialism. At all events, they are willing to admit an ultimate substantial ground of thought and volition, provided it is not claimed that this substrate is of a spiritual nature. The bare existence of some substrate, however, is all that we assert, for the present.

Before leaving this topic, we wish to call attention to the fact that the subject of thought and desire is active as well as passive. Mind, in other words, is not merely a persistent medium wherein passive mental states are maintained, but an active and synthetic principle as well. Mental processes, like those of judgment, reasoning, and recognition, require a unitary and unifying principle, which actively examines and compares our impressions and thoughts, in order to discern their relations to one another and to itself. Materialistic psychology, in spite of the plain testimony of consciousness, is all for ignoring the mind in its active rôle as the percipient of the identities and discrepancies of thought, and for regarding mind as a mere complex of mental states or transient flux of fleeting imagery. It is well, then, to bear in mind the indubitable facts of internal experience, to which Cardinal Mercier calls attention. “English psychology,” he observes, “had attempted a kind of anatomy of consciousness. It made all consist in passive sensations or impressions. These impressions came together, fused, dissociated under the guidance of certain laws, principally those of similarity and dissimilarity. The whole process was entirely passive without the intervention of any active subject. It was psychology without a soul. Now that things are being examined a little more closely, psychologists find that there are a lot of conscious states that are without the slightest doubt active on the part of the subject. There are a number of mental states upon which the subject brings his attention to bear, and attention (from ad-tendere) means activity. Ordinarily we do not know the intensity of a sensation without comparing it with another preceding one. This work of comparison, or, as the English call it, discrimination, is necessarily activity. The Associationists had confounded the fact of coëxistence with the perception of similarity or dissimilarity. Supposing even that the coëxistence of two mental states were entirely passive, it still remains true that the notion of their similarity or dissimilarity requires an act of perception. It is absolutely impossible to conceive psychical life without an active subject which perceives itself as living, notes the impressions it receives, compares its acts, associates and dissociates them; in a word, there can be no psychology without a perceiving subject which psychologists call esprit, or with the English, ‘mind.’” (Op. cit., pp. 52-54—italics his.)

The conflict between phenomenalism and the clear testimony of consciousness is summed up in the following words of T. Fontaine: “If all things are phenomena, then we ourselves can be nothing more than events unknown to one another; in order, then, that such events may appear to us united, so that we may be able to declare their succession within us, it is necessary that something else besides them should exist; and this something else, this link that binds them together, this principle that is conscious of their succession, can be nothing else than a non-event or non-phenomenon, namely, a substance, an ego substantially distinct from sensations.” (“La sensation et la pensée,” p. 23.)

For the phenomenalists, mind is but a collective term for the phenomenal series of our transitory thoughts and feelings. With Wundt, they discard the substantial or entitive soul for a dynamic or functional one, “die aktuelle Seele.” (Cf. Grundz. der Phys. Psych., ed. 5th, III, p. 758 et seq.) Thought antecedes itself by becoming its own thinker; for Titchener tells us: “The passing thought would seem to be the thinker.” (“Pr. of Psych.,” I, p. 342.) We do not think, but thought thinks; John does not walk, but walking walks; aeroplanes do not fly, but flight flies; air does not vibrate, but vibration vibrates. The phenomenalist objectivates his subjective abstractions, divorces processes from their agents, and substantializes phenomena. The source of his error is a confusion of the ideal, with the real, order of things. Because it is possible for us to consider a thought apart from any determinate thinker, by means of a mental abstraction, he very falsely concludes that it is possible for a thought to exist without a concrete thinker. It would be obviously absurd to suppose that the so-called Grignard reaction could occur without definite reactants, merely because we can think of it without specifying any particular kind of alkyl halide; it would be preposterous to infer, from the fact that vibration can be considered independently of any concrete medium such as air, water, or ether, that therefore a pure vibration can exist without any vibrating medium; and it is equally absurd to project an abstraction like subjectless thought into the realm of existent reality. Abstractions are ideal entities of the mind; they can have no real existence outside the domain of thought. Hence to assign a real or extralogical existence to actions, modalities, and properties, in isolation from the concrete subjects, to which they belong, is a procedure that is not legitimate in any other world than Alice’s Wonderland, where, we are told, the Cheshire Cat left behind his notorious grin long after his benign countenance had faded from view. His faceless grin is a fitting comment on the neo-Kantian folly of those who, as L. Chiesa says, “speak of phenomena without substance, of sensations without subject, of thoughts without the Ego, to which they belong, imitating in this way the poets, who personify honor, virtue, beauty, etc. Now all this proceeds exclusively from a confusion of the subjective abstraction with the reality, and from the assumption that the phenomenon, for example, exists without substance, because we are able (by means of abstraction) to consider the former independently of the latter.” (“La Base del Realismo,” p. 39.) In other words, the mind is capable of separating (representatively, of course, and not physically) its own phenomena from itself, but this is no warrant for transferring the abstractions thus formed from the ideal, to the real, order of things.

So much for the soul’s substantiality, but it is a simple, as well as a substantial, principle, that is to say, it is inextended, uncompounded, incorporeal, and not dispersed into quantitative parts or particles. In other words, it is not a composite of constituent elements or complex of integral parts, but something really distinct from the body and pertaining to a different order of reality than matter. This, as we have seen, does not necessarily mean that it is immaterial, in the sense of being intrinsically independent of matter. In a word, simplicity does not involve spirituality (absolute immateriality). Not only plant and animal souls, but even mineral entelechies, are simple, in the negative sense of excluding extension, corporeality and dispersal into quantitative parts, but they are, none the less, intrinsically dependent on matter and are therefore material principles.

That the soul or vital entelechy is really distinct from its material substrate is apparent from the perennial process of metabolism enacted in the living organism. In this process, matter is the variant and entelechy or specific type is the constant. Hence the two principles are not only distinct, but separable. Moreover, the soul’s rôle as a binding-principle that obstructs dissolution is incompatible with its dispersal into quantitative parts; for such a principle, far from being able to bind, would require binding itself, and could not, therefore, be the primary source of unification in the organism. Finally, the soul must be incorporeal; since, if it were a corporeal mass, it could not be “a formative power pervading the growing mass as a whole” (Wilson); for this would involve the penetration of one body by another. Consequently, the soul is a simple, inextended, incorporeal reality undispersed into quantitative parts.

Introspective psychology bears witness to the same truth; for consciousness reinforced by memory attests the substantial permanence of our personal identity. We both think and regulate our practical conduct in accordance with this sense of unchanging personal identity. All recognition of the past means simply this, that we perceive the substantial identity of our present, with our past, selves throughout all the experiences and vicissitudes of life. There is an inmost core of our being which is unchanging and which remains always identical with itself, in spite of the flow of thought and the metabolic changes of the life-cycle. It is this that gives us the sense of being always identically the same person, from infancy to maturity, and from maturity to old age. It is this that constitutes the thread of continuity which links our yesterdays with today, and makes us morally responsible for all the deliberate deeds of a lifetime. Courts of law do not acquit a criminal because he is in a different frame of mind from that which induced him to commit murder, nor do they excuse him on the score that metabolism has made him a different mass of flesh from that which perpetrated the crime. Such philosophies as phenomenalism and materialism are purely academic. Even their advocates dare not reduce them to consistent practice in everyday life.

Nor can the cases of alternating personalities be adduced as counterevidence. In the first place, these cases are psychopathic and not normal. In the second, they are due, not to a modification of personality itself, but to a modification in the perception of personality. Since this perception is, as we shall see, extrinsically dependent on cerebral imagery, any neuropathic affection is liable to modify the perception of personality by seriously disturbing the imagery, on which it depends. But (pace Wundt and James) the perception of personality is one thing, and personality itself quite another. Perception does not produce its objects, but presupposes them, and self-perception is no exception to this rule. Introspection, therefore, does not create our personality, but reveals and represents it. If then to the intuition of consciousness our personality appears as an unchanging principle that remains always substantially identical with itself, it follows that this perception must be terminated by something more durable than a flux of transient molecules or a stream of fleeting thought. Unless this perceptive act has for its object some unitary and uniformly persistent reality distinct from our composite, corruptible bodies, and not identified with our transitory thoughts, this sense of permanent personal identity would be utterly impossible. Materialism, which recognizes nothing more in man than a decaying organism, a mere vortex of fluent molecules, is at a loss to account for our consciousness of being always the same person. Phenomenalism, which identifies mind or self with the “thought-stream,” is equally impotent to account for this sense of our abiding sameness.

James’ attempt at a phenomenalistic explanation of the persistent continuity of self, on the assumption that each passing thought knows its receding predecessor and becomes known, in turn, by its successor, is puerile. To pass over other flaws, this absurd theory encounters an insuperable difficulty in sleep, which interrupts, for a considerable interval, the flow of conscious thought. Thought is a transient reality, which passes, so far as its actuality is concerned, and can only remain in the form of a permanent effect. Unless, therefore, there were some persistent medium in which the last waking thought could leave a permanent vestige of itself, the process of relaying the past could never be resumed, and we would lose our personal identity every twenty-four hours. The mind, or subject of thought, then, must be an abiding and unitary principle distinct from our composite bodies, and from our manifold and fleeting thoughts.

Finally, to the two foregoing attributes of the human soul (substantiality and simplicity), we must add a third and crowning attribute, namely, spirituality. It is this, and this alone, that differentiates the human from the bestial soul, which latter is but an incomplete complement of matter, incapable of existence apart from matter, and doomed to perish with the dissolution of the organism, as the cylindrical form of a candle perishes with the consumption of the wax by the flame.

All the psychic activities of the brute, such as sensation, object-perception, imagination, associative memory, sensual emotion, etc., are organic functions of the sensitivo-nervous type. In all of them the agent and recipient is not the soul alone, but the psycho-organic composite of soul and organism, that is, the soul-informed sensory and central neurons of the cerebrospinal system. The sensory neurons are nerve cells that transmit centerward the excitations of physical stimuli received by the external sense organs or receptors, in which their axon-fibers terminate. These receptors and sensory neurons are extended material organs proportioned and specialized for receiving physical impressions from external bodies, either directly through surface-contact with the bodies themselves or their derivative particles (e.g. in touch, taste and smell), or indirectly through surface-contact with an extended vibrant medium such as air, water, or ether (e.g. in hearing and sight). The central neurons of the cerebral cortex are, as it were, the tablets, upon which the excitations transmitted thither by the sensory neurons, record the extended neurograms that constitute the physical basis of the concrete imagery of memory and imagination. Interior senses, then, like memory and imagination, merely continue and combine what was preëxistent in the exterior senses. Their composite imagery is rigidly proportioned to the extended neurograms imprinted on the cerebral neurons, and these neurograms, in turn, are determined both qualitatively and quantitatively by the physical impressions received by the receptors, and these impressions, finally, are exactly proportioned to the action of the material stimuli in contact with the receptors. Thus the composite images of imagination as well as those of direct perception are proportioned to the underlying neurograms of the cortex and correspond exactly, as regards quality, intensity, and extensity, to the original stimulus affecting the external receptors. Hence men born blind can never imagine color, nor can men born deaf ever imagine sound. An inextended principle, such as the discarnate soul, cannot receive or record impressions from extended vibrant media, or from extended corporeal masses. For this the soul requires the intrinsic coöperation of material receptors. Now, the highest cognitive and appetitive functions of the brute (e.g. sense-perception and emotion) are, as has been stated, of the sensitivo-nervous or psycho-organic type, that is, they are functions in which the material organism intimately coöperates; brute animals give no indication of having so much as a single function, which proceeds from the soul alone and which is not communicated to the organism. Hence the bestial soul is “totally immersed” in matter; as regards both operation and existence, it is “intrinsically dependent” upon its material complement, the organism. It never operates save in conjunction with the latter, and its sole reason for existence is adequately summed up in saying that it exists, not for its own sake, but merely to vivify and sensitize the organism. Consequently, the brute soul, though inextended and incorporeal, belongs, not to the spiritual, but to the material, order of things.

