PSYCHICAL ANTECEDENTS OF SCIENCE 155

such. This result is sometimes strikingly manifested by

somnambulists, who have been known to perform very

complicated actions. Under such circumstances, a drawer

may be opened or a door unlocked in an unconscious

search to obtain some object or reach some locality.

Such actions are easily explicable in the way above stated.

For the consentience of the sleep-walker is impressed by

various groups of sensations, such as those produced by

the walls and furniture of the room the sleep-walker may

be traversing on the way to the desired locality, the door

of which is locked. The feelings thus excited arouse his

imagination of the inside of the place sought, this in

turn excites the nervous channels habitually stimulated in

overcoming the intervening obstruction the hand auto-

matically seeks the key ; the feelings produced by its

touch stimulate the muscles of the arm ; the key is

turned, and the door opened. Very complex movements

are sometimes thus automatically performed in order to

complete a sensuous harmony which the imagination,

through habit, has come to crave. It craves for fresh,

completing sensations, and is thus led to perform appro-

priate movements when certain initial sensations have been

afresh excited, after which the completing sensations have

(in past experience) habitually followed. This, then, is

the "practical imagination of means to effect a desired

end."

Such sensuous acts are what we should expect to find

amongst animals if they are, as they have generally been

supposed to be, creatures richly endowed with sensitive

faculties, though devoid of those which are intellectual.

But what judgment are we to form with respect to the

highest psychical faculties of animals? That is the next

question to which we must now address ourselves. The

question, however, is not, of course, to be pursued for its

such. This result is sometimes strikingly manifested by

somnambulists, who have been known to perform very

complicated actions. Under such circumstances, a drawer

may be opened or a door unlocked in an unconscious

search to obtain some object or reach some locality.

Such actions are easily explicable in the way above stated.

For the consentience of the sleep-walker is impressed by

various groups of sensations, such as those produced by

the walls and furniture of the room the sleep-walker may

be traversing on the way to the desired locality, the door

of which is locked. The feelings thus excited arouse his

imagination of the inside of the place sought, this in

turn excites the nervous channels habitually stimulated in

overcoming the intervening obstruction the hand auto-

matically seeks the key ; the feelings produced by its

touch stimulate the muscles of the arm ; the key is

turned, and the door opened. Very complex movements

are sometimes thus automatically performed in order to

complete a sensuous harmony which the imagination,

through habit, has come to crave. It craves for fresh,

completing sensations, and is thus led to perform appro-

priate movements when certain initial sensations have been

afresh excited, after which the completing sensations have

(in past experience) habitually followed. This, then, is

the "practical imagination of means to effect a desired

end."

Such sensuous acts are what we should expect to find

amongst animals if they are, as they have generally been

supposed to be, creatures richly endowed with sensitive

faculties, though devoid of those which are intellectual.

But what judgment are we to form with respect to the

highest psychical faculties of animals? That is the next

question to which we must now address ourselves. The

question, however, is not, of course, to be pursued for its