EVOLUTION AND HUMAN DESTINY 



eralized significance, namely as matter being aware of 

 its own structure — then consciousness is certainly of 

 recent historical origin. Of course one may also regard 

 consciousness as simply meaning that an individual 

 living creature is aware of his own existence. This kind 

 of consciousness certainly has existed since the earliest 

 historical times, and probably dates far back into pre- 

 history. Awareness of one's own existence is a feeling, 

 the existence of which is a matter of degree. Animal 

 psychologists differ as to whether any such awareness 

 exists among the higher animals. Their differences are 

 probably largely due to lack of common definition of 

 the meaning of awareness, as well as the intrinsic dif- 

 ficulties encountered in investigating the subject. 

 Awareness is a mental attribute which probably has 

 no clear beginning in evolutionary history, but gradu- 

 ally evolved in the higher animals, reaching a level in 

 prehistoric man, where awareness of existence may be 

 taken for granted. Certainly awareness must have pre- 

 ceded the more remarkable consciousness of present- 

 day man. While awareness appears possible for a com- 

 plex multicellular creature, real consciousness (de- 

 fined as awareness of structure and nature) seems pos- 

 sible only in a societal organism in the process of for- 

 mation and may well be a concurrent feature of its de- 

 velopment, provided the initial units are of a suffi- 

 ciently high level of complexity. 



Is there any possibility that this kind of conscious- 



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