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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.
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