“If these, then, and similar acts, were such that both the impressions which produced them and the acts themselves were perceived by the animal, would they not be called psychological? Is there not in them all that constitutes an intelligent act—adaptation of means to ends; not a general and vague adaptation, but a determinate adaptation to a determinate end? In the reflex action we find all that constitutes in some sort the very groundwork of an intelligent act—that is to say, the same series of stages, in the same order, with the same relations between them. We have thus, in the reflex act, all that constitutes the psychological act except consciousness. The reflex act, which is physiological, differs in nothing from the psychological act, save only in this—that it is without consciousness.”
The only remark which suggests itself upon this, is that we have no right to say that the part of the animal which moves does not also perceive its own act of motion, as much as it has perceived the impression which has caused it to move. It is plain “the animal” cannot do so, for the animal cannot be said to be any longer in existence. Half a frog is not a frog; nevertheless, if the hind legs are capable, as M. Ribot appears to admit, of “perceiving the impression” which produces their action, and if in that action there is (and there would certainly appear to be so) “all that constitutes an intelligent act, . . . a determinate adaptation to a determinate end,” one fails to see on what ground they should be supposed to be incapable of perceiving their own action, in which case the action of the hind legs becomes distinctly psychological.
Secondly, M. Ribot appears to forget that it is the tendency of all psychological action to become unconscious on being frequently repeated, and that no line can be drawn between psychological acts and those reflex acts which he calls physiological. All we can say is, that there are acts which we do without knowing that we do them; but the analogy of many habits which we have been able to watch in their passage from laborious consciousness to perfect unconsciousness, would suggest that all action is really psychological, only that the soul’s action becomes invisible to ourselves after it has been repeated sufficiently often—that there is, in fact, a law as simple as in the case of optics or gravitation, whereby conscious perception of any action shall vary inversely as the square, say, of its being repeated.
It is easy to understand the advantage to the individual of this power of doing things rightly without thinking about them; for were there no such power, the attention would be incapable of following the multitude of matters which would be continually arresting it; those animals which had developed a power of working automatically, and without a recurrence to first principles when they had once mastered any particular process, would, in the common course of events, stand a better chance of continuing their species, and thus of transmitting their new power to their descendants.
M. Ribot declines to pursue the subject further, and has only cursorily alluded to it. He writes, however, that, on the “obscure problem” of the difference between reflex and psychological actions, some say, “when there can be no consciousness, because the brain is wanting, there is, in spite of appearances, only mechanism,” whilst others maintain, that “when there is selection, reflection, psychical action, there must also be consciousness in spite of appearances.” A little later (p. 223), he says, “It is quite possible that if a headless animal could live a sufficient length of time” (that is to say, if the hind legs of an animal could live a sufficient length of time without the brain), “there would be found in it” (them) “a consciousness like that of the lower species, which would consist merely in the faculty of apprehending the external world.” (Why merely? It is more than apprehending the outside world to be able to try to do a thing with one’s left foot, when one finds that one cannot do it with one’s right.) “It would not be correct to say that the amphioxus, the only one among fishes and vertebrata which has a spinal cord without a brain, has no consciousness because it has no brain; and if it be admitted that the little ganglia of the invertebrata can form a consciousness, the same may hold good for the spinal cord.”
We conclude, therefore, that it is within the common scope and meaning of the words “personal identity,” not only that one creature can become many as the moth becomes manifold in her eggs, but that each individual may be manifold in the sense of being compounded of a vast number of subordinate individualities which have their separate lives within him, with their hopes, and fears, and intrigues, being born and dying within us, many generations, of them during our single lifetime.
“An organic being,” writes Mr. Darwin, “is a microcosm, a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute, and numerous as the stars in heaven.”
As these myriads of smaller organisms are parts and processes of us, so are we but parts and processes of life at large.
CHAPTER VIII.
APPLICATION OF THE FOREGOING CHAPTERS—THE ASSIMILATION OF OUTSIDE MATTER.
Let us now return to the position which we left at the end of the fourth chapter. We had then concluded that the self-development of each new life in succeeding generations—the various stages through which it passes (as it would appear, at first sight, without rhyme or reason)—the manner in which it prepares structures of the most surpassing intricacy and delicacy, for which it has no use at the time when it prepares them—and the many elaborate instincts which it exhibits immediately on, and indeed before, birth—all point in the direction of habit and memory, as the only causes which could produce them.