MYSTERIES OF LIFE AND EXISTENCE — SNODGRASS 533 



neural events involved in the simplest forms of mental activity." The 

 physiologists know what goes on in our visceral organs; they liave not 

 yet been able to fully explore the secrets of the brain. 



It must be noted that our forms of consciousness resulting from 

 sensory stimuli give us little or no information about the nature of 

 the stimuli. From our sensation of illumination and color, for ex- 

 ample, we should never know that physical light is vibrations of 

 something traversing space that impinge on the eye. What we call 

 sound is a form of consciousness generated by propagated waves of 

 air. Some people, therefore, cannot understand that there is no sound 

 without an ear to hear it. So with odor and taste, which in conscious- 

 ness are sensations produced by chemical substances. Truly, in our 

 consciousness we live in a world that does not conform with reality. 

 Only the primitive sense of touch gives us some information about 

 the nature of the object felt, its shape, size, and whether it is hard, 

 soft, smooth, or rough. 



Consciousness in ourselves has come to be more than the registra- 

 tion of sensory stimuli. It is also the medium of imagination, mem- 

 ory, and reason. This group of faculties constitutes intelligence, and 

 greatly complicates the efforts of the psychologists to rationalize our 

 mental life according to any theory. It is much easier to understand 

 how we see than how we think. There is no doubt that intelligence 

 has developed with the evolution of the vertebrate forebrain, but it 

 is scarcely perceptible below the mammals. The higher mammals 

 can learn by "trial and error," and they exhibit many human emo- 

 tions, but it is highly doubtful that any but the human species is 

 capable of abstract reasoning. 



It is a long-disputed and still unanswered question as to where con- 

 sciousness begins in the animal kingdom. Since pain is a most acute 

 form of consciousness, it would seem reasonable to believe that any 

 animal that gives vocal evidence of feeling pain must have con- 

 sciousness. This would include the mammals and birds and perhaps 

 the frogs, but lack of a voice can hardly be taken as evidence of insen- 

 sitivity to pain. We cannot positively assert that the higher inverte- 

 brates do not have some dim awareness of their surroundings or of 

 their actions. It is hard to imagine that an insect or a spider, for ex- 

 ample, is merely a mechanism responding automatically to stimuli 

 that in us generate consciousness. Consciousness in other animals, 

 liowever, is beyond experimental investigation, and probably will long 

 remain a secret of the animals themselves. 



The greatest literary crime that can be brought against a writer 

 on animal behavior is indulgence in anthropomorphism — the attribut- 

 ing to animals of human motives and reason. Yet there is plenty of 

 animalism in the human species, and some recent accounts of animals 

 in nature, such as that of tlie African lioness by Adamson (1960, 