Is the human soul equally material in nature, or does it belong to the spiritual category of being? The state of the question has long since been formulated for us by Aristotle: “A further difficulty,” he says, “arises as to whether all attributes of the soul are also shared by that which has the soul or whether any of them are peculiar to the soul itself: a problem which it is imperative, and yet by no means easy, to solve. It would appear that in most cases it neither acts nor is acted upon apart from the body: as, e.g., in anger, courage, desire, and sensation in general. Thought, if anything, would seem to be peculiar to the soul. Yet if thought is a sort of imagination, or something not independent of imagination, it will follow that not even thought is independent of the body. If, then, there be any functions or affections of the soul that are peculiar to it, it will be possible for the soul to be separated from the body: if, on the other hand, there is nothing peculiar to it, the soul will not be capable of separate existence.” (“Peri Psyches,” Bk. I, chap. I, 9.) We shall see that the human soul has certain operations which it discharges independently of the intrinsic coägency of the organism, e.g., abstract thought (not to be confounded with the concrete imagery of the imagination) and deliberate volition (to be distinguished from the urge of the sensual appetite). Hence, over and above the organic functions, which it discharges in conjunction with the material organism, the human soul has superorganic functions, of which it is itself, in its own right, the exclusive agent and recipient. In other words, it exists for its own sake and not merely to perfect the body.

The Aristotelian argument for the spirituality of the human soul consists in the application of a self-evident principle or axiom to certain facts of internal experience. The axiom in question is the following: “The nature of an agent is revealed by its action”; or, to phrase it somewhat differently: “Every being operates after the same manner that it exists.” The factual data, to which reference is made, are man’s higher psychic functions, in which the soul alone is the active cause and receptive subject, namely: the rational or superorganic functions of thinking and willing. The argument may be formulated thus: Every agent exists after the same manner that it operates. But in rational cognition and volition the soul acts without the co-agency of the material organism. Therefore the human soul can exist without the coexistence of the material organism. But this is tantamount to saying that it is a spiritual reality irreducible to matter and incapable of derivation from matter. For we define that as spiritual, which exists, or is, at least, capable of existing, without matter. Consequently, the human soul is a supermaterial and immortal principle, which does not need the body to maintain itself in existence, and can, on that account, survive the death and dissolution of its material complement, the organism. Such a reality, as we have seen, cannot be a product of evolution, but can only come into existence by way of creation.

The axiom, that activity is the expression or manifestation of the entity which underlies it, needs but little elucidation. In the genesis of human knowledge, the dynamic is prior to both the static and the entitive. We deduce the nature of the cause from the changes or effects that it produces. Action, in short, is the primary datum upon which our knowledge of being rests. It is the spectrum of solar light emitted by them, which enables us to determine the nature of the chemical elements present in the distant Sun. It is the reaction of an unknown compound with a test reagent that furnishes the chemist with a clue to its composition and structure. It is the special type of tissue degeneration caused by the specific toxin engendered by an invisible disease germ that enables the pathologists to identify the latter, etc., etc. So much for the axiom. Regarding the psychological facts, a more lengthy exposition is required. To begin with, there is prima facie evidence against the contention that the higher psychic functions in man are independent of the organism. Injury and degeneration of the cerebral cortex result (very often, at least) in insanity and idiocy. Reason, therefore, is in some way dependent upon the organism. Babies, too, are incapable of rational thought until such a time as the nervous system is fully developed. Obviously, then, rational functions cannot be spiritual, inasmuch as they are not independent of the organism.

This time-honored objection of materialists is based on a misapprehension. It falsely assumes that spirituality excludes every kind of dependence upon a material organism, and that our assertion of the soul’s independence of matter is an unqualified assertion. This, however, is far from being the case. It is only intrinsic (subjective), and not extrinsic (objective), independence of the organism which is here affirmed. An analogy from the sense of sight will serve to make clear the meaning of this distinction. In the act of seeing a tree, for example, our sight is dependent upon a twofold corporeal element, namely, the eye and the tree. It is dependent upon the eye as upon a corporeal element intrinsic to the visual sense, the eye being a constituent part of the agent and subject of vision; for it is not the soul alone which sees, but rather the soul-informed retina and neurons of the psycho-organic composite. The eye enters as an essential ingredient into the intimate constitution of the visual sense. It is a constituent part of the specific cause of vision, and it can therefore be said with perfect propriety that the eye sees. Such dependence upon a material element is called intrinsic or subjective dependence, and is utterly incompatible with spirituality on the part of that which is thus dependent. But the dependence of sight upon an external corporeal factor, like a tree or any other visible object, is of quite a different nature. Here the corporeal element is outside of the seeing subject and does not enter as an ingredient into the composition of the principal and specific agent of vision. True the tree, which is seen, is coïnstrumental as a provoking stimulus and an objective exemplar, but its concurrence is of an extrinsic nature, not to be confounded with the intrinsic co-agency of the eye in the act of vision. Hence, in no sense whatever can the tree be said to see; for the tree is merely an object, not the principal and specific cause, of vision. When the dependence of an agent upon a corporeal element is of this sort, it is termed extrinsic or objective dependence. Such dependence upon a material element is perfectly compatible with spirituality, which does, indeed, exclude all materiality from the specific agent and subject of a psychic act, but does not necessarily exclude materiality from the object contemplated in such an act. Hence the fact that the thinking soul must abstract its rational concepts from the concrete imagery of a cerebral sense, like the imagination, in no wise detracts from its spirituality, because the dependence of abstract thought upon such imagery is objective or extrinsic, and not subjective or intrinsic.

Psychologists of the sensationalist school have striven to obscure the fundamental distinction which exists between rational thought and the concomitant cerebral imagery. It is, however, far too manifest to escape attention, as the healthy reaction of the modern school of Würzburg indicates. “It cost me great resolution,” says Dr. F. E. Schultze, a member of this school, “to say, that, on the basis of immediate experiment, appearances and sensible apprehensions are not the only things that can be experienced. But finally I had to resign myself to my fate.” (“Beitrag zur Psychologie des Zeitbewusstseins,” p. 277.)

But thought is not only distinct from imagery, often there is marked contrast between the two, both as regards subjective, and objective, characters. Thus our thought may be perfectly clear, precise, and pertinent, while the accompanying imagery is obscure, fragmentary, and irrelevant. “What enters into consciousness so fragmentarily, so sporadically, so very accidentally as our mental images,” exclaims Karl Bühler (also of Würzburg), “can not be looked upon as the well-knitted, continuous content of our thinking.” (Archiv. für die ges. Psychol., 9, 1907, p. 317.) The same contrast exists with respect to their objective characters. Imagination represents by means of one and the same image what reason represents by means of two distinct concepts, e.g. an oasis and a mirage; and, vice versa, reason represents under the single general concept of a rose objects that imagination is forced to represent by means of two distinct images, e.g., a yellow, and a white rose. Imagery depicts only the superficial or exterior properties of an object, whereas thought penetrates beneath the phenomenal surface to interior properties and supersensible relationships. The sensory percept apprehends the existence of a fact, while the rational concept analyzes its nature. Hence sense-perception is concerned with the reality of existence, while thought is concerned with the reality of essence.

Certain American psychologists employ the term imageless thought to designate abstract concepts. The expression is liable to be misunderstood. It should not be construed as excluding all concomitance and concurrence of sensible imagery, in relation to the process of thought. What is really meant is that sensible appearances do not make up the sum-total of our internal experiences, but that we are also aware of mental acts and states which are not reducible to imagery. In other words, we experience thought; and thought and imagery, though concomitant, are not commensurable. The clarity and coherence of thought does not depend on the clarity or germaneness of the accompanying imagery, nor is it ever adequately translatable into terms of that imagery. Thus the universal triangle of geometry, which is not right, nor oblique, nor isosceles, neither scalene nor equilateral, neither large nor small, neither here nor there, neither now nor then, is not visualizable in terms of concrete imagery, although we are clearly conscious of its significance in geometrical demonstrations. Imagery differs according to the person, one man being a visualist, another an audist, another a tactualist, another a motor-verbalist, etc. But thought is the same in all, and consequently it is thought, and not imagery, which we convey by means of speech. Helen Keller, whose imagery is mainly motor and tactile, can exchange views with an audist or visualist on the subject of geometry, even though the amount of imagery which she has in common with such persons is negligible. “Eine Bedeutung,” says Bühler, “kann man überhaupt nicht vorstellen, sondern nur wissen,” and Binet, in the last sentence of his “L’Étude expérimentale de l’intelligence,” formulates the following conclusion: “Finally—and this is the main fact, fruitful in consequences for the philosophers—the entire logic of thought escapes our imagery.”

Nevertheless, thought does not originate in the total absence of imagery, but requires a minimal substrate of sensible images, upon which it is objectively, if not subjectively, dependent. The nature of this objective dependence is explained by the Scholastic theory concerning the origin of concepts. According to this theory, the genesis of our general and abstract knowledge is as follows: (1) We begin with sense-perception, say of boats differing in shape, size, color, material, location, etc. (2) Imagination and sense-memory retain the composite and concrete imagery synthesized or integrated from the impressions of the separate external senses and representing the boats in all their factual particularity, individuality, and materiality, as existent here and now, or there and then, as constructed of such and such material (e.g., of wood, or steel, or iron, or concrete), as having determinate sizes, shapes, and tonnages, as painted white, or gray, or green, as propelled by oar, or sail, or turbine, etc. (3) Then the active intellect exerts its abstractive influence upon this concrete imagery, accentuating the essential features which are common to all, and suppressing the individuating features which are peculiar to this or that boat, so that the essence of a boat may appear to the cognitive intellect without its concomitant individuation—the essence of a boat being, in this way, isolated from the peculiarities thereof and its various qualities from their subject (representatively, of course, and not physically). (4) The imagery thus predisposed, being no longer immersed in matter, but dematerialized by the dispositive action of the active intellect, becomes coïnstrumental with the latter in producing a determination in the cognitive intellect. (5) Upon receiving this determination, the cognitive intellect, which has hitherto been, as it were, a blank tablet with nothing written upon it, reacts to express the essence or nature of a boat by means of a spiritual representation or concept—the abstractive act of the active intellect is dispositive, inasmuch as it presents what is common to all the boats perceived without their differentiating peculiarities; the abstractive act of the cognitive intellect, however, is cognitive, inasmuch as it considers the essence of a boat without considering its individuation. Such is the abstractive process by which our general and abstract concepts are formed. From a comparison of two concepts of this sort the process of judgment arises, and from the comparison of two concepts with a third arises the process of mediate inference or reasoning. Volition, too, is consequent upon conception, and hence an act of the will (our rational appetite), such as the desire of sailing in a boat, entails the preëxistence of some conceptual knowledge of the nature of a boat. Volition, therefore, presupposes thought, and thought presupposes imagination, which supplies the sensible imagery that undergoes the aforesaid process of analysis or abstraction. Such imagery, however, is a function of the cerebral cortex, and, for this reason, the normal exercise of the imagination presupposes the cerebral cortex in a normal physiological condition; and anything that disturbs this normal condition of the cortex will directly disturb the imagery of the imagination, and therefore indirectly impede the normal exercise of conceptual thought, which is abstracted from such imagery. Hence it is clear that the activity of both the intellect and the will is objectively dependent upon the organic activity of the imagination, and, in consequence, indirectly dependent upon the physiological condition of the cerebral cortex, which is the organ of the imagination. Since, however, this dependence is objective rather than subjective, it does not, as we have seen, conflict with the spirituality of rational thought.

The nature of conceptual thought is such as to exclude the participation of matter as a constituent of its specific agent and receptive subject. The objects of a cerebral sense like the imagination are endowed with extension, color, shape, volume, mass, temperature, and other physical properties, in virtue of which they can set up vibrations in an extended medium or modify an extended organ by immediate physical contact. But, while imagination makes us conscious of objects capable of stimulating extended material organs, the objects, of which we are conscious in abstract thinking, are divested of all the sensible properties, extension, and specific energies, which would enable them to modify a material neuron, or produce a physical impression upon a material receptor of any kind whatever. Between an extended material receptor, like a sense-organ or a cerebral neuron, and the nondimensional, dematerialized object or content of an abstract thought, like science, heroism, or morality, there is no conceivable proportion. How can a material organ be affected by what is supersensible, unextended, imponderable, invisible, intangible, and uncircumscribed by the limitations of space and time? Extended receptors are necessary for picking up the vibrations of a tridimensional medium (like air or ether), and they are, likewise, essential for the reception of impressions produced by surface-contact with an exterior corporeal mass. In short, sensory neurons are needed to receive and transmit inward the quantitative and measurable excitations of the material stimuli of the external world, and central neurons are required as tablets upon which these incoming excitations may imprint extended neurograms, that are proportionate in intensity and extensity to the external stimulus apprehended, and that underlie and determine the concrete imagery (of which they are the physical basis). But when it comes to perceiving and representing the meaning of duty, truth, error, cause, effect, psychology, means, end, entity, logarithms, etc., our mind can derive no benefit from the coöperation of a material organ. In such thinking we are conscious of that which could not make an impression nor leave a record upon material receptors like neurons. To employ a material organ for the purpose of perceiving abstract essences and qualities would be as futile and pointless as an attempt to stop a nondimensional, unextended, intangible baseball with a catcher’s glove. Hence the services of material centers and receptors may be dispensed with, so far as rational thought is concerned. Rational thought cannot utilize the intrinsic coägency of the organism, and it is therefore a superorganic or spiritual function.

