The Principles of Psychology

All nervous centres have then in the first instance one essential function, that of ‘intelligent’ action. They feel, prefer one thing to another, and have ‘ends.’ Like all other organs, however, they evolve from ancestor to descendant, and their evolution takes two directions the lower centres passing downwards into more unhesitating automatism, and the higher ones upwards into larger intellectuality.94 Thus it may happen that those functions which can safely grow uniform and fatal become least accompanied by mind, and that their organ, the spinal cord, becomes a more and more soulless machine; whilst on the contrary those functions which it benefits the animal to have adapted to delicate environing variations pass more and more to the hemispheres, whose anatomical structure and attendant consciousness grow more and more elaborate as zoological evolution proceeds.