The Evolution of Mind. 185 



tacked looks like a horse surrouiuled by a pack of hungry 

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

 monocellular micro-organisms is exceedingly complex, and 

 that 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 versa,"f so these facts 

 evidently teach that mind is not the result of a nervous 

 system, but vice versa. ]\Ir. Spencer's illustration of the 

 evolution of the Social organism,! j)oints out in most em- 

 phatic terms the serious character of the blunder made by 

 Professor Komanes 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-larva? ; 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- 

 mer and winter, etc., are all a confused, undifferentiated 

 jumble of energies playing on the surface of an amoeba, 

 and but little if anything more to a jelly flsh. It is the 

 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- 

 •oestors 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 I Other minds, 

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



* Ibid, p. 60. 



t Pop. Sci. Mon., Vol. 11, p. r..i2. 



t niustrations of Universal Progress, 3*4-428(1873). 



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



