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which are, in the last analysis, of an impersonal, not to say trop- ismatic, character; such as is demanded by science, with its in- sistence on opaque cause and effect. While knowledge is con- strued in teleological terms, in terms of personal interest and at- tention, this teleological aptitude is itself reducible to a product of unteleological natural selection. The teleological bent of in- telligence is a hereditary trait settled upon the race by the selec- tive action of forces that look to no end. The foundations of pragmatic intelligence are not pragmatic, nor even personal or sensible.
This impersonal character of intelligence is, of course, most evident on the lower levels of life. If we follow Mr. Loeb, e. g., in his inquiries into the psychology of that life that lies below the threshold of intelligence, what we meet with is an aimless but unwavering motor response to stimulus. 1 The response is of the nature of motor impulse, and in so far it is "pragmatic," if that term may fairly be applied to so rudimentary a phase of sensibility. The responding organism may be called an "agent" in so far. It is only by a figure of speech that these terms are made to apply to tropismatic reactions. Higher in the scale of sensibility and nervous complication instincts work to a some- what similar outcome. On the human plane, intelligence (the selective effect of inhibitive complication) may throw the re- sponse into the form of a reasoned line of conduct looking to an outcome that shall be expedient for the agent. This is naive pragmatism of the developed kind. There is no longer a ques- tion but that the responding organism is an "agent," and that his intelligent response to stimulus is of a teleological character. But that is not all. The inhibitive nervous complication may also detach another chain of response to the given stimulus, which does not spend itself in a line of motor conduct and does not fall into a system of uses. Pragmatically speaking, this out- lying chain of response is unintended and irrelevant. Except in urgent cases, such an idle response seems commonly to be present as a subsidiary phenomenon. If credence is given to the view
1 Jacques Loeb, Heliotropismus der Thiere and Comparative Psychology and Physiology of the Brain.
