insignificant skin stimuli as the above to defer his
appropriate reaction. Goltz relates the behaviour of a dog from which
almost the whole fore-brain had been removed. The animal lived healthily
under the careful treatment accorded it. At feeding time a little
quinine (bitter) added to its sop of meat and milk led to the morsels,
after being taken into the mouth, being at once and regularly rejected.
None was ever swallowed, nor was the slightest hesitation in their
rejection ever obtained by any coaxing or command, or encouragement of
the animal by the attendant who constantly had charge of it. On the
other hand, directly an undoctored piece had entered the mouth it was
swallowed at once. Goltz threw to his own house-dog a piece of the same
doctored meat. The creature wagged its tail and took it eagerly, then
after receiving it into its mouth pulled a wry face and hesitated,
astonished. But on encouragement to go on eating it the dog did so.
Perhaps it deemed it unseemly to appear ungrateful to the giver and
reject the gift. It overcame its reflex of rejection, and by its
self-control gave proof of the intact cerebrum it possessed.

There seems a connexion between consciousness and the power to modify
reflex action to meet the exigencies of the occasion. Pure reflexes are
admirably adapted to certain ends. They are reactions which have long
proved advantageous to the phylum of which the existent animal is the
representative embodiment. But the reflexes have a machine-like
fatality, and conscious aim does not forerun their execution. The
subject as active agent does not direct them. Yet they lie under the
control of higher centres. The cough, the eye-closure, the impulse to
smile, all these can be suppressed. The innate respiratory rhythm can be
modified to meet the requirements of vocal utterance. In other words,
the reaction of reflex arcs is controllable by the mechanism to whose
activity consciousness is adjunct. The reflexes controlled are often
reactions but slightly affecting consciousness, but consciousness is
very distinctly operative with the centres which exert the control. It
may be that the primary aim, object and purpose of consciousness is
control. "Consciousness in a mere automaton," writes Professor Lloyd
Morgan, "is a useless and unnecessary epiphenomenon." As to _how_ this
conscious control is operative on reflexes, how it intrudes its
influence on the running of the reflex machinery, little is known.