That conceptual thought is in no wise communicated to the organism, but subjected in the spiritual soul alone, is likewise apparent from the data furnished by introspection. The conceiving mind apprehends even material objects according to an abstract or spiritualized mode of representation. In other words, in conceiving material objects we expurgate them of their materiality and material conditions, endowing them with a dematerialized mode of mental existence which they could never have, if subjected in their own physical matter, or in the organized matter of the cerebral cortex. Thus, in forming our concept of a material object like a boat, we spiritualize the boat by separating (representatively, of course, and not physically) its nature or essence from the determinate matter (e.g., wood, or steel) of which it is made, and by divesting it of the material and concrete conditions which define not only its physical existence outside of us, but also its imaginal existence within us as a concrete image in our imagination. In other words, we isolate the type or form of a given object from its material substrate and liberate it from the limiting material and concrete individuation, which confine it to a single material subject and localize it definitely in space and time. Now, it is axiomatic that whatever is received is received according to the nature of the receiver. Water, for example, assumes the form of the receptacle into which it is poured, and a picture painted upon canvas is necessarily extended according to the extension of the canvas. If, therefore, our intellect endows even the material objects, which it perceives, with a dematerialized or spiritualized mode of representation, it follows that the intellect itself is a spiritual power and not an organic sense immersed in concretifying and individualizing matter. Certainly, this ideal or spiritualized mode of existence does not emanate from the material object without nor yet from its vicarious material image in our organic imagination (which, in point of fact, is absolutely impotent to imagine anything except concrete, singular things in all their determinate individuation and quantification). Thought, then, with its abstract mode of presentation, cannot, like imagery, be subjected in the animated or soul-informed cortex, but must have the spiritual mind alone as its receptive subject. Our abstract or dematerialized mode of conceiving material objects is a subjective character of thought, proceeding from, and manifesting, the spirituality of the human mind, which represents even material objects in a manner that accords with its own spiritual nature.

But it is not only in the process of abstraction, but also in that of reflection, that rational thought manifests its superorganic or spiritual character. The human mind knows that it knows and understands that it understands, thinks of its own thoughts and of itself as the agent and subject of its thinking. It is conscious of its own conscious acts, that is to say, it reflects upon itself and its own acts, becoming an object to itself. The thinking ego becomes an object of observation on the part of the thinking ego, which acquires self-knowledge by this process of reflective thought. In introspection, that which observes is identical with that which is observed. Now such a capacity of self-observation cannot reside in matter, cannot be spatially commensurate with a material organ nor inseparably attached thereto. It is possible only to an immaterial or spiritual principle, devoid of mass and extension, and not subject to the law of the impenetrability of matter. In virtue of the law of impenetrability, no two material particles, no two bodies, no two integral parts of the same body, can occupy one and the same place. One part of a body can, indeed, act on another part extrinsic to itself; but one and the same part or particle cannot act upon itself. To become at once observed and observer, a material organ would have to split itself in two, so that the part watched could be distinct from, and spatially external to, the part watching. The power of perfect reflection, therefore, must reside in the spiritual soul, and cannot be bound to, and coëxtensive with, a material organ. Only in this supposition can there be a return of the subject upon and into itself, only in this supposition can there be that identification of observed and observer implied by the process of reflection. H. Gründer, in his “Psychology without a Soul,” gives a graphic reductio ad absurdum of the contrary assumption: “A fairy tale,” he says, “tells of a knight who was beheaded by his victorious foe. But, strange to relate, the vanquished knight rose to his feet, seized his severed head and bore it off, as in triumph. The most remarkable part, however, of the story is that with a last effort of gallantry he took his own head, and—kissed its brow. The climax of this fairy tale is no more absurd than the assumption that a material organ can know itself and philosophize on itself. Only if we admit with the scholastics a simple soul intrinsically independent of any bodily organism, can we explain the possibility of perfect psychological reflexion.” (Cf. pp. 193, 194.)

For the rest the impossibility of introspection on the part of a material organ is so evident that the materialists themselves freely concede it, and being unwilling to admit the spirituality of the human intellect, they are forced to resort to the disingenuous expedient of denying the fact of reflection on the part of the human mind. “It is obvious,” says Auguste Comte, “that by an invincible necessity the human mind can observe directly all phenomena except its own. We understand that a man can observe himself as a moral agent, because in that case he can watch himself under the action of the passions which animate him, precisely because the organs that are the seat of those passions are distinct from those that are destined for the functions of observation.... But it is manifestly impossible to observe intellectual phenomena whilst they are being produced. The individual thinking cannot divide himself in two, so that one half may think and the other watch the process. Since the organ observing and the one to be observed are identical, there can be no self-observation.” (“Cours de philosophie positive,” lière leçon.) But an argument is of no avail against a fact, and, as a matter of fact, we do reflect. It is by introspection or reflective thought that we discriminate between our present and our past thoughts, and become conscious of our own consciousness. Our intellect even reflects upon its own act of reflection, and so on indefinitely, so that, unless we are prepared to accept the absurd alternative of an infinite series of thinkers, we have no choice but to identify the subject knowing with the subject known. That our intellect is conscious of its own operations and attentive to its own thoughts, is an evident fact of internal experience, and it is preposterous to tilt against facts by means of syllogisms. When Zeno concocted his aprioristic “proof” of the impossibility of translatory movement, his sophism was refuted by the simple process of walking—solvitur ambulando. In like manner, the Comtean sophism concerning the impossibility of reflection is refuted by the simple act of mental reflection—solvitur reflectendo. For the rest, we readily concede Comte’s contention that an organ is incapable of reflection or self-observation, but we deny his tacit assumption that our cognitive powers are all of the organic type. Our intellect, which attends to its own phenomena, thinks of its own thought and reasons upon its own reasoning, cannot be bound to, or coextensive with, a material organ, but must be free from any corporeal organ and rooted in a spiritual principle. In a word, reflective thought is a superorganic function expressing the spiritual nature of the human mind.

Another proof of the superorganic nature of the human intellect as compared with sentiency, both exterior and interior, is one adduced by Aristotle himself: “But that the impassivity of the sense,” he says, “is different from that of intellect is clear if we look at the sense organs and at sense. The sense loses its power to perceive, if the sensible object has been too intense; thus it cannot hear sound after very loud noises, and after too powerful colors or odors it can neither see nor smell. But the intellect, when it has been thinking on an object of intense thought, is not less, but even more, able to think of inferior objects. For sense-perception is not independent of the body, whereas the intellect is.” (“Peri Psyches,” Bk. III, Ch. iv, 5.)

This temporary incapacitation of the senses consequent upon powerful stimulation is a common experience embalmed in such popular expressions as “a deafening noise,” “a blinding flash,” “a dazzling light,” “a numbing pain,” etc. Weber’s law of the differential threshold tells us that the intensity of sensation does not increase in the same proportion as that of the stimulus. On the contrary, the more intense the previous stimulus has been, the greater must be the increment added to the subsequent stimulus before it can produce a perceptible increase in the intensity of sensation. In short, stimulation of the senses temporarily decreases their sensitivity with reference to supervening stimuli. The reason for this momentary loss of the power to react normally is evidently due to the organic nature of the senses. Their activity entails a definite and rigidly proportionate process of destructive metabolism in their bodily substrate, the organism. In other words, the exercise of sense-perception involves a commensurate process of decomposition in the neural tissue, which must afterwards be compensated by a corresponding assimilation of nutrient material, before the sense can again react with its pristine vigor. This process of recuperation requires time and temporarily inhibits the reactive power of the sense in question, the duration of this repair work being determined by the amount of neural decomposition caused by the reaction of the sense to the previous stimulus. When, therefore, a weaker stimulus supervenes in immediate succession to a stronger one, the sense is incapable of perceiving it. All organic activity, in short, such as sense-perception and imagination, is rigidly regulated by the metabolic law of waste and repair.

With the intellect, however, the case is quite different. The intellect is neither debilitated nor stupefied by the discovery of truths that are exceptionally profound, or unusually abstruse, or strikingly evident; nor is it temporarily incapacitated thereby from understanding simpler, easier, or less evident truths. On the contrary, the more comprehensive, the more penetrating, the more perspicuous, the more sublime our intellectual vision is, so much the more is our intellect invigorated and enthused in its pursuit of truth, and its knowledge of the highest truths renders it not less, but more, apt for the understanding of simple and ordinary truths. Obviously, then, the intellect is not bound to a corruptible organ like the senses, but has for its subject a spiritual principle that is intrinsically independent of the organism.

In opposition to this contention, it may be urged that a prolonged exercise of intellectual activity results in the condition commonly known as brain-fag. But this fatigue of the brain is not, as a matter of fact, the direct effect of intellectual activity; rather it is the direct effect of the activity of the imagination, and only indirectly the effect of intellectual thought. The intellect, as we have seen, requires a constant flow of associated and aptly coördinated imagery as the substrate of its contemplation. Now, the imagination, which supplies this imagery, is a cerebral sense, whose activity is directly proportionate to, and commensurate with, the metabolic processes at work in the cortical cells. Its exercise is directly dependent upon the energy released by the decomposition of the cerebral substance. Prolonged activity of the imagination, therefore, involves the destruction of a considerable amount of the cortical substance, and results in temporary incapacitation or paralysis of the imagination, which must then be compensated by a process of repair in the cortical neurons, before the imagination can resume its normal mode of functioning. Brain-fag, then, is due to the activity of the imagination rather than that of the intellect. That such is the case appears from the fact that after the initial exertion, which results from the imagination being forced to assemble an appropriate and systematized display of illustrative imagery as subject-matter for the contemplation of the intellect, the latter is henceforth enabled to proceed with ease along the path of a given science, its further progress being smooth and unhampered. Once the preliminary work imposed upon the imagination is finished, the sense of effort ceases and intellectual investigation and study may subsequently reach the highest degrees of concentration and intensity, without involving corresponding degrees of fatigue or depression on the part of the cerebral imagination, just as, conversely speaking, the activity of the cerebral imagination may reach degrees of intensity extreme enough to induce brain-fag in psychic operations wherein the concomitant intellectual activity is reduced to a minimum, e. g., in the task of memorizing a poem, or recitation. Here, in the all but complete absence of intellectual activity, the same fatigue results as that induced by a prolonged period of analytic study or investigation, in which imaginative activity and rational thinking are concomitant. The point to be noted, in this latter case, is that the intellect does not show the same dependence upon the physiological vicissitudes as the imagination. The imagery of our imagination, being rigidly correlated with the metabolic processes of waste and repair at work in the cerebral cortex, manifests correspondingly variable degrees of intensity and integrity, but the intensity of thought is not dependent upon this alternation of excitation and inhibition in the cortex. Hence, while the concomitant imagery is fitful, sporadic, and fragmentary, intellectual thought itself is steady, lucid, and continuous. The intensity of thought does not vary with the fluctuations of neural metabolism, and may reach a maximum without involving corresponding fatigue in the brain. The brain-fag, therefore, which results from study does not correspond to the height of our intellectual vision, but is due to the intensity of the concomitant imaginative process.

The intellect, therefore, is not subject to the metabolic laws which rigidly regulate organic functions like sense-perception and imagination. Man’s capacity for logical thought is frequently unaffected by the decline of the organism which sets in after maturity. All organic functions, however, such as sight, hearing, sense-memory, are impaired in exact proportion to the deterioration of the organism, which is the inevitable sequel of old age. The intellectual powers, on the contrary, remain unimpaired, so long as the cortex is sound enough to furnish the required minimum of imagery, upon which intellectual activity is objectively dependent. There are, in fact, many cases on record where men have remained perfectly sane and rational, despite the fact that notable portions of the cerebral cortex had been destroyed by accident or disease (e. g., tumors). Intellectual thought, therefore, is a superorganic function, having its source in a spiritual principle and not in a corruptible organ.

