Mental development in the child and the race : methods and processes / by James Mark Baldwin.

Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Mental development in the child and the race : methods and processes / by James Mark Baldwin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    that uniform contractile tissue did not have consciousness before the heightened process which indicates pleasure, and that this heightened process is due in some way to accidental adjustments of movement; then consciousness must have arisen by means of these adjustments. But we have seen that adjustments of movement can have no meaning for the organism, except as they bring certain vital stimulations. So the rise of consciousness after all would seem to be due to the influence of these vital stimulations. And when we come to ask why these vital stimulations are vital, why they are necessary, that is, we appeal at once to the habits — the very constitution of the life process itself — all of which must have come to the particular organism by heredity. So consciousness becomes, after all, in its actual rise a phylogenetic product. Looking at it from this phylogenetic point of view, as a variation, we find difficulties and certain advantages. Romanes, it will be remembered, treats the fact of ' selec- tive contraction' as the ' criterion of mind,' the indication of the presence of consciousness^; and, inasmuch as he also finds this fact of selective contraction in the lowest known living creatures, it would seem in his view to be due either to selection, in case we suppose still earlier a uni- form contractile tissue, or as a part of the ' general mystery of life,' in case we do not. The difficulty, however, which he sees to the ' selection' view, he states in this way: The difficulty is that I began by showing it necessary to define mind as the power of exercising Choice [selective reaction], and then proceeded to define the latter as a power belonging only to agents that are able to feel. ... It seems that my conception of 1 Mental Evolution in Animals^ Chap. I.
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