MIND IN EVOLUTION 509 



not at the time anything to show for it in our explicit 

 behaviour, and our neighbour offers us a penny for our 

 thoughts. Yet our future action in the case of a genius, 

 the history of the world may be modified by this hour of 

 hard thinking. Is there that sort of inner life of the mind- 

 body in animals ? We must not expect too much. Not only 

 is our nervous system a much more differentiated and in- 

 tegrated nervous system than that of even the highest ani- 

 mals, but we have language and we have developed the pos- 

 sibilities it affords of inter-subjective communion. A few 

 animals have a limited vocabulary, but no animals have 

 more than the primordia of language, so we must not sup- 

 pose that the mental furnishings of animals are like our 

 own. Some experts have warned naturalists that the search 

 for reasoning, imagery, and the like among animals must 

 forever remain futile. On the other hand, we should remem- 

 ber that in our own case there is much in mind besides those 

 inferences which we are accustomed to regard as distinctive 

 of intelligence. There is a continuous flow of mingled sen- 

 sations, perceptions, ideas, feelings, desires, and volitions, 

 a stream sometimes clear and peaceful, sometimes muddy 

 and turbulent. It is probable that among the lower animals, 

 the flow does not show much in the way of perceptions and 

 ideas, still less in the way of experiments with these. We 

 know that in our own individual development the earlier 

 stages are largely pre-intellectual, mainly emotional. It is 

 extremely improbable that the starfish laboriously disarming 

 the sea-urchin has made any inference on the subject, for 

 its nervous system has no ganglia ; but it is difficult to make 

 sense of the operation without crediting the creature with 

 conation, with something of the nature of endeavour, not 

 necessarily with full antecedent awareness, but with a de- 



