THE RISE OF CONSCIOUSNESS 



favorites so far down on the ladder of progressive 

 life. It is this personal sentiment, arising out of 

 our fondness for creatures that we cherish and ad- 

 mire so much, which constitutes the great diffi- 

 culty in the way of our belief that the lowest man 

 belongs to a separate, higher class than the highest 

 of other animals, simply by virtue of his posses- 

 sion of self-consciousness. 



And this difficulty is the harder to combat be- 

 cause anatomy provides no evidence in the mat- 

 ter. You can dissect out the original rudiment of 

 a backbone, but you cannot cut out a dead man's 

 self -consciousness and put it under the microscope 

 and say, "There!" 



But if other animals had self -consciousness, i. e., 

 if they thought about things, including them- 

 selves, we should long ere this have been able to 

 invent a language of sounds and signs in which 

 we could converse with them upon all sorts of sub- 

 jects. But they cannot think about things, only 

 of them ; so our converse with them as well as 

 their converse with each other, is limited to ex- 

 pressions of simple animal emotions. 



The possession of language, as a means of ex- 

 pressing thoughts other than mere emotions, thus 

 offers definite evidence that man alone is self- 

 conscious. 



Another definite proof that man alone is self- 

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