most powerful practical and æsthetic interests, our chief help towards noticing those special characters of phenomena which, when once possessed and named, are used as reasons, class names, essences, or middle terms, is this association by similarity. Without it, indeed, the deliberate procedure of the scientific man would be impossible: he could never collect his analogous instances. But it operates of itself in highly-gifted minds without any deliberation, spontaneously collecting analogous instances, uniting in a moment what in nature the whole breadth of space and time keeps separate, and so permitting a perception of identical points in the midst of different circumstances, which minds governed wholly by the law of contiguity could never begin to attain.

Figure 66 shows this. If m, in the present representation A, calls up B, C, D, and E, which are similar to A in possessing it, and calls them up in rapid succession, then m, being associated almost simultaneously with such varying concomitants, will roll out' and attract our separate notice.

If so much is clear to the reader, he will be willing to admit that the mind in which this mode of association most prevails will, from its better opportunity of extricating characters, be the one most prone to reasoned thinking; whilst, on the other hand, a mind in which we do not detect reasoned thinking will probably be one in which association by contiguity holds almost exclusive sway.

Geniuses are, by common consent, considered to differ from ordinary minds by an unusual development of association by similarity. One of Professor Bain's best strokes of work is the exhibition of this truth. It applies to geniuses in the line of reasoning as well as in other lines.

The Reasoning Powers of Brutes. As the genius is to the vulgarian, so the vulgar human mind is to the intelli gence of a brute. Compared with men, it is probable that brutes neither attend to abstract characters, nor have associations by similarity. Their thoughts probably pass from one concrete object to its habitual concrete successor far more uniformly than is the case with us. In other words, their associations of ideas are almost exclusively by contiguity. So far, however, as any brute might think by abstract characters instead of by the association of concretes, he would have to be admitted to be a reasoner in the true human sense. How far this may take place is quite uncertain. Certain it is that the more intelligent brutes obey abstract characters, whether they mentally single them out as such or not. They act upon things according to their class. This involves some sort of emphasizing, if not abstracting, of the class-essence by the animal's mind. A concrete individual with none of his characters emphasized is one thing; a sharply conceived attribute marked off from everything else by a name is another. But between no analysis of a concrete, and complete analysis; no abstraction of an embedded character, and complete abstraction, every possible intermediary grade must lie. And some of these grades ought to have names, for they are certainly represented in the mind. Dr. Romanes has pro

posed the name recept, and Prof. Lloyd Morgan the name construct, for the idea of a vaguely abstracted and generalized object-class. A definite abstraction is called an isolate by the latter author. Neither construct nor recept seems to me a felicitous word; but poor as both are, they form a distinct addition to psychology, so I give them here. Would such a word as influent sound better than recept in the following passage from Romanes?

"Water-fowl adopt a somewhat different mode of alighting upon land, or even upon ice, from that which they adopt when alighting upon water; and those kinds which dive from a height (such as terns and gannets) never do so upon land or upon ice. These facts prove that the animals have one recept answering to a solid surface, and another answering to a fluid. Similarly a man will not dive from a height over hard ground or over ice, nor will he jump into water in the same way as he jumps upon dry land. In other words, like the water-fowl he has two distinct recepts, one of which answers to solid ground, and the other to an unresisting fluid. But unlike the water-fowl he is able to bestow upon each of these recepts a name, and thus to raise them both to the level of concepts. So far as the practical purposes of locomotion are concerned, it is of course immaterial whether or not he thus raises his recepts into concepts; but... for many other purposes it is of the highest importance that he is able to do this."*

A certain well-bred retriever of whom I know never bit his birds. But one day having to bring two birds at once, which, though unable to fly, were alive and kicking,' he deliberately gave one a bite which killed it, took the other one still alive to his master, and then returned for the first. It is impossible not to believe that some such abstract thoughts as 'alive-get away-must kill,' . . . etc., passed in rapid succession through this dog's mind, whatever the

*Mental Evolution in Man, p. 74.

sensible imagery may have been with which they were blended. Such practical obedience to the special aspects of things which may be important involves the essence of reasoning. But the characters whose presence impress brutes are very few, being only those which are directly connected with their most instinctive interests. They never extract characters for the mere fun of the thing, as men do. One is tempted to explain this as the result in them of an almost entire absence of such association by similarity as characterizes the human mind. A thing may remind a brute of its full similars, but not of things to which it is but slightly similar; and all that dissociation by varying concomitants, which in man is based so largely on association by similarity, hardly seems to take place at all in the infra-human mind. One total object suggests another total object, and the lower mammals find themselves acting with propriety, they know not why. The great, the fundamental, defect of their minds seems to be the inability of their groups of ideas to break across in unaccustomed places. They are enslaved to routine, to cut-and-dried thinking; and if the most prosaic of human beings could be transported into his dog's soul, he would be appalled at the utter absence of fancy which there reigns. Thoughts would not be found to call up their similars, but only their habitual successors. Sunsets would not suggest heroes' deaths, but supper-time. This is why man is the only metaphysical animal. To wonder why the universe should be as it is presupposes the notion of its being different, and a brute, who never reduces the actual to fluidity by breaking up its literal sequences in his imagination, can never form such a notion. He takes the world simply for granted, and never wonders at it at all.

CHAPTER XXIII.

CONSCIOUSNESS AND MOVEMENT.

All consciousness is motor. The reader will not have forgotten, in the jungle of purely inward processes and products through which the last chapters have borne him, that the final result of them all must be some form of bodily activity due to the escape of the central excitement through outgoing nerves. The whole neural organism, it will be remembered, is, physiologically considered, but a machine for converting stimuli into reactions; and the intellectual part of our life is knit up with but the middle or central' part of the machine's operations. We now go on to consider the final or emergent operations, the bodily activities, and the forms of consciousness consequent thereupon.

Every impression which impinges on the incoming nerves produces some discharge down the outgoing ones, whether we be aware of it or not. Using sweeping terms and ignoring exceptions, we might say that every possible feeling produces a movement, and that the movement is a movement of the entire organism, and of each and all its parts. What happens patently when an explosion or a flash of lightning startles us, or when we are tickled, happens latently with every sensation which we receive. The only reason why we do not feel the startle or tickle in the case of insignificant sensations is partly its very small amount, partly our obtuseness. Professor Bain many years ago gave the name of the Law of Diffusion to this phenomenon of general discharge, and expressed it thus: "According as an impression is accompanied with Feeling, the aroused currents diffuse themselves over the brair