appropriate to the one cannot be set up as absolute to the prejudice of those appropriate to the other. As a philosophic point of view, this position has, of course, an honorable ancestry. But there have always been carping critics who have insisted that the standpoint simply represented an attempt in philosophic speculation to run with the hare and course with the hounds. The question here, therefore, is as to the relevancy of this criticism, which clearly has an important bearing on Mr. Baldwin's point of view. If the theory of organic selection requires even occasionally the assistance of consciousness to make it work, one is at once confronted with the task of showing how consciousness succeeds in producing causal changes in the physical world of muscles ; for if it does not produce such changes, it is evidently futile to cite it at all in connection with explanations supposedly based upon physical causation. That Mr. Baldwin does not mean to blink the issue is shown by the following words: "The fact of accommodation requires on the part of the individual organism something equivalent to what we call consciousness in ourselves" (p. 121).
Now I do not understand that, in his setting forth of the case, Mr. Baldwin means to go further than the utterance of a hope that somehow or other a point of view may be worked out in accordance with which it shall be found tenable to countenance in a vital way the immediate implications of the deliverances of consciousness, concerning the reality of the control which our minds exercise over our movements, and at the same time to adhere without shuffling to the conclusions of physical science in its treatment of causal and mechanical relations,as these bear upon the operations of the neuro-muscular processes. At all events, he says in one place: "And it is the problem of the metaphysics of experience to find the broader category, the final principle of experience as a whole, both objective and subjective. This I do not care to discuss," etc., etc. (pp. 130, 131).
Apparently, then, the recognition that consciousness plays an important part in organic evolution must for the present remain a relatively unilluminating postulate. For it can only be efficient for some large view in which are harmoniously included the rights of both the mechanical and the non-mechanical categories. Until biologists are ready to write the history of evolution in the terms of this larger view (e.g., the "æsthonomic idealism" of a recent article by Mr. Baldwin) instead of in those of the natural science and causation view, all references to efficient factors of the conscious kind must inevitably involve contradiction. One cannot, of course, impute to Mr. Baldwin respon-
