204 CONSCIOUSNESS IN 



wholly different. Kirby and Spence, for instance, believe 

 it to be through the medium of their antennae that many 

 Insects are enabled to perceive approaching alterations in 

 the weather. Bees, they say, seem in some way to be- 

 come aware of the approach of a shower, and hastily 

 return to their hives in time to escape from it, when we 

 may be able to perceive no indications of any atmospheric 

 change. 



But, even apart from this possible existence of unknown 

 modes of sentiency in some of the lower animals, enor- 

 mous differences must exist in regard to the Perceptions 

 derived through those channels of sense which are more 

 or less analogous to our own. 



The actual nature and complexity of the Conscious 

 and Cognitive States roused in animals by external objects 

 will, necessarily, be influenced by two principal causes. 

 First, their qualitative nature (within the, sphere of each 

 sense) will depend upon the structural elaboration of the 

 several sense-organs and of their related nerve-ganglia, in 

 different animals. While, secondly, their complexity will 

 also be largely dependent upon the degree of development 

 of the higher nerve-centres as a whole, because, on the 

 occasion of any impression upon an organ of sense, what is 

 actually perceived (i.e. the completeness of the Perception) 

 depends principally upon the degree of rapid irradiation of 

 the impression to other parts of the brain. The Percep- 

 tions of similar objects by different kinds of animals will 

 vary extremely, as pointed out in a previous chapter, in 

 regard to the number and complexity of their components. 

 And these variations, as the reader will easily understand, 

 must in the main depend upon the average race-experi- 

 ences and sensorial endowments generally of the different 

 kinds of animals, in their associations with the particular 

 objects perceived. 