Such is the spiritualism of Aristotle. That this conception differs profoundly from the ultraspiritualism of Descartes, it is scarcely necessary to remark. The position assumed by the latter was always untenable, but it is now, more than ever, indefensible in the face of that overwhelming avalanche of facts whereby modern physiological psychology demonstrates the close interdependence and correlation existent between psychic and organic states. Such facts are exploited by materialists as arguments against spiritualism, though it is evident that they have force only against Cartesian spiritualism, and are bereft of all relevance with respect to Aristotelian spiritualism, which they leave utterly intact and unscathed. In the latter system, sense-perception, imagination, and emotion are acknowledged to be directly dependent on the organism. Again, spiritual functions like thinking and willing are regarded as objectively or extrinsically dependent upon the imagination, which, in turn, is directly dependent on a material organ, namely: the brain. Hence even the rational operations of the mind are indirectly dependent upon the cerebral cortex. The spiritualism of Aristotle, therefore, by reason of its doctrine concerning the direct dependence of the lower, and the indirect dependence of the higher, psychic functions upon the material organism, is able to absorb into its own system all the supposedly hostile facts amassed by Materialism, thereby rendering them futile and inconsequential as arguments against the spirituality of the human soul. In confronting this philosophy, the materialistic scientist finds himself disarmed and impotent, and it is not to be wondered at, that, after indulging in certain abusive epithets and a few cant phrases, such as “metaphysics” or “medieval” (invaluable words!), he prudently retires from the lists without venturing to so much as break a lance in defense of his favorite dogma, that nothing is spiritual, because all is matter. In this predicament, the Cartesian caricature proves a boon to the materialist, as furnishing him with the adversary he prefers, a man of straw, and enabling him to demonstrate his paltry tin-sword prowess. Of a truth, Descartes performed an inestimable service for these modern “assassins of the soul,” when he relieved them of the necessity of crossing swords with the hylomorphic dualism of Aristotle by the substitution of a far less formidable antagonist, namely, the psychophysical dualism of mind and matter.

The proofs advanced, in the previous pages, for the spirituality of the human soul are based upon the superorganic function of rational thought. A parallel series of arguments can be drawn from the superorganic function of rational volition. The cognitive intellect has for its necessary sequel the appetitive will, which may be defined as spiritual tendency inclining us toward that which the intellect apprehends as good. The objects of such volition are frequently abstract and immaterial ideals transcendent to the sphere of concrete and material goods, e. g., virtue, glory, religion, etc. The will of man, moreover, is free, in the sense that it can choose among various motives, and is not compelled to follow the line of least resistance, as is the electric current when passing through a shunt of steel and copper wire. Like the self-knowing intellect, the self-determining will is capable of reflective action, that is, it can will to will. Having its own actions within its own control, it is itself the principal cause of its own decisions, and thus becomes responsible for its conduct, wherever its choice has been conscious and deliberate. External actions, which escape the control of the will, and even internal actions of the will itself, which are indeliberate, are not free and do not entail responsibility. Our courts of law and our whole legal system rests on the recognition of man’s full responsibility for his deliberate voluntary acts. The distinction between premeditated murder, which is punished, and unpremeditated homicide, which is not, is purely moral, and not physical, depending for its validity upon the fact of human freedom. It is this exemption from physical determinism, that makes man a moral agent, subject to duties, amenable to moral suasion, and capable of merit or demerit. Finally, the will of man is insatiable, invincible, and inexhaustible. The aspirations of the will are boundless, whereas our animal appetites are easily cloyed by gratification. There is no freezing point for human courage. The animal or sensual appetites wear out and decline with old age, but virtue and will-power do not necessarily diminish with the gradual deterioration of the material organism. Willing, therefore, is a superorganic or spiritual function. Activity which is bound to a material organ cannot tend towards supersensible ideals, cannot escape physical determinism, cannot achieve the reflective feat of spurring itself to action, cannot avoid exhaustion, cannot elude rigid regulation by the laws of organic metabolism. For this reason, the brute, whose psychic functions are of the organic type exclusively, is destitute of freedom, morality, and responsibility. Deliberate volition, therefore, like conceptual thought, has its source and subject in man’s spiritual soul, and is not a function of the material organism.

To develop the argument drawn from rational volition for the spirituality of the human soul would carry us too far afield. Those who wish to pursue the subject further may consult Chapter VIII of Gründer’s monograph entitled “Psychology without a Soul,” also his monograph on “Free Will.”

G. H. Parker of Harvard, though admitting the fact of human freedom, tries to explain it away in terms of materialism. The following is the description which he gives of his theory: “It is a materialist view which, however, recognizes in certain types of organized matter a degree of free action consistent with human behavior and the resultant responsibility.” (Science, June 13, 1924, p. 520.) Freedom, in other words, “emerges” from matter having a peculiar “type of organization.”

This view must be interpreted in the light of the philosophy of “Emergent Evolution,” which Parker holds in common with C. Lloyd Morgan and R. W. Sellars. The philosophy in question recognizes in nature an ascending scale of more and more complexly organized units, starting with protons and electrons, at the bottom, and culminating in the human organism, at the top. At each higher level of this cosmic scale we find higher units formed by coalescence of the simpler units of a lower level. These higher units, however, are something more than a mere summation of the lower units; for, in addition to additive properties that can be predicted from a knowledge of the components, they exhibit genuinely new properties which, not being mere sums of the properties of the component units, are unpredictable on that basis. Given, for example, the weight of two volumes of hydrogen and one volume of oxygen, we could predict an additive property such as the weight of the compound, i.e. the water, formed by their combination. Other properties, of the compound, however, such as liquidity, are not foreshadowed by the properties of the component gases. Similarly, the weight of carbon disulphid (CS₂) is an additive function of the combining weights of sulphur and carbon, but the other properties of this mobile liquid are not predictable on the basis of the properties of sulphur and carbon. Hence two kinds of properties are distinguished: (1) additive (quantitative) properties called resultants, which are predictable; (2) specificative (qualitative) properties called emergents, which are unprecedented and unpredictable. Freedom and intelligence, accordingly, are pronounced to be emergents of matter organized to that degree of complexity which we find in man.

This dualism of resultance and emergence is merely a new verbal vesture for the hylomorphic dualism of Aristotle. The additive properties (resultants) are based on matter, which is the principle of continuity. The specificative (constituitive or qualitative) properties called emergents are rooted in entelechy (form), which is the principle of novelty. In fact, entelechy (form) itself is an emergent of matter just as the specificative properties are emergents of matter, with the sole difference that entelechy is the primary emergent of matter, whereas the specificative or qualitative properties are secondary emergents. For in Aristotelian philosophy, entelechy is not, as it is in Neo-vitalism, “an alien principle inserted into matter” abruptly and capriciously “at the level of life,” but a primary emergent and constituent of matter both living and non-living. In fine, entelechy is an emergent of matter in all the units of nature from the simplest atom to the most complex plant or animal organism. The only entelechy, which is not an emergent, but an insert into matter, is the spiritual human soul. Neither the human soul nor the superorganic functions rooted in it, namely, abstraction, reflection, and election, are emergents. Here we have novelty without continuity, and therefore not emergence (eduction), but insertion (infusion).

In his “Emergent Evolution,” 1923, Lloyd Morgan lays it down as axiomatic that emergence involves continuity—“There may often be resultants,” he says, “without emergence; but there are no emergents that do not involve resultant effects also. Resultants give quantitative continuity which underlies new constitutive steps in emergence.” (Op. cit., p. 5.) Now our proofs for human spirituality consist precisely in the complete exclusion of quantitative continuity between organic functions (e. g. sensation) and superorganic functions (e. g. conceptual thought and free volition). Hence, by the very axiom which Morgan himself formulates, the human soul and its superorganic functions are excluded from the category of material emergents. If there can be no emergence without quantitative continuity, then the human soul is not an emergent from, but an insert into, matter. Free choice, too, it is needless to say, is not an emergent of matter, but an expression of the supermaterial nature of the human soul. So much for the new-old dualism of emergence and resultance.

Two additional facts may be cited as bringing into strong relief the basic contrast existing between the higher or rational, and the lower or animal psychosis in man. The first is the occurrence of irreconcilable opposition or conflict. The imagination, for example, antagonizes the intellect by visualizing as an extended speck of chalk or charcoal the mathematical point, which the intellect conceives as destitute of extension and every other property except position. Similarly, the effort of our rational will to be faithful to duty and to uphold ideals is antagonized by the sensual impulses of the animal appetite, which seek immediate gratification at the expense of remote considerations that are higher. Such antagonism is incompatible with any identification of the warring factors, that is, of our rational, with our sentient, functions; for, wherever opposition is in evidence, there a fortiori a real distinction must be recognized. The understanding and the will, therefore, differ radically from sense and sensual appetite. The second significant fact is the domination exerted by reason and will over the cognitive and appetitive functions of the organic or sentient order. Our intellect criticizes, evaluates and corrects the data of sense-perception, it discriminates between objective percepts and illusions and hallucinations, it distinguishes dreams from realities, it associates and dissociates imagery for purposes of comparison, contrast, illustration, or analysis. Moreover, it not only shows its superiority to sense by supervising, revising, and appraising the data of sentient experience, but it manifests its discontent at the inaccuracy and limitation of sense by the invention and use of instrumentation (e. g. ear trumpets, spectacles, microscopes, telescopes, spectroscopes, polariscopes, periscopes, etc.) to remedy the defects or increase the range of sense-perception, etc. This phenomenon is without parallel among brute animals, and is a patent manifestation of the superiority of human psychology. In like manner, the will demonstrates its preeminence over the organic or animal appetite, by exerting supreme control over the passions and impulses of our lower nature. In fact, it is able to bridle and repress the impulses of sensuality even in the immediate presence of sensible stimuli that would irresistibly determine the brute to a gratification of its animal lusts; and it can force the struggling and reluctant flesh to undergo a crucifixion for supersensible motives that make no appeal to the beast. The understanding and the will, therefore, are essentially superior to the organic psychosis that they control, namely, the sentient consciousness and sensual appetite, which we share in common with the brute, but which, in the latter, give no evidence whatever of rational or moral control.

§ 4. Darwinian Anthropomorphism

The spiritual mind of man represents an eminence to which evolving matter can never attain. This, then, is the hill that must needs be laid low, if the path of Darwinian materialism is to be a smooth one. There is, therefore, nothing very surprising in the fact that Darwin and his followers, from Huxley down to Robinson, have done all in their power to obscure and belittle the psychological differences between man and the brute. The objective of their strategy is twofold, namely, the brutalization of man and its converse, the humanization of the brute. The ascent will be easier to imagine, if man can be depressed, and the brute raised, to levels that are not far apart. To this end, the Darwinian zealots have, on the one hand, spared no pains to minimize the superiority and dignity of human reason by the dissemination of sensistic associationism, psychophysical parallelism, and various other forms of “psychology without a soul”; and they have striven, on the other hand, to exalt to the utmost the psychic powers of the brute by means of a crude and credulous anthropomorphism, which, for all its scientific pretensions, is quite indistinguishable from the naïveté of the author of “Black Beauty” and the sentimentality of S. P. C. A. fanatics, vegetarians, anti-vivisectionists, etc. The first of these tendencies we have already discussed, the second remains to be considered.

Title of a horse’s autobiography by Anna Sewall, the horse’s alter ego.

When it comes to anthropomorphizing the brute, Darwin has not been outdistanced by the most reckless of his disciples. Three entire chapters of the “Descent of Man” are filled with this “vulgar psychology” (as Wundt so aptly styles it). It is the sum and substance of the entire fabric of argumentation, which he erects in support of his thesis that “the difference in mind between man and the higher animals is certainly one of degree and not of kind.” (Cf. op. cit., chs. III-V.) Haeckel, Huxley, and Clifford attained to equal proficiency in the sport. Subsequent philosophers parroted their bold metaphors and smart aphorisms, and the game went on merrily till the close of the century. Then a badly needed reaction set in under the auspices of Wundt, Lloyd Morgan, and Thorndike, who insisted on abandoning this naïve impressionism in favor of more critical methods.

In his “Vorlesungen über die Menschen und Tierseele” (cf. 2nd ed., p. 370), Wundt proclaims his rupture with the impressionistic school in the following terms: “The one great defect of this popular psychology is that it does not take mental processes for what they show themselves to be to a direct and unprejudiced view, but imports into them the reflections of the observer about them. The necessary consequence for animal psychology is that the mental actions of animals, from the lowest to the highest, are interpreted as acts of the understanding. If any vital manifestation of the organism is capable of possible derivation from a series of reflections and inferences, that is taken as sufficient proof that these reflections and inferences actually led up to it. And, indeed, in the absence of a careful analysis of our subjective perceptions we can hardly avoid this conclusion. Logical reflection is the logical process most familiar to us, because we discover its presence when we think about any object whatsoever. So that for popular psychology mental life in general is dissolved in the medium of logical reflection. The question whether there are not perhaps other mental processes of a simpler nature is not asked at all, for the one reason that whenever self-observation is required, it discovers this reflective process in the human consciousness. The same idea is applied to feelings, impulses, and voluntary actions which are regarded, if not as acts of intelligence, still as effective states which belong to the intellectual sphere.

