hair-trigger organization makes of it a happy-go-lucky, hit-or-miss affair. It is as likely to do the crazy as the sane thing at any given moment. A low brain does few things, and in doing them perfectly forfeits all other use. The performances of a high brain are like dice thrown forever on a table. Unless they be loaded, what chance is there that the highest number will turn up oftener than the lowest? All this is said of the brain as a physical machine pure and simple. _Can consciousness increase its efficiency by loading its dice?_ Such is the problem. Loading its dice would mean bringing a more or less constant pressure to bear in favor of _those_ of its performances which make for the most permanent interests cf the brain's owner; it would mean a constant inhibition of the tendencies to stray aside. Well, just such pressure and such inhibition are what consciousness _seems_ to be exerting all the while. And the interests in whose favor it seems to exert them are _its_ interests and its alone, interests which it _creates_, and which, but for it, would have no status in the realm of being whatever. We talk, it is true, when we are darwinizing, as if the mere _body_ that owns the brain had interests; we speak about the utilities of its various organs and how they help or hinder the body's survival; and we treat the survival as if it were an absolute end, existing as such in the physical world, a sort of actual _should-be_, presiding over the animal and judging his reactions, quite apart from the presence of any commenting intelligence outside. We forget that in the absence of some such superadded commenting intelligence (whether it be that of the animal itself, or only ours or Mr. Darwin's), the reactions cannot be properly talked of as 'useful' or 'hurtful' at all. Considered merely physically, all that can be said of them is that _if_ they occur in a certain way survival will as a matter of fact prove to be their incidental consequence. The organs themselves, and all the rest of the physical world, will, however, all the time be quite indifferent to this consequence, and would quite as cheerfully, the circumstances changed, compass the animal's destruction. In a word, survival can enter into a purely physiological discussion only as an _hypothesis made by an onlooker_, about the future. But the moment you bring a consciousness into the midst, survival ceases to be a mere hypothesis. No longer is it, "_if_ survival is to occur, then so and so must brain and other organs work." It has now become an imperative decree: "Survival _shall_ occur, and therefore organs _must_ so work!" _Real_ ends appear for the first time now upon the world's stage. The conception of consciousness as a purely cognitive form of being, which is the pet way of regarding it in many idealistic schools, modern as well as ancient, is thoroughly anti-psychological, as the remainder of this book will show. Every