The Evolution of Mind. 185 



tacked looks like a horse siirrounded by a pack of hungry 

 wolves.* These facts teach us that the psychic life of even 

 » monocellular micro-organisms is exceedingly complex, and 

 ithat we must go lower still to discover the dawn of aware- 

 \ness. As Haeekel in speaking of Bathybius said : " Life is 

 not a result of organization, but vice ve/'.sr/,"t so these facts 



€vidently teach that mind is not the result of a nervous 

 ystem, but vice versa. Mr. Spencer's illustration of the 

 evolution of the Social organism, t points out in most em- 

 phatic terms the serious character of the blunder made by 

 Professor Romanes in handling the subject of the Evolution 

 of Mind.§ His chart purports to give the exact point on 

 the ascending scale, where the various mental faculties ap- 

 pear. Memory he first discovers among the Echinoderms ; 

 surprise, fear and the primary instincts among Annelids 

 and insect-larvae ; the secondary instincts among spiders and 

 the like. Using his test of choice as evidence of psychosis, 

 the verdict is against his conclusions. Infusoria flee from 

 danger, display fear and exert choice. As a savage com- 

 ports himself more rationally toward his environing friends 

 and foes than many nations do toward other nations, it is 

 not to be wondered at that single-celled beings are more in- 

 telligent than those myriad-celled ones in whom adjust- 

 ments of the composing units have not become perfected. 

 To the latter, too, a new universe is being opened up, and 

 its successive steps of organization are adaptations to the 

 same. The forces which we have resolved into color and 

 sound, taste and odor, form and structure, harmony and 

 discord, land and water, sky and air, day and night, sum- 

 ^uer and winter, etc., are all a confused, undifferentiated 

 jumble of energies playing on the surface of an amoeba, 

 land but little if anything more to a jelly fish. It is the 

 I resolution of this confusion that constitutes the evolution of 

 'mind in polycellular creatures. Prof. Wm. James says : 

 *• The world we feel and live in will be that which our an- 

 cestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have 

 extricated out of this, as the sculptor extracts his statue by 

 simply rejecting the other portions of the stone. Other 

 sculptors, other statues from the same stone ! Other nunds, 

 other worlds from the same chaos ! Goethe's world is but 



* Ibid, p. 60. 



t Pop. ?5ci. Mon., Vol. 11, p. 052. 



X Illustrations of Universal I'rofjress, 384-428 (1873). 



§ Mental Evolution in Animals, D. Appleton & Co. 



