This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1895 Excerpt: ...relation to the theory of variations, and not in relation to that of natural selection, that Organic Selection has its main force. Organic Selection presents a new qualification of a positive kind which enables the organism to meet its environment and cope with it, while natural selection remains exactly what it was, the negative law that if the organism does not succeed in living, then it dies, and as such a qualification on the part of the organism, Organic Selection presents several interesting features. 1. If we hold, as has been argued above, that the method of Organic Selection is always the same (that is, that it has a natural method), being always accomplished by a certain typical sort of nervous process (i. e., being always neuro-genetic), then we may ask whether that form of nervous process--and the consciousness which goes with it--may not be a variation appearing early in the phylogenetic series. I have argued elsewhere (ref. 2, pp. 200 ff. and 208 ff.) that this is the most probable view. Organisms that did not have some form of selective response to what was beneficial, as opposed to what was damaging in the environment, could not have developed very far; and as soon as such a variation did appear it would have immediate preeminence. So we have to say either that selective nervous property, with consciousness, is a variation, or that it is a fundamental endowment of life and part of its final mystery. "The intelligence holds a remarkable place. It is itself, as we have seen, a congenital variation; but it is also the great agent of the individual's personal adaptation both to the physical and to the social environment" (ref. 4). "The former (instinct) represents a tendency to brain variation in the direction of fixed connections...