“This mistake, then, springs from ignorance of exact psychological methods. It is unfortunately rendered worse by the inclination of animal psychologists to see the intellectual achievements of animals in the most brilliant light.... Unbridled by scientific criticism the imagination of the observer ascribes phænomena in perfectly good faith to motives which are entirely of its own invention. The facts reported may be wholly true; the interpretation of the psychologist, innocently woven in with his account of them, puts them from first to last in a totally wrong light. You will find a proof of this on nearly every page of the works on animal psychology.” (English Translation by Creighton & Titchener, p. 341.)

Wundt’s warning against taking at their face value popular, or even so-called scientific, accounts of wonderful feats performed by animals is very salutary. The danger of subjective humanization of bestial conduct is always imminent. We are unavoidably obliged to employ the analogy of our own animal nature and sentient consciousness as our principal clue to an understanding of brute psychology, but we must beware of pressing this analogy based on our own consciousness to the uncritical extreme of interpreting in terms of our highest psychic operations animal behavior that, in itself, admits of a far simpler explanation. According to the principle of the minimum, it is unscientific to assume in a given agent the presence of anything that is not rigidly required for the explanation of its observed phenomena. We must refrain, therefore, from reading into the consciousness of an animal what is not really there. We must abstain from transporting our own viewpoint and personality into a brute, by imagining, with Darwin, that we discern a “sense of humor,” or a “high degree of self-complacency” in some pet animal, like a dog. In general, we can rest assured that animals are quite innocent of the motivation we ascribe to them. All their manifestations of the psychic order are adequately explicable in terms of sensory experience, associative memory, instinct, and the various automatisms of their innate and conditioned reflexes. There is no ground whatever for supposing the brute to possess the superorganic power of understanding commonly known as intelligence.

Etymologically speaking, the abstract term “intelligence,” together with the corresponding concrete term “intellect,” is derived from the Latin: intus-legere, signifying to “read within,” the fitness of the term being based upon the fact that the intellect can penetrate beneath the outer appearances of things to inner aspects and relations, which are hidden from the senses. In its proper and most general usage, intelligence denotes a cognoscitive power of abstraction and generalization, which, by means of conceptual comparison, discovers the supersensible relationships existent between the realities conceived, in such wise as to apprehend substances beneath phenomena, causes behind effects, and remote ends beyond proximate means.

Certain animal psychologists, however, refuse to reserve the prerogative of intelligence for man. Bouvier’s “La Vie Psychique des Insectes” (1918), for example, contains the following statement: “Choice of a remarkably intellectual nature, is even more noticeable in the instinctive manifestations of individual memory. The animal, endowed with well-developed senses and nervous system, not only reacts to new necessities by new acts, but associates the stored up impressions of new sensations and thereby appropriately directs its further activities. Thus, by an intelligent process, new habits are established, which by heredity become part of the patrimony of instinct, modifying the latter and constituting elements essential to its evolution. Of these instincts acquired through an intelligent apprenticeship Forel was led to say that they are reasoning made automatic, and it is to them particularly that we may apply the idea of certain biologists that instincts are habits which have become hereditary and automatic.” (Smithson. Inst. Rpt. for 1918, p. 454.)

It is extremely doubtful, however, whether Bouvier is here using the term intelligence in its proper sense. Indeed, his words convey the impression that what he means by intelligence is an ability to profit by experience. Now, ability to profit by experience may, under one set of circumstances, involve the power of logical reflection and inference, while, under another set of circumstances, it may imply nothing more than the power of associative memory. In the latter case, the facts are explicable without any recourse to psychic powers of a superorganic nature, and, in point of fact, it often happens that the very zoöpsychologists, who insist on attributing this sort of “intelligence” to brutes, are most emphatic in denying that brutes are endowed with reason. In any case, it is unfortunate that the word intelligence is now used in two entirely different senses. This new and improper sense, being unrelated to the etymology, and out of harmony with the accepted use of the term, serves only to engender a confusion of ideas. It should be suppressed, in order to avoid misunderstandings.

That men should be deluded, however, into crediting animals with “intelligence” (properly so-called) is not at all surprising, when we reflect on the source of this misapprehension; for we find combined in the animal two important factors, whose association closely simulates intelligence, namely, sentient consciousness and unconscious teleology. Now teleology is not inherent or subjective intelligence, but rather an objective expression and product of intelligence. It exists in unconscious mechanisms like phonographs and adding machines, and it is, likewise, manifest in unconscious organisms like plants. Here, however, there is no danger of confounding it with conscious intelligence, because machines and plants do not possess consciousness in any form whatever. But in animals, on the contrary, teleology is intimately associated with sentient consciousness. Here the teleological automatisms of instinct are not wholly blind and mechanical, but are guided by sense-perception and associative memory. It is this combination of teleology with sentient “discernment” (as Fabre styles it) that conveys the illusory impression of a conscious intelligence. Careful analysis, however, of the facts, in conjunction with judicious experiments, will, in every instance, enable the observer to distinguish between this deceptive semblance of intelligence and that inherent rational power of abstraction, classification, and inference which is the unique prerogative of the human being. A genuine intelligence of this sort need not be invoked to explain any of the phenomena of brute psychology. All of them, from the highest to the lowest, are explicable in terms of the sensitivo-nervous functions. To illustrate the truth of this statement let us cite a few typical examples of animal behavior, that are sometimes regarded as manifestations of intelligent or rational consciousness on the part of the brute.

Animals, it is pointed out, learn by experience. The tiny chick that has been stung by a wasp, for instance, learns to avoid such noxious creatures for the future. This is, indeed, “learning by experience.” Obviously, however, it does not consist in an inference of a new truth from an old truth. On the contrary, it amounts to nothing more than a mere association of imagery, formed in accordance with the law of contiguity in time, sanctioned by the animal’s sensual appetite, and persistently conserved in its sentient memory. A bond of association is formed between the visual image of the wasp and the immediately ensuing sensation of pain. Thereafter the wasp and the pain are associated in a single complex, which the sensile memory of the animal permanently retains. We are dealing with a mere association of contiguity, and nothing further is required to explain the future avoidance of wasps by the chick. The abilities acquired by animals through the trial and error method are to be explained in the same way. A horse confined within an enclosure, for example, seeks egress to the fresh grass of the pasture. The fact that repeated exits through the gate of the enclosure have associated the image of its own access to the pasture with the particular spot where the gate is located induces it to approach the gate. Its quest, however, is balked by the fact that the gate is closed and latched. Thereupon, it begins to chafe under the urge of frustrated appetite. Certain actions ensue, some spontaneous and others merely reflex movements. It paws the ground, prances about, and rubs its nose against the gate. Its futile efforts to pass through the closed gate continue indefinitely and aimlessly, until, by some lucky accident, its nose happens to strike against the latch and lift it sufficiently to release the gate. This causes the gate to swing ajar, and the horse rushes out to food and freedom. By the law of contiguity, the vision of free egress through the gate is thereafter firmly associated in the horse’s sense-memory with the final sensation experienced in its nose just prior to the advent of the agreeable eventuation of its prolonged efforts. Henceforth the animal will be able to release itself from the enclosure by repeating the concatenated series of acts that memory associates with the pleasurable result. On the second occasion, however, the more remote of its futile acts will have been forgotten, and the process of opening the gate will occupy less time, though probably a certain amount of useless pawing and rubbing will still persist. Gradually, however, the number of inefficacious actions will diminish, until, after many repetitions of the experience, only those actions which directly issue in the desirable result will remain in the chain of impressions retained by memory, all others being eliminated. For, by a teleological law, making for economy of effort, all impressions not immediately and constantly connected with the gratification of animal appetites tend to be inhibited. Pawlow’s experiments on dogs show that impressions which coincide in time with such gratification tend to be recalled by a return of the appetitive impulse, but are soon disconnected from such association and inhibited, if they recur independently of the recurrence of gratification. For this reason, the horse tends to remember more vividly those actions which are more closely connected with the pleasurable result, and, as its superfluous actions are gradually suppressed by a protective process of inhibition, it gradually comes to run through the series of actions necessary to open the gate with considerable accuracy and dispatch.

The point to be noted, however, is that the horse does not discursively analyze this concatenated series of associated stimulators and actions; for, let the concrete circumstances be changed never so little, the horse will at once lose its laboriously acquired ability to open the gate. Such, for example, will be the result, if the position of the gate be transferred to another part of the enclosure. The horse, therefore, is incapable of adapting its acquired ability to new conditions. It can only rehearse the original series in all its initial concreteness and stereotyped specificity; and it must, whenever the circumstances are changed, begin once more at the beginning, and rearrive by trial and error at its former solution of the problem. The reason is that the horse merely senses, but does not understand, its own solution of the problem. The sense, however, cannot abstract from the here and now. Consequently, the human infant of two summers is enabled by its dawning intelligence to adapt old means to new ends, but the ten-year-old horse cannot adjust its abilities to the slightest change in the concrete conditions surrounding the original acquisition of a useful habit. The cognitive powers of an animal are confined to the sphere of concrete singularity, it has no power to abstract or generalize.

The selfsame observation applies to the tricks which animals “learn” through human training. Their sensitive memory is very receptive and retentive. Hence, by means of a judicious alternation of “rewards” and “penalties” (e.g. of sugar and the whip), a man can, as it were, inscribe his own thoughts on the tablets of the brute’s memory, in such a way as to force the latter to form habits that appear to rest upon a basis of intelligence. And so, indeed, they do, but the intelligence is that of the trainer and not that of the animal, which is as destitute of intrinsic intelligence as is a talking phonograph, upon whose records a man can inscribe his thoughts far more efficiently than he can write them in terms of the neurographic imagery of the canine, equine, or simian memory.

The trained monkey always renders back without change the original lesson imparted by its human trainer. The lesson as first received becomes an immutable reaction-basis for the future. With a school child, however, the case is quite different. It does, indeed, receive “an historical basis of reaction,” when the teacher illustrates the process of multiplication by means of an example on the blackboard. But it does not receive this information passively and render it back in the original stereotyped form. On the contrary, it analyzes the information received, and is able thereafter to reapply the analyzed information to new problems differing in specificity from the problem that the teacher originally worked out on the blackboard. The human pupil does not, like the monkey or the phonograph, render back what it has received in unaltered specificity. His reaction differs from its original passive basis. To borrow the words of Driesch, he “uses this basis, but he is not bound to it as it is. He dissolves the combined specificities that have created the basis.” (“The Problem of Individuality,” pp. 27, 28.) The brute, therefore, cannot “learn,” or “be taught” in the sense of intellectual comprehension and enlightenment. “We see,” says John Burroughs somewhere, “that the caged bird or beast does not reason because no strength of bar or wall can convince it that it cannot escape. It cannot be convinced because it has no faculties that are convinced by evidence. It continues to dash itself against the bars not until it is convinced, but until it is exhausted. Then slowly a new habit is formed, the cage habit. When we train an animal to do stunts, we do not teach it or enlighten it in any proper sense, but we compel it to form new habits.”

Human beings, however, can be taught and enlightened under the most adverse circumstances. Even those unfortunates are susceptible to it, who, like Laura Bridgman, Helen Keller, Martha Obrecht, Marie Heurtin, and others, have been blind and deaf and dumb from infancy or birth. With nearly all the light of sensibility extinguished, there was, nevertheless, latent within them something of which a perfectly normal ape, for all the integrity of its senses, is essentially destitute, namely, the superorganic power of reason. Reason, however, is extrinsically dependent on organic sensibility, and, consequently, “the gates of their souls” were closed to human converse, until such a time as the patient kindness and ingenuity of their educators devised means of reciprocal communication on a basis of tactile signals. Thereupon they revealed an intelligence perfectly akin to that of their rescuers. Years of similar education, however, would be futile in the case of an ape. The “gates of the soul” would never open, because the ape has no rational soul, to which the most ingenious trainer might gain access, in which respect it differs fundamentally from even the lowest savage. A being that lacks reason may be trained by means of instruction, but it can never be enlightened by it.

