2i 4 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST 



mental processes, feelings, and movements. With it comes 

 thought, knowledge, reason, and will. We may speak 

 of consciousness as invading or spreading gradually over 

 the territory of mind. All the three steps of the growth 

 of mind which I have distinguished can be seen following 

 one on the other in the growth of a human child from 

 infancy to adolescence. The second step the develop- 

 ment of individual mechanisms due to memory is not 

 in most animals, and not entirely in man, pervaded by or 

 " within the area of " consciousness. Memory is at first 

 " unconscious memory," and there still remains in man a 

 capacity for forming " memory " which never (or in some 

 matters only exceptionally) becomes illuminated by 

 consciousness. Apparently the inherited mechanisms 

 which we call " instincts " are never within the reach of 

 consciousness, though, of course, the actions determined 

 by them are. It is a difficult matter to decide how far 

 the memory of apes, dogs, and such animals nearest to 

 man is conscious memory. Probably very little. But 

 it is only when memory, as well as the impression of the 

 moment, is pervaded by consciousness that reflection, 

 and reason and action dependent on reason, are possible. 1 



Hence it is that man in all the procedure of courtship 

 stands apart from animals. Even the Australian has 

 not only an educable brain, but a more or less conscious 

 memory. He seems to be permanently, in this respect, 

 in the condition of an ordinary European child of about 

 five years old. Gradually in the course of the develop- 

 ment, both of increased educability and of more and more 

 efficient and serviceable education, man has first aban- 

 doned by slow degrees his violent ancestral methods of 

 procuring a mate, and has, as the result of observation, 



1 I have alluded to this subject again, necessarily with some 

 repetition in the chapter on "The Mind of Apes and of Man," p. 262. 



