COURTSHIP, INSTINCT AND REASON 213 



isms among animals. He has practically to learn by 

 individual experience — and therefore in the form best 

 suited to his individual requirements — a host of most 

 important actions and behaviours which even monkeys as 

 well as dogs and sheep and horses never have to " learn," 

 but proceed to put in practice as soon as they are born, 

 or, at any rate, without any preliminary process of ex- 

 periment and effort. Man is the one highly " educable " 

 animal. In consequence of his large brain and its 

 roomy memory he can be, and is — even when a 

 " savage " — educated. Monkeys and dogs have only 

 small " educability " as compared with man, though 

 more than have reptiles or fishes. Man's mind is, 

 therefore, in this essential feature different from that 

 of animals. The modern mammals with brains as much 

 as eight times the bulk of their early Tertiary ancestors 

 have, it is true, acquired " educability " and the power of 

 storing individual experience as " memory," but their 

 memory is far less extensive than that of man, and 

 though its guidance is of great value to them it acts 

 entirely, or nearly so, without consciousness. No doubt 

 man's brain includes some hereditary mechanisms, but in 

 the main it distinctively consists of nerve-mechanisms, 

 formed by his own individual education, acting on re- 

 ceptive and specially educable brain matter. And the 

 brain mechanism formed by education is of greater life- 

 saving value than is that of the inherited instincts which 

 meet general emergencies, but not those new and special 

 to the individual. 



The third step in the development of mind is the 

 arrival (for one can call it by no other term) of that 

 condition which we call " consciousness " — the power of 

 saying to oneself" I am I," and of looking on as a detached 

 existence not only at other existences but at one's own 



