But not only the motor and sensory organs are to be traced in origin and growth to psychic basis in self-consciousness and struggle, but other organs now quite disassociated from will may originally have been developed by will. Thus the stomach may have originated in digestive effort and the heart in circulatory effort. That self-attention to the heart stimulates the action of the heart is well-known, and also that in rare cases the heart’s action is directly controlled by will. This may be survival. Function is built up also as indirect result of will, as when motor effort in running develops heart action. Psychism may thus be interpreted as the basis of all organic development. The body is the offspring of will. Certainly as man surveys progressive adaptation in himself and other evolving organisms, the psychic basis is apparent in feeling and in effort self-conscious; and if in any wise it has apparently become mechanical and spontaneous, as in heart-beat, as in digestion, as in winking the eye, this is to be ascribed to impulse from the past. Self-consciousness quickens reaction, for reaction time is shortened when there is anticipation, and anticipation implies self-consciousness as awareness of experienceability. Self-consciousness also enormously strengthens reaction. Thus the more thoroughly one realizes his own danger, the more powerful the effort to escape. This is true under normal and simple conditions, the only form in which we are considering self-consciousness. Self-consciousness may become abnormal and debilitating in the hypochondriac, but this is a stage beyond our present studies. Primarily in the struggle of life self-relating to one’s own experience is always advantageous function. The most important thing in life is the realization, by the aid of self-consciousness, of the self-experience value of things; to appreciate and understand environment, and so adapt oneself to it and adapt it to oneself, to conserve and extend self, this is the substance of psychism, and its whole history is thence pervaded by self-consciousness.