62 CONSCIOUSNESS 
a rational being, capable of judging how far his own behaviour 
and that of others is conformable to an ideal. 
If, then, we were asked to characterize in the briefest 
possible terms the stages of conscious evolution, we should say 
that in the first stage we have consciousness as accompaniment ; 
in the second, consciousness as guide ; in the third, conscious- 
ness as judge. And if we were pressed to apply distinctive 
terms to these three, we should adopt St. George Mivart’s 
term consentience for the mid-phase, and speak of mere sentience 
in the first stage ; consentience in the second ; and conscious- 
ness, with restricted signification, in the third and highest 
stage. Such a distinction in terms is, however, a counsel of 
perfection, and we shall not attempt to preserve it in the 
following pages, in which the word “ consciousness ” will be 
used in a comprehensive serse. 
Ever since the publication of Darwin’s “ Origin of Species,” 
evolutionists have been divided into two sections where con- 
sciousness in the narrower sense is under discussion. The 
members of the one have contended that, though the physical 
and perhaps the lower mental nature of man is the outcome of 
evolutionary process, his higher mental attributes are of other 
origin. ‘The members of the second section have urged that 
the higher not less than the lower characteristics of the mind 
of man have been evolved. It is somewhat strange that 
naturalists who accept the latter position are not infrequently 
impatient when any serious attempt is made to discuss it from 
the standpoint of psychology. It is, however, becoming more 
and more clearly evident that the discussion of the relation of 
the animal to the human mind, if it is to be made a subject of 
scientific inquiry, must be conducted on psychological lines by 
those who have devoted years of study to the subject. In this 
work such a discussion will be attempted, and animal behaviour 
will be treated as the precursor of human conduct, and as 
affording evidence of the germs from which the distinctively 
human mental attributes may have been evolved. 
