The Destiny of Man | Page 7

reflex actions. All the visceral actions which keep us alive
from moment to moment, the movements of the heart and lungs, the
contractions of arteries, the secretions of glands, the digestive
operations of the stomach and liver, belong to the class of reflex actions.
Throughout the animal world these acts are repeated, with little or no
variation, from birth until death, and the tendency to perform them is
completely organized in the nervous system before birth. Every animal
breathes and digests as well at the beginning of his life as he ever does.

Contact with air and food is all that is needed, and there is nothing to be
learned. These actions, though they are performed by the nervous
system, we do not class as psychical, because they are nearly or quite
unattended by consciousness. The psychical life of the lowest animals
consists of a few simple acts directed toward the securing of food and
the avoidance of danger, and these acts we are in the habit of classing
as instinctive. They are so simple, so few, and so often repeated, that
the tendency to perform them is completely organized in the nervous
system before birth. The animal takes care of himself as soon as he
begins to live. He has nothing to learn, and his career is a simple
repetition of the careers of countless ancestors. With him heredity is
everything, and his individual experience is next to nothing.
As we ascend the animal scale till we come to the higher birds and
mammals, we find a very interesting and remarkable change beginning.
The general increase of intelligence involves an increasing variety and
complication of experiences. The acts which the animal performs in the
course of its life become far more numerous, far more various, and far
more complex. They are therefore severally repeated with less
frequency in the lifetime of each individual. Consequently the tendency
to perform them is not completely organized in the nervous system of
the offspring before birth. The short period of ante-natal existence does
not afford time enough for the organization of so many and such
complex habitudes and capacities. The process which in the lower
animals is completed before birth is in the higher animals left to be
completed after birth. When the creature begins its life it is not
completely organized. Instead of the power of doing all the things
which its parents did, it starts with the power of doing only some few
of them; for the rest it has only latent capacities which need to be
brought out by its individual experience after birth. In other words, it
begins its separate life not as a matured creature, but as an infant which
needs for a time to be watched and helped.

V.
The Dawning of Consciousness.

Here we arrive at one of the most wonderful moments in the history of
creation,--the moment of the first faint dawning of consciousness, the
foreshadowing of the true life of the soul. Whence came the soul we no
more know than we know whence came the universe. The primal origin
of consciousness is hidden in the depths of the bygone eternity. That it
cannot possibly be the product of any cunning arrangement of material
particles is demonstrated beyond peradventure by what we now know
of the correlation of physical forces.[4] The Platonic view of the soul,
as a spiritual substance, an effluence from Godhood, which under
certain conditions becomes incarnated in perishable forms of matter, is
doubtless the view most consonant with the present state of our
knowledge. Yet while we know not the primal origin of the soul, we
have learned something with regard to the conditions under which it
has become incarnated in material forms. Modern psychology has
something to say about the dawning of conscious life in the animal
world. Reflex action is unaccompanied by consciousness. The nervous
actions which regulate the movements of the viscera go on without our
knowledge; we learn of their existence only by study, as we learn of
facts in outward nature. If you tickle the foot of a person asleep, and the
foot is withdrawn by simple reflex action, the sleeper is unconscious
alike of the irritation and of the movement, even as the decapitated frog
is unconscious when a drop of nitric acid falls on his back and he lifts
up a leg and rubs the place. In like manner the reflex movements which
make up the life of the lowest animals are doubtless quite unconscious,
even when in their general character they simulate conscious actions, as
they often do. In the case of such creatures, the famous hypothesis of
Descartes, that animals are automata, is doubtless mainly correct. In the
case of instincts also, where the instinctive actions are completely
organized before birth, and