Another consideration, that is occasionally urged in proof of bestial intelligence, is the fact that birds, mammals, and even insects communicate with one another by means of sounds or equivalent signals, which are sometimes remarkably diversified in quality and consequent efficacy. “Since fowls,” writes Darwin, “give distinct warnings for danger on the ground, or in the sky, from hawks ..., may not some unusually wise ape-like animal have imitated the growl of a beast of prey, and thus told his fellow monkeys the nature of the expected danger? This would have been a first step in the formation of a language.” (“Descent of Man,” 2nd ed., ch. III, pp. 122, 123.) This is saltatory logic with a vengeance! Darwin leaps at one bound across the entire chasm between irrationality and rationality, without pausing to build even the semblance of a bridge. Given an animal with the foresight and inventiveness requisite to employ onomatopœia for the purpose of specifying the nature of an expected danger, in the interest of its fellows, and we need not trouble ourselves further about plausibleizing any transition; for so “unusually wise” an ape is already well across the gap that separates reason from unreason, and far on its way towards the performance of all the feats of which reason is capable. After swallowing the camel of so much progress, it would be straining at a gnat to deny such a paragon of simian genius the mere power of articulate speech. Of course, if imagination rather than logic, is to be the dominant consideration in science, there is no difficulty in imagining animals to be capable of thinking or doing anything we choose to ascribe to them, as witness Æsop’s Fables. But, if sober and critical judgment be in order, then, evidently, from the simple fact that an animal has diversified cries manifestative of different emotions or degrees of emotion (e.g. of fear or rage) and capable of arousing similar emotions in other animals of the same species, it by no means follows that such an irrational animal can adapt a means to an end by using mimicry in order to give notification of approaching danger, and to specify the nature of the danger in question.

This stupid anthropomorphism arises from Darwin’s failure to appreciate the fundamental distinction that exists between the “language” of animals, which is indicative, emotional, and inarticulate, and human language, which is descriptive, conceptual, and articulate. Brute animals, under the stress of a determinate passion or emotion, give vent impulsively and unpremeditatedly to instinctive cries indicative of their peculiar emotional state. Moreover, these emotionalized sounds are capable of arousing kindred emotions in the breasts of other animals of the same species, since organisms of the same species are syntonic with (i.e. attuned to) one another. Hence these reflex or instinctive cries have, no doubt, a teleological value, inasmuch as they serve to protect the race by inciting a peculiar flight-reaction in those that are not in immediate contact with the fear-inspiring object. This so-called warning, however, is given without reflection or intention on the part of the frightened animal, and is simply sensed, but not interpreted, by the other animals that receive it.

This premised, it is easy to discriminate between bestial and human language. The former is not articulate, that is to say, the sounds of which it is composed have not been elaborated by analysis and synthesis into phonetic elements and grammatical forms. In the second place, it is emotional and not conceptual, because it is manifestative of the emotions or passions (which are functions of the organic or sensual appetite), and not of rational concepts. In the third place, it is indicative, that is, it merely signalizes a determinate emotional state, as a thermometer indicates the temperature, or a barometer the atmospheric pressure. It is not, therefore, descriptive, in the sense of being selected and arranged in syntactic sequence for the express purpose of making others realize one’s own experiences. The rational language of man, on the contrary, is not emotional. Only a negligible portion of the human vocabulary is made up of emotional interjections. It consists, for the most part, of sounds descriptive of thought, to express which an elaborate system of vowels and consonants are discriminated and articulated on the basis of social agreement, the result being a conventional vocal code invented and used for the express purpose of conveying, not emotions or imagery, but general and abstract concepts.

§ 5. The True Significance of Instinct

A third class of facts commonly cited as evidence of bestial intelligence are the remarkable phenomena of instinct. The beaver acts as though it were acquainted with the principles of hydraulics and engineering, when it maintains the water at the height requisite to submerge the entrance to its dwelling by building a dam of mud, logs, and sticks across the stream at a point below the site of its habitation. The predatory wasp Pompilius is endowed with surgical art, that suggests a knowledge of anatomy, inasmuch as it first disarms and afterwards paralyzes its formidable prey, the Lycosa or black Tarantula. Another predatory wasp, the Stizus ruficornis, disables Mantids in a similar fashion. One of the American Pompilids, the black wasp Priocnemis flavicornis, is an adept in the art of navigation, since it adopts the principle of the French hydroglissia (an air-driven boat which skims the water under the propulsion of an aeroplane propeller). This insect tows a huge black spider several times its own size and too heavy to be carried, propelling its prey with buzzing wings along the open waterway, and leaving behind a miniature wake like that of a steamer. It thus avoids the obstacles of the dense vegetation, and saves time and energy in transporting the huge carcass of its paralyzed quarry to the haven of its distant burrow. Spiders like the Epeira, for example, are endowed with the mathematical ability of constructing their webs on the patterns of the logarithmic spiral of Jacques Bernouilli (1654-1705), a curve which it took man centuries to discover. The dog infested with parasitic tapeworms (Taenia) evinces a seeming knowledge of pharmaceutics, seeing that it will avidly devour Common Wormwood (Artemisia absynthium), an herb which it never touches otherwise.

J. Henri Fabre and Erich Wasmann, S.J., have formulated very sound and critical views on the subject of instinct. The works of these authors are now available in English. (Cf. de Mattos’ translation of the Souvenirs etymologiques: “The Mason Bees,” Ch. VII; “The Bramble Bees,” Ch. VI; “The Hunting Wasps,” Chs. IX, X, XX; cf. also Wasmann’s Instinct and Intelligence, and Psychology of Ants and of Higher Animals, Engl. translation by Gummersbach.)

In all these cases, however, as we have previously remarked, the illusion of intelligence is due to the combination of teleology or objective purposiveness with sentient consciousness. But teleology is nothing more than a material expression of intelligence, not to be confounded with subjective intelligence, which is its causal principle. When the cells of the iris of the eye of a larval salamander regenerate the lens in its typical perfection, after the latter has been experimentally destroyed, we behold a process that is objectively, but not subjectively, intelligent. In like manner the instinctive acts of an animal are teleological or objectively purposive, but do not proceed from an intelligence inherent in the animal, any more than the intelligent soliloquy delivered by a phonograph proceeds from a conscious intelligence inherent in the disc. In the animal, sentient consciousness is associated with this teleology or objective purposiveness, but such consciousness is only aware of what can be sensed, and is, therefore, unconscious of purpose, that is, of the supersensible link, which connects a means with an end. “Instinct,” to cite the words of Wm. James, “is usually defined as the faculty of acting in such a way as to produce certain ends, without foresight of the ends, and without previous education in the performance.” (“Principles of Psychology,” vol. II, c. xxiv, p. 383.) Hence the unconscious and objective purposiveness, which the human mind discerns in the instinctive behavior of brutes, is manifestative, not of an intelligence within the animal itself, but only of the infinite intelligence of the First Cause or Creator, Who imposed these laws replete with wisdom upon the animal kingdom, and of the finite intelligence of man, who is capable of recognizing the Divine purpose expressed, not only in the instincts of animals, but in all the telic phenomena of nature. Such marvels are not the fortuitous result of uncoördinated contingencies. Behind these correlated teleologies of the visible universe there is a Supreme Intelligence, which has “ordered all things in measure, and number, and weight.” (Wisdom: XI, 21.) “And this universal geometry,” says Fabre, in allusion to the mathematics of the Epeira’s web, “tells of an Universal Geometrician, whose divine compass has measured all things. I prefer that, as an explanation of the logarithmic curve of the Ammonite and the Epeira, to the Worm screwing up the tip of its tail. It may not perhaps be in accordance with latter-day teaching, but it takes a loftier flight.” (“Life of the Spider,” p. 400.)

But, though the teleology of instinct is wonderful in the extreme, the element of psychic regulation is so subordinate and restricted, that, far from postulating intelligent control, certain scientists go so far as to deny even sentient control, in the case of instinctive behavior. Animals, in their opinion, are nothing more than “reflex machines,” a view which coincides with that of Descartes, who regarded animals as unconscious automatons. “The instincts,” says Pawlow, “are also reflexes but more complex.” (Science, Nov. 9, 1923, p. 359.) The late Jacques Loeb was a protagonist of the view that instincts are simply metachronic chain-reflexes, in which one elementary process releases another, each preceding phase terminating in the production of the succeeding phase, until the entire gamut of concatenated arcs has been traversed. Hence, John B. Watson, the Behaviorist disciple of Loeb, defines instinct as “a combination of congenital responses unfolding serially under appropriate stimulation.”

But, if Darwinian anthropomorphism sins by excess, Loeb’s mechanism sins by defect, and fails to account for the indubitable variability of instinctive behavior. For, however fixed and stereotyped such behavior may be, it manifests unmistakable adaptation to external circumstances and emergencies, as well as subordination to the general physiological condition of the organism, phenomena that exclude the idea of fatal predetermination according to the fixed pattern of a determinate series of reflex arcs. As Jennings has shown, synaptic coördination in the neural mechanism cannot be more than a partial factor in determining serial responses. The state of the organism as a whole must also be taken into account. (Cf. “Behavior of the Lower Organisms,” p. 251.) Thus an earthworm may turn to the right simply because it has just turned to the left, but this so-called “chain-reflex” does not involve an invariable and inevitable sequence of events, since the earthworm may turn twice or thrice to the left, before the second reaction of turning to the right comes into play. Any animal, when sated, will react differently to a food stimulus than it will when it is starved, by reason of its altered organic condition. We have something more, therefore, to reckon with than a mere system of reflexes released by a simple physical stimulus.

The second type of variability manifested by instinct is its capacity for complex and continuous adjustment to variable environmental circumstances. Thus predatory animals, such as wasps, crabs, spiders, and carnivorous mammals, accommodate themselves appropriately and uninterruptedly to the changing and unforeseeable movements of the prey they are engaged in stalking, giving evidence in this way of the regulation of their hunting instincts by sensory impressions. Whether this element of psychic control is based upon object-perception, or simple sensation, and whether it involves a sensual impulse, or is merely sensori-motor, we have, naturally, no direct means of ascertaining. But the presence of some sort of sensory regulation is evident enough, e.g. in the prompt and unerring flight of vultures to distant carrion. Moreover, there is a close analogy between our sense organs and those of an animal. Particularly, in the case of the higher animals, the resemblance of the sense organs and nervous system to our own is extremely close, so much so that even the localization of sensory and motor centers in the brain is practically identical in dogs, apes, and men. Moreover, the animals make analogous use of their sense organs, orientating them and accommodating them for perception, and using them to inspect strange objects, etc., e.g. they turn their eyes, prick up their ears, snuff the wind, etc. Again, analogous motor and emotional effects result from the stimulation of their sense organs, and brutes make emotional displays of anger, exultation, fear, etc., similar to our own. Hence it is to be presumed that they have similar sensuous experiences. The analogy, however, must not be pressed further than the external manifestations warrant. With brute animals, the manifestations in question are confined exclusively to phenomena of the sensuous order.

Another indication of sensory control is found in the repair-work performed by animals endowed with the constructive instinct. C. F. Schroeder, for instance, experimenting on certain caterpillars, found that they repaired their weaving, whenever it was disturbed by the experimenter. Fabre, too, discovered that a Mason-bee would plaster up holes or clefts marring the integrity of its cell, provided that the bee was actually engaged in the process of plastering at the time, and provided that the experimenter inflicted the damage at the level, and within the area, of the construction work on which the bee was then engaged. In a word, if the damage inflicted could be repaired by a simple continuation or extension of its actual work of the moment, the bee was able to cope with the emergency. There are other ways, too, in which the animal adapts its constructive instincts to external circumstance. Fabre tells us that the Bramble-bee Osmia, which builds a train of partitioned cells in snail shells or in hollow reeds, will victual first and then plaster in a partition, if the reed be narrow, but will first plaster a partition, and then introduce honey and pollen through a hole left unclosed in the partition, whenever the reed is of greater diameter. This reversal of the procedure according to the exigencies of the external situation does not suggest the chain-reflex of Loeb. (Cf. “The Bramble-Bee,” pp. 214-217.) Another kind of adaptation of instinct to external circumstances consists in the economical omission of the initial step of a serial construction, in cases where the environmental conditions provide a ready-made equivalent. “The silkworm,” says Driesch, “is said not to form its web of silk if it is cultivated in a box containing tulle, and some species of bees which normally construct tunnels do not do so if they find one ready made in the ground, they then only perform their second instinctive act: separating the tunnel into single cells.” (“Science & Phil. of the Organism,” vol. II, p. 47.)

