Excerpt from The British Journal of Psychology, 1912, Vol. 4 My third observation is that the tropisms and intelligence that appear in the earliest forms of life never afterwards disappear. For we cannot suppose with Spencer and Romanes that consciousness is first found at some stage in the development of animals, as a result of the complexity of organisation, hesitancy or delay of reaction, seeing that the Signs of consciousness are present in the Simplest; nor do we find that discrimination and memory are at any stage lost, to be after wards recovered. There is, no doubt, opposition between the complete organisation of a reflex arc, and the manifestation of intelligence; and we are apt to assume that the whole life of a lowly organism is Similar to the more completely integrated structures of our own bodies, which seem to us unconscious. But this is a very disputable analogy; for in complex organisms with division of labour the lead in adaptive variation is restricted to special organs. As intelligence persists, so also do the tropisms at all stages of development; originally independent of a nervous system, they are taken up by such systems as soon as these are formed, and extensively influence the conduct of all animals, including ourselves. I am inclined to believe that the explanation of every instinct will lead us back to a tropism or tropisms. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.