Now, when a mammal is born, a bird is hatched, an insect emerges from the chrysalis, we have, if not the beginning, at any rate a great and sudden extension of the range of effective consciousness. In the case of the mammal and bird the experience gained in the womb or within the egg-shell is presumably of little value for the wider life upon which an entrance is made. It is true that an insect has passed through a previous stage of active and no doubt consciously guided existence as a caterpillar. But we do not know whether the experience thus acquired is effectual for use in the later imago stage. And we may perhaps infer from the extensive remodelling of the nervous system, which occurs during the chrysalis sleep, that this itself serves to break the continuity of experience. In any case the newly hatched chick, if it inherit no experience, and can have gained little of guiding value in the egg, enters upon a situation which from the number and variety of the data supplied may well seem to us bewildering. If we picture ourselves in such a position, with sights, sounds, motor sensations, touches, and pressures raining in upon a virgin experience, we wonder how we should make a beginning; how we could possibly decide on the first step towards reducing this multiplicity and diversity to something like unity and order. And perhaps we wonder how we ourselves made a beginning when we were pink newly born babies. If it may be said without paradox, we never did make a beginning. The beginning was made for us. For we habitually associate ourselves with the control centres, and regard our bodies, like our watches, as ours and not us. We wind the bodily watch, and set its hands from time to time; but we did not make it, and it was already going when heredity handed it to us over the counter of birth. The first step towards reducing the seeming chaos of sensory experience to something like order is not due to the selection by consciousness of this or that element for prominence among the rest, but to the thrusting forward of certain modes of behaviour by the conditions of organic life. The differentiation of the field of vision in the chick is not effected by any conscious determination to fix the attention on that wriggling maggot, but through the congenital response it calls forth. This serves not only to make the grub stand out clearly amid its surroundings, but also to emphasize a motor group, called into vigorous action in the midst of other motor sensations, and, in rapid sequence, to lay stress on a sensation of taste suddenly called into prominence.