Driesch’s analysis of the constructive instinct shows that these facts of adaptation or regulation fit in with the idea of sensory control rather than with that of a chain-reflex. In the supposition that the successive stages of instinctive construction are due to a chain-reflex, consisting of a series of elementary motor reactions a, b, c, etc., in which a produces the external work A and, on terminating, releases b, which, in turn, produces external work B and releases c, etc., clearly b could never appear before a, and the sight of A ready-made would not inhibit a, nor would the removal of A defer the advent of b. In other words, regulation would be impossible. But, if we suppose that not the elemental act a, but rather the sensory perception of A, the first state of the external construction, is the stimulus to b and, consequently, to the production of the second state of construction B, then we understand why b is released independently of a, when, for example, an insect discovers a ready-made substitute for A, the initial step in its construction, and we also understand why, in cases of accidental damage resulting in the total or partial removal of A, the reaction b is deferred and the reaction a prolonged, until the repair or reconstruction of A is complete; for, in this supposition, the addition of A will inhibit a and release b, whereas the subtraction of A will inhibit the appearance of b and consequently defer B, until the state of construction A, the sight of which is the stimulus to b, is complete. The fact of regulation, therefore, entails sensory control of the serial responses involved in the constructive instinct. Hence, as H. P. Weld of Cornell expresses it: “We may safely assume that even in the lowest forms of animal life some sort of sensory experience releases the (instinctive) disposition and to an extent determines the subsequent course of action.” (Encycl. Am., v. 15, p. 168.)

But it would be going to the opposite extreme to interpret these adjustments of instinct to external contingencies as evidence of intelligent regulation. The animal’s ability, for example, to repair accidental damage to a construction, which instinct impels it to build, is rigidly limited to repairs that can be accomplished by a simple continuation of the actual and normal occupation of the moment. If, however, the damage affects an already completed portion of the instinctive structure, and its present occupation is capable of continuance, the animal is impotent to relinquish this actual occupation of the moment, in order to cope with the emergency. Suppose, for illustration, that the instinctive operations a and b are finished and the animal is in the c-stage of its instinctive performance, then, if the damage is inflicted in the A-portion of the structure, and c can be continued independently of A, the animal cannot relinquish c and return to a, in order to restore the marred integrity of A. This shows that the animal is guided, in its repair-work, by sense, which is bound to the here and now, and not by intelligence, which is an abstractive faculty that emancipates from the actual and concrete present, and enables the possessor to hark back to the past of its performance, should necessity require. Thus Fabre found that the Mason-bee, after it had turned from building to the foraging of honey and pollen, would no longer repair holes pricked in its cell, but suffered the latter to become a veritable vessel of the Danaïdes, which it vainly strove to fill with its liquid provender. Though the holes affected portions extremely close to the topmost layer of masonry, and although it frequently sounded and explored these unaccustomed holes with its antennæ, it took no steps to check the escape of the honey and pollen by recurring to its mason craft of earlier stages. And, finally, when it did resume the plasterer’s trade in constructing a lid for the cell, it would spare no mortar to plug the gaping breaches in the walls of its cell, but deposited its egg in a chamber drained of honey, and then proceeded to perform the useless work of closing with futile diligence only the topmost aperture in this much perforated dwelling. Obviously, therefore, the bee failed to perceive the connection which existed between these breaches and the escape of the honey, and it was unable to apply its instinctive building skill to new uses by abstraction from the definite connection, in which the latter is normally operative.

Sense, therefore, and not intelligence, is the regulatory principle of instinct. To recognize causal and telic relationships is the prerogative of a superorganic intelligence. The transcendental link by which a useful means is referred to an ulterior end is something that cannot be sensed, but only understood. An animal, therefore, acts toward an end, not on account of an end. Nature, however, has compensated for this ignorance by implanting in each species of animal a special teleological disposition, by reason of which objects and actions, which are, under normal conditions, objectively useful to the individual, or the species, become invested for the animal with a subjective aspect of agreeableness, while objects and actions, which are normally harmful, are invested with a subjective aspect of repulsiveness. The qualities of serviceableness and pleasantness happen, so far as the animal is concerned, to be united in one and the same concrete object or action, but the animal is only aware of the pleasantness, which appeals to its senses, and not of the serviceableness, which does not. Thus, in the example already cited, the dog suffering from tapeworms eats the herb known as Common Wormwood, not because it is aware of the remedial efficacy of the herb, but simply because the odor and flavor of the plant appeal to the animal in its actual morbid condition, ceasing to do so, however, when the latter regains the state of health. How different is the action of the man whose blood is infected with malarial parasites and who takes quinine, not because the bitter taste of the alkaloid appeals to his palate, but solely because he has his future cure explicitly in view! “Finally,” says Weld, “the more we learn about instincts the more apparent it becomes that the situations from which they proceed are meaningful, but we need not suppose that the organism is aware of the meaning. The chick in the egg feels (we may only guess as to its nature) a vague discomfort, and the complicated reaction by which it makes its egress from the shell is released.” (Encycl. Am., v. 15, p. 169.)

Recapitulating, then, we may define instinct as a psycho-organic propensity, not acquired by education or experience, but congenital by inheritance and identical in all members of the same zoölogical species, having as its physical basis the specific nervous organization of the animal and as its psychic basis a teleological coördination of the cognitive, emotional, and motor functions, in virtue of which, given the proper physiological state of the organism and the presence of an appropriate environmental stimulus, an animal, without consciousness of purpose, is impelled to the inception, and regulated in the performance, of complicated behavior which is sensually gratifying and, under normal circumstances, simultaneously beneficial to the individual, or the race.

Instinctive acts are performed without previous experience or training on the part of the animal, and are, nevertheless, at least in the majority of cases, perfect in their first performance. A few, like the pecking-instinct of young chickens, are slightly improvable through sentient experience, e.g. the young chick, at first undiscriminating in the choice of the particles which it picks up, learns later by associative memory to distinguish what is tasty and edible from what is disagreeable and inedible, but, for the most part, the perfection of instinctive acts is independent of prior experience. Hence instinct is entirely different from human reason, which, in the solution of problems, is compelled to begin with reflection upon the data furnished by previous experience, or education. The animal, however, in its instinctive operations, without pausing to investigate, deliberate, or calculate, proceeds unhesitatingly on the very first occasion to a prompt and perfect solution of its problems. Hence, without study, consultation, planning, or previous apprenticeship of any sort, and in the complete absence of experimental knowledge, that might serve as matter for reflection or as a basis for inference, the animal is able to solve intricate problems in engineering, geometry, anatomy, pharmaceutics, etc., which the combined intelligence of mankind required centuries upon centuries of schooling, research, and reflection in order to solve. Of two things, therefore, one: either these actions do not proceed from an intelligent principle inherent in the animal; or they do, and in that case we are compelled to recognize in brute animals an intelligence superior to our own, because they accomplish deftly and without effort ingenious feats that human reason cannot duplicate, save clumsily and at the price of prolonged discipline and incessant drudgery. “Perhaps the strongest reason,” says an anonymous writer, “for not regarding the activities of instinct as intelligent is that in such enormously complex sequences of action as, for instance, the emperor moth carries out in the preparing of an escape-opening for itself on its completing the larval and passing into the imago state, the intelligence needed would be so great that it could not be limited to this single activity, and yet it is so limited.”

Cf. Nelson’s Encyclopedia, v. 6, p. 452.

Intelligence is essentially a generalizing and abstracting power; hence, from its very nature, it could not be limited to a single activity. Bestial instincts, however, though frequently so amazingly complex and ingeniously purposive as to seem the fruit of profound meditation, are, nevertheless, confined exclusively to this or that determinate ability. They operate within narrow and preëstablished grooves, from which they never swerve to any appreciable degree, being but little modifiable or perfectible by experience. Bees always construct hexagonal cells, spiders stick to the logarithmic spiral, and beavers never attempt to put their engineering skill to new uses. Instincts have but little pliancy, their regularity and uniformity being such as to make the instinctive abilities definitely predictable in the case of any given species of animal. Now, the distinctive mark of intelligence is versatility, that is, aptitude for many things without determinate restriction to this or that. A man who is expert in one art may, by reason of his intelligence, be equally proficient in a dozen others. The biologist may be a competent chemist, and the astronomer an excellent physicist. Michel Angelo was a sculptor, a frescoer, a painter, an anatomist, an engineer, and an architect, while Leonardo da Vinci had even more arts to his credit. To predict before birth the precise form that a man’s ability will take is an impossibility. Certain aptitudes, such as a musical gift, are no doubt inherited, but it is an inheritance which imposes no rigid necessity upon inheriter; since he is free to neglect this native talent, and to develop others for which he has no special innate aptitude. With man, the fashion in clothing and the styles of architecture vary from day to day. The brute, however, never emerges from the rut of instinct, and each generation of a given animal species monotonously reproduces the history of the previous generation. Man, on the contrary, is capable of indefinite progress, as the march of human cultures and civilizations shows. Gregarious animals are restricted by their instincts to determinate types of aggregation, as we see in the case of ants and bees. Hence these insect communities are unacquainted with our sanguinary revolutions which overturn monarchies in favor of republics, or set up dictatorships in place of democracies; for, fortunately or unfortunately, as one may choose to regard it, man is not limited to one form of government rather than another.

Animals, then, notwithstanding their wonderful instincts, are deficient in precisely that quality which is the unique criterion of intelligence, namely, versatility. Each species has but one stereotyped ability, outside of which it is woefully stupid and inefficient. “So long,” says Fabre, “as its circumstances are normal the insect’s actions are calculated most rationally in view of the object to be attained” (“The Mason-Bees,” p. 167), but let the circumstances cease to be normal, let them vary never so little from those which ordinarily obtain, and the animal is helpless, while its instinctive predisposition becomes, not merely futile, but often positively detrimental. Thus the instinct, which should, in the normal course of events, guide night-flying moths to the white flowers that contain the life-sustaining nectar of their nocturnal banquets, proves their undoing, when they come into contact with the white lights of artificial illumination. In fact, the fatal fondness of the moth for the candle flame has become in all languages a proverb for the folly of courting one’s own destruction.

The animal may employ an exquisitely efficient method in accomplishing its instinctive work, but is absolutely impotent to apply this ingenious method to more than one determinate purpose. Man, however, is not so restricted. He varies at will both his aims and his methods. He can adapt the same means (a pocketknife, for instance) to different ends, and, conversely, he can obtain the same end by the use of different means (e.g. communicate by mail, or telegraph, or radio). Man, in a word, is emancipated from limitation to the singular and the concrete by virtue of his unique prerogative, reason, or intelligence, the power that enables him to generalize from the particular and to abstract from the concrete. This is the secret of his unlimited versatility. This is the basis of his capacity for progress. This is the root of his freedom; for his will seeks happiness in general, happiness in the abstract, and is not, therefore, compelled to choose any particular form or concrete embodiment of happiness, such as this or that style of architecture, this or that form of government, this or that kind of clothing, etc., etc. Teleology is but a material expression of intelligence, and may, therefore, occur in things destitute of intelligence, but versatility is the inseparable concomitant and infallible sign of an inherent and autonomous intelligence. Lacking this quality, instinct, however telic, is obviously not intelligence.

Another indication of the fact that no intelligence lies behind the instinctive behavior of brutes is manifest from their evident unconsciousness of purpose. That the animal is ignorant of the purpose implied in its own instinctive actions appears from the fact that it will carry out these operations with futile diligence and exactitude, even when, through accident, the purpose is conspicuously absent. Thus the hen deprived of her eggs will, nevertheless, continue the now futile process of incubation for twenty-one days, or longer, despite the fact that her obstinacy in maintaining the straw of the empty nest at a temperature of 104° F. serves no useful purpose whatever. She cannot but sense the absence of the eggs; she has not, however, the intelligence to realize that incubation without eggs is vain. The connection between the latter and the former is something that mere sense cannot apprehend. Hence the hen is not troubled by the purposelessness of her performance. Fabre gives many examples of this futile persistence in instinctive operations, despite their complete frustration. Alluding to the outcome of his experiments on the Mason-wasp Pelapaeus, he says: “The Mason bees, the Caterpillar of the Great Peacock Moth, and many others, when subjected to similar tests, are guilty of the same illogical behaviour: they continue, in the normal order, their series of industrious actions, though accident has now rendered them all useless. Just like millstones unable to cease revolving though there be no corn left to grind, let them once be given the compelling power and they will continue to perform their task despite its futility.” (“Bramble Bees,” pp. 192, 193.)

