lus lies in the fact that the adaptive value of these nascent
motor tendencies becomes operative as the determining principle in the
organization of the response. The response, for example, to "sharp" or
"will cut" is reminiscent of an earlier reaction in which the organism
engaged in certain defensive movements as the result of an actual
injury. That is, the response to "sharp" is a nascent or incipient form
of a response which at the time of its first occurrence was the
expression of a maladaptation. The response that is induced when an
object is seen as sharp would be biologically bad, if it were completed,
and the fact that the object is seen as sharp means that this result is
foreshadowed and operates as a stimulus to prevent such maladaptation.
Similarly the couch which meets my weary eye becomes a stimulus to
repose because the nascent activity which is aroused would be
biologically good if completed. In any case the character of the
stimulus is determined by the adaptive value which the incipient
activity would have if it were carried out. Consciousness, accordingly,
is just a future adaptation that has been set to work so as to bring
about its own realization. The future thus becomes operative in the
present, in much the same way as the prospects for next year's crop may
be converted by the farmer into ready money with which to secure the
tools for its production.

To justify this conclusion by a detailed and extensive application of
this interpretation to every form of quality and relation would carry us
beyond the limits of the present undertaking. It is a view, however,
which offers possibilities that have not as yet been properly
recognized. Certain considerations, besides those already discussed, may
be mentioned as giving it an antecedent plausibility. As regards simple
sense-qualities, there is abundant reason for believing that Locke's
doctrine of "simple ideas" is a violent perversion of the facts. To
assume that the last results of analysis are the first things in
experience is to give a fatal twist to psychology and to commit us to
the fruitless agonies of epistemology. The original "blooming, buzzing
confusion" with which experience starts becomes differentiated into
specific qualities only to the extent that certain typical and organized
forms of response are built up within the body. Sense-qualities, in
other words, are functionally not simple but extremely complex; they owe
their distinctiveness