Confluence of Opposites

Author(s): Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: Champat Rai Jain

Page 87

CONFLUENCE OF OPPOSITES
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intelligence. It cannot be urged, I think, that the excitation always suffices, in or by itself, to produce a movement in the motor reflexes. Such a supposition would reduce the whole thing to pure mechanical activity where consciousness would have absolutely no function to serve. It is, moreover, to be doubted if there is any proportion between the excitation of a sensory filament, or nerve, and the ensuing movement of the organism or limb, e. &, a pin.prick may cause a mammoth to move its collosal foot, and a mosquito bite, a sleeping giant to turn over in his bed ! What seems actually to happen in such cases is this that the sensory excitement has no more function to perform after it has given rise to a sensation, and that the resulting reaction of the experiencing consciousness is the source of the bodily movement which is performed through automatic reflexes where the deliberative faculty is lacking, and through selected appropriate channels in the converse case.
May it not, then, be that psychic automatism represents a faculty' asleep rather than the crude beginning of a function that is to grow and develop through a long, tortuous and protracted course of evolution ? May it not also be that the development of the brain is in. tended to meet a demand from an ego already advanced in self-control rather than as a distillery or factory for the manufacturing of the ego itself ? It is significant that the highest function of the mind, namely, selection, discrimination or judgment is performed only by such of the living beings as are able to arrest their psychic