The instance cited by Dr. H. D. Schmidt is an excellent illustration of this inability of an animal to appreciate either the utility or futility of its instinctive behavior. Having described the instinct of squirrels to bury nuts by ramming them into the ground with their teeth, and then using their paws to cover them with earth, he continues as follows: “Now, as regards the young squirrel, which, of course, never had been present at the burial of a nut, I observed that, after having eaten a number of hickory nuts to appease its appetite, it would take one between its teeth, then sit upright and listen in all directions. Finding all right, it would scratch upon the smooth blanket on which I was playing with it as if to make a hole, then hammer with the nut between its teeth upon the blanket, and finally perform all the motions required to fill up a hole—in the air; after which it would jump away, leaving the nut, of course, uncovered.” (Transactions of the Am. Neurological Ass’n, 1875, vol. I, p. 129—italics his.) This whole pantomime of purposeless gesticulations, from the useless “Stop, look and listen!” down to the final desertion of the uncovered nut, is overwhelming evidence of the fact that the brute is destitute of any rational faculty capable of recognizing the telic aspect of its own instinctive conduct.

The claim is sometimes made that certain forms of animal behavior are not unconsciously, but consciously, telic. Bouvier, for example, claims that in the rare cases of the use of tools among the Arthropoda, we have evidence of the existence of intelligent inventiveness of a rudimentary kind. Thus the crab Melia carries a sea-anemone in its chela as a weapon wherewith to sting its prey into a condition of paralysis. The leaf-cutting ants of India and Brazil use their own thread-spinning larvæ as tools for cementing together the materials out of which their nests are constructed. The predatory wasp Ammophila urnaria uses a pebble to tamp the filling of its burrow. According to the Wheelers (cf. Science, May 30, 1924, p. 486), the hunting wasp Sphex (Ammophila) gryphus (Sm.) makes similar use of a pebble. As Bouvier notes, however, this use of tools appears “to be rather exceptional ..., showing itself only in the primitive state consisting of the use of foreign bodies as implements.” (Smithson. Inst. Rpt. for 1918, p. 456.) Moreover, the animals in question are limited to a concretely determinate kind of tool, which their environment supplies ready-made. Such a use of implements does not presuppose any power of abstraction and generalization. In fact, the presence of such a power is expressly excluded by the consideration that the animal’s so-called “inventiveness” is confined exclusively to one particularized manifestation.

At times the behavior of animals so closely simulates the consciously telic or intelligent conduct of men, that only severely critical methods enable us to discriminate between them. An experiment, which Erich Wasmann, S.J., performed upon ants will serve to illustrate this point. In one of his glass nests, Father Wasmann constructed an island of sand surrounded by a moat filled with water. He then removed from their “nursery” a certain number of the ant larvæ and placed them on the island. Thereupon the ants were observed to build a bridge of sand across the moat “for the purpose,” apparently, of rescuing the marooned larvæ. Such behavior seemed to imply an intelligent ordination of a means to an end. Wasmann’s second experiment, however, proved this inference to be wholly unwarranted; for, when he excavated a hole in the sand of the nest and filled it with water, the ants, stimulated by what to them was the disagreeable dampness of the marginal sand, were impelled to perform the reflex act of kicking about in the sand. This impulse persisted until all traces of the hole, the dampness and the water had been buried under a carpet of drier sand. Then, and then only, was the aforesaid impulse inhibited. Applying these results to the interpretation of the first experiment, we see that the “building of a bridge” in the first experiment was not intentional, but merely an accidental result of a kicking-reflex, with damp sand acting as a stimulator. Once the moat was bridged, however, the ants happened to find the larvæ, and were then impelled by instinct to carry the larvæ to their proper place in the nest. To see in such an incident a planned and premeditated rescue of the marooned larvæ would be grossly anthropomorphic. Nevertheless, had only the first experiment been performed, such an anthropomorphic interpretation would have seemed fully justified, and it was only by an appropriate variation of the conditions of the original experiment that this false interpretation could be definitively excluded.

Consciously telic behavior is distinguishable from unconsciously telic conduct only to the extent that it implies an agent endowed with the power of abstraction. Unless an agent can vary radically the specificity of the procedure, whereby it attains a given end, the purposiveness of its behavior is no evidence of its intelligence. “Among animals,” says Bergson, “invention is never more than a variation on the theme of routine. Locked up as it is within the habits of its species, the animal succeeds no doubt in broadening these by individual initiative; but its escape from automatism is momentary only, just long enough to create a new automatism; the gates of its prison close as soon as they are opened; dragging the chain merely lengthens it. Only with man does consciousness break the chain.” (Cf. Smithson. Inst. Rpt. for 1918, p. 457.)

In vain, then, do our Darwinian humanizers of the brute exalt instinct at the expense of intelligence. Their attempt to reduce to a difference of degree the difference of kind that separates the irrational from the rational, fails all along the line. Indeed, far from being able to account for the appearance of intelligence in the world, transformistic theories are impotent to account for so much as the development of instinct, all forms of the evolutionary theory, the Lamarckian, the Darwinian, the De-Vriesian, etc., being equally inadequate to the task of explaining the origin of animal instincts.

The complex instinctive behavior of predatory wasps, for example, is absolutely essential for the preservation of their respective races, and yet these indispensable instincts are completely useless in any other than the perfect state. From their very nature, therefore, they do not admit of gradual development. The law of all, or none, holds here. “Instinct developed by degrees,” says Fabre, “is flagrantly impossible. The art of preparing the larva’s provisions allows none but masters, and suffers no apprentices; the Wasp must excel in it from the outset or leave the thing alone.” (“The Hunting Wasps,” p. 403.) To be useful at all, the instinctive operation must possess an indivisible perfection, which cannot be partitioned into degrees. The Pompilius (Calicurgus), for instance, must, under penalty of instant death, take the preliminary precaution to sting into inaction the ganglion that controls the poison forceps of her formidable prey, the Black Tarantula (Lycosa), before she proceeds to paralyze it by stabbing its thoracic ganglion. The slightest imperfection or shortcoming in her surgery would be irretrievably disastrous. Such an instinct never existed in an imperfect form. The first wasp to possess it must have been an expert, or she would never have lived to serve the limp body of the huge spider as living provender for her tiny grub. “The first to come to grips with the Tarantula,” says Fabre, “had an unerring knowledge of her dangerous surgery. The least hesitation, the slightest speculation, and she was lost. The first teacher would also have been the last, with no disciples to take up her art and perfect it.” (“Bramble Bees,” p. 354.)

Another hunting wasp, the Hairy Ammophila, subdues a large caterpillar into a state of coma by pricking with its sting nine of the ventral ganglia, while it spares the cervical ganglion, merely compressing the latter with its mandibles, so as not to destroy life altogether. This nice discrimination rules out Loeb’s hypothesis of a so-called “chemotaxis.” As a result of this elaborate surgical operation, the power of movement is suppressed in every segment, and the tiny larva of the wasp emerging from the egg laid on the ventral surface of the caterpillar can devour this huge living, but motionless, victim in peace and safety. Dead meat would not agree with the larva, and any movement of the caterpillar would be fatal to the delicate grub. To eliminate these contingencies, the Wasp’s surgery must be perfect from the very outset. “There is,” says Fabre, “no via media, no half success. Either the caterpillar is treated according to rule and the Wasp and its family is perpetuated; or else the victim is only partially paralyzed and the Wasp’s offspring dies in the egg. Yielding to the inexorable logic of things, we will have to admit that the first Hairy Ammophila, after capturing a Grey Worm to feed her larva, operated on the patient by the exact method in use today.” (“The Hunting Wasps,” pp. 403, 404.)

Certain meticulous critics of our day cite the fact of the diffusion of the poison as indicating that the surgery of the hunting wasps need not be so perfectly accommodated to the nervous system of their prey, and they attempt in this way to discredit Fabre as having failed to take the occurrence of diffusion into account. A careful reading of his works, however, will serve to vindicate him in this respect. In a chapter on the poison of the bee, for instance, we read: “The local effect is diffused. This diffusion, which might well take place in the victims of the predatory insects, plays no part in the latter’s method of operation. The egg, which will be laid immediately afterwards, demands the complete inertia of the prey from the outset. Hence all the nerve-centers that govern locomotion must be numbed instantaneously by the virus.” (“Bramble Bees,” p. 347.) Bouvier, therefore, very justly remarks: “After all, when Fabre’s work is examined there is no trouble in seeing that none of these details escaped him. He never disputed the paralytic action of the poison inoculated by the insect, and the wonderful researches by the Peckhams on the Pompilids, which hunt Lycosids, have clearly established the fact that the thrusts of the sting given by the predatory insect produce two different kinds of paralysis, one functional, and often temporary, resulting from the action of the venom, the other structural and persistent, produced by the dart which more or less injures the nervous centers.” (Smithson. Inst. Rpt. for 1916, p. 594.)

In the case of predatory insects, therefore, the instinct must be perfect at the outset, or survival is impossible. For the origin of such instincts, Darwinism, which stresses the gradualness of evolutionary progress, has no explanation that will hold water. Lamarckism, which sees in acquired habits transmitted by inheritance, the origin of instinct, the “memory of the race,” is equally at a loss to account for these instincts. The formation of habits requires practice and repetition. The predatory insect must be perfect at the start, and yet it only exercises its remarkable instinct once a year. Where is the practice and reiteration requisite for canalizing its nervous system into the conduction-paths of habit? How did one particular set of rarely performed acts happen to gain precedence over all others, and to be alone successful in stamping themselves indelibly upon the nerve plasm as habits, and upon the germ plasm as instincts? De-Vriesianism, which would make the acquisition and perfecting of instinct dependent upon the rare and accidental contingency of a fortuitous mutation, is even more objectionable. These instincts are vital to the insect. If their acquisition and improvement depend upon the lucky chance of a series of favorable mutations, its prospects of survival are nil; for it cannot afford to wait at all. “In order to live,” says Fabre, “we all require the conditions that enable us to live: this is a truth worthy of the famous axioms of La Palice. The predatory insects live by their talent. If they do not possess it to perfection, their race is lost.” (“Bramble Bees,” p. 364.)

Recently, there has been a revival of Lamarckism hitherto regarded as defunct. Guyer, Kammerer, and Pawlow profess to find factual justification for it, and Bouvier adopts it in his “La vie psychique des insectes” (1918), to account for the origin of instinct. Of the alleged facts of Kammerer and Guyer, we have spoken in a previous chapter. Here we shall content ourselves with few remarks on the experiments of Ivan Pawlow, as being especially relevant to the subject under consideration. The Russian physiologist has experimented on white mice, and claims that the mice of the fifth generation learned to answer a dinner bell in the space of five lessons, whereas their ancestors of the first generation had required a hundred lessons to answer the same signal. Hence he concludes: “The latest experiments ... show that conditioned reflexes, i.e., the highest nervous activity, are inherited.” (Science, Nov. 9, 1923, p. 360.) His results, however, do not tally with those recently obtained by E. C. MacDowell of the Carnegie Institution, by H. G. Bragg, and by E. M. Vicari of Columbia. MacDowell found that white rats trained in a circular maze did not improve in their susceptibility to training from generation to generation. “Children from trained parents,” he says, “or from trained parents and grandparents, take as long to learn the maze habit as the first generation used.” (Science, March 28, 1924, p. 303.) Having cited the similar results of Bragg, who experimented with white mice, he concludes: “The results are in full accord with those given above; they indicate that the training of the ancestors did not facilitate the learning of the descendants.” (Ibidem.) E. M. Vicari, using a simple maze and white rats, obtained the same results. “It seems clear,” she says, “that the latter generations have not been aided by the training of their ancestors.” (Ibidem.)

Bouvier’s conception, then, that the automatisms of instinct originate as automatisms of acquired habit, the latter being appropriated by inheritance, still stands in need of reliable experimental confirmation. Moreover, a theory of this sort could never account, as Weismann points out, for such phenomena as the specific instincts of worker bees, which are excluded from propagation. Nor can the theory explain, as originating in acquired habit, those instinctive operations of enormous complexity, like the complicated method of emergence employed by the larva of the emperor moth, which only occur once in a lifetime, and could not, therefore, fasten themselves on the organism as a habit.

An evolutionary origin of instinct, however, though extremely improbable, is, at any rate, not absolutely inconceivable. Its teleology, as we have seen, does not imply inherent intelligence, but is explicable as an innate law involving appropriate coördination of the sensory, emotional, and motor functions, all of which are intrinsically dependent on the organism. But intelligence, as we have seen, is a superorganic power, having its source in a spiritual principle, that, from the very nature of things, cannot be evolved from matter. Human reason, therefore, owes its origin, not to any evolution of the human body, but to the creation of the human soul, which is the source and subject of that unique prerogative of man, namely: the power of abstract thought.