Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/526

THE PHYSICAL CONDITIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 513 intelligence in the higher animals, as if the former were not " the fruits of a science of very ancient date," 1 and 110 animal except man had any right to display the latter, springs really from the difficulty of stripping the facts of their traditional and disguising vesture of words and of seeing them as they are in their essential nature. The collective brain in which the varieties of animal nervous organisation are supposed to be gathered and con- centrated would, of course, be a very different brain from a human brain ; although collected, they would be independent. Moreover, each system has for the most part been specialised to the utmost along the particular lines of its development, and, as it were, stereotyped ; wherefore, if it were not separate, it would still be incapable of entering into com- munion of function for a common end with other systems. In the human brain, on the other hand, the different parts are inter-connected structurally and functionally so as to form one organic whole, and they have the character of plastic forming rather than of rigid formed parts ; wherefore, they come into relations of function and develop together in progressive adaptation to surroundings, so working out in the end a fixed mental organisation. The latter, therefore, supplies the physical conditions of consciousness which the former does not. When the human brain has, by a long routine of functions in similar circumstances, grown to certain set forms of feeling, thinking and action, its work is pretty nearly as automatic as the instinct of the animal ; indeed, most persons become eventually little better than more or less complex automata. If we could make the ant and the bee into one animal, by combining their nervous systems and the parts they subserve into one organisation, in which each system should be in intimate functional relation with the other, so that the ant felt and responded to the circumstances of the bee's life, and the bee felt and responded to the circumstances of the ant's 1 Charles George Leroy, born 1723, the Ranger of Versailles and Marly, and author of the admirable letters written as Naturalist of Nuremberg. "It has been proved," he writes, "by incontestable facts that a large portion of the inclinations resulting solely from education, when they have been converted into habits and cultivated for two or three generations successively, become almost hereditary . . . the descendants display- ing them from birth." . . . " It is possible, then, that the actions which we see performed by these animals independently of the teachings of experience are the fruits of a science of very ancient date, and that in former times a thousand trials attended with more or less success have finally led to the attainment of the degree of perfection which we see manifested in some of their works of the present day."