CHAPTER III 

 THE MIND OF THE SIMPLEST ANIMALS 



8. The Structure and Behavior of Amoeba 



WE have seen in the last chapter that no one can prove 

 the absence of consciousness in even the simplest forms of 

 living beings. It is therefore perfectly allowable to speculate 

 as to what may be the nature of such consciousness, provided 

 that the primitive organisms concerned 'possess it. Per- 

 fectly allowable, yet also perfectly useless, many authorities 

 would argue ; the remoteness of the creatures from ourselves 

 in structure and behavior renders theorizing .about their 

 conscious experience, which is probably non-existent and 

 certainly unimaginable in any definite terms by us, the idlest 

 form of mental exercise. 



Undeniably the formation of a positive notion regarding 

 the character arid content of psychic states in the mind, say 

 of an Amoeba, is next door to an impossibility. Yet it may 

 not be wholly a waste of time if we spend a few pages in the 

 attempt to discover wherein the simplest type, of mind, sup- 

 posing it to be that belonging to the simplest type of animal, 

 necessarily differs from our own. Some light, perhaps, may 

 be cast upon the growth of mental life -in complexity if we 

 try to make clear to ourselves what primitive consciousness is 

 not, though we may not be able to find in our own experience 

 any elements that shall properly represent what it is. 



The first need is evidently information about the structure 

 and the behavior of a primitive animal. For this purpose the 



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