Knowledge and Error

Abstract

Living beings have reached equilibrium with their surroundings by means of adaptation that is partly innate and permanent, partly acquired and temporary. However, a mode of organization and behaviour that is biologically beneficial under certain circumstances may become detrimental under changed conditions and even end up by destroying life itself. A bird is organized for life in air, and a fish for life in water, but not the other way round. A frog snatches at flying insects that are his food but falls victim to this habit if he gets hold of a piece of moving cloth and is caught on the hook attached to it. Moths that fly towards light and colour for the sake of self-preservation, may in the course of this generally appropriate behaviour finish up on the painted flowers on wallpaper, which do not nourish; or in a flame, which kills. Any animal caught in a trap or by another beast thereby shows that its psychophysical organization is appropriate only up to a point. In the simplest animals stimulus and response may lie in attack and flight, so regularly linked that the observed facts would not cause us to imagine that sensation, ideas, moods and will intervene between the two, were it not that this is strongly suggested by analogy with processes we observe in ourselves. Here, stimuli work directly and actively, as in a reflex movement, say of tendons, of which we do not learn until after it has happened.