it the question of mind? By compounding the reflex with the reflex,
Spencer thinks he generates instinct and rational volition one after the
other. He fails to see that the specialized reflex, being a terminal
point of evolution just as much as perfect will, cannot be supposed at
the start. That the first of the two terms should have reached its final
form before the other is probable enough; but both the one and the other
are _deposits_ of the evolution movement, and the evolution movement
itself can no more be expressed as a function solely of the first than
solely of the second. We must begin by mixing the reflex and the
voluntary. We must then go in quest of the fluid reality which has been
precipitated in this twofold form, and which probably shares in both
without being either. At the lowest degree of the animal scale, in
living beings that are but an undifferentiated protoplasmic mass, the
reaction to stimulus does not yet call into play one definite mechanism,
as in the reflex; it has not yet choice among several definite
mechanisms, as in the voluntary act; it is, then, neither voluntary nor
reflex, though it heralds both. We experience in ourselves something of
this true original activity when we perform semi-voluntary and
semi-automatic movements to escape a pressing danger. And yet this is
but a very imperfect imitation of the primitive character, for we are
concerned here with a mixture of two activities already formed, already
localized in a brain and in a spinal cord, whereas the original activity
was a simple thing, which became diversified through the very
construction of mechanisms like those of the spinal cord and brain. But
to all this Spencer shuts his eyes, because it is of the essence of his
method to recompose the consolidated with the consolidated, instead of
going back to the gradual process of consolidation, which is evolution
itself.

Is it, finally, the question of the correspondence between mind and
matter? Spencer is right in defining the intellect by this
correspondence. He is right in regarding it as the end of an evolution.
But when he comes to retrace this evolution, again he integrates the
evolved with the evolved--failing to see that he is thus taking useless
trouble, and that in positing the slightest fragment of the actually
evolved he posits the whole--so that it is vain for him, then, to
pretend to make the genesis of it.

For, according to him, the phenomena that succeed each