CHAPTER XXIX 

 THE MIND OF APES AND OF MAN 



JUST as man's brain is enormously larger than that 

 of the ordinary monkeys, although his general 

 make and anatomy is closely similar to theirs, so we find 

 that the rhinoceros has an enormous brain as compared 

 with extinct rhinoceros-like animals, the predecessors and 

 ancestors of those now living. The extinct Titanotherium 

 of the lower Miocene period managed to carry on its 

 life in an efficient way and to hold its own for a con- 

 siderable period with a brain which was only one-eighth 

 the bulk of that of a modern rhinoceros, as did other 

 animals in the past with even greater bodies and smaller 

 brains. To get some suggestion as to the significance 

 of this fact we must, in however incomplete a way, 

 distinguish some of the main features of the mental 

 processes which go on in man and animals and have 

 their " seat " in the brain. 



Descartes and other philosophers have held that 

 there is a great difference in the mental processes of 

 animals as compared with those of man in this, namely, 

 that man is " conscious," that is to say, conscious of 

 himself as " I," and, as it were, looks on at himself 

 acting on and being acted on by surrounding existences, 

 whilst (so it is assumed) animals have not this conscious- 

 ness, but are " automata," going through all the processes 



262 



