44 The Animal Mind 



by our own vague, diffused sense of bodily well-being or ill- 

 being ; and this is undoubtedly given its coloring in our case 

 by the structure and functioning of our internal organs. 



As for the peculiar behavior of an Amoeba suspended in 

 the water and deprived of solid support, the stimulus for this 

 must lie within the cell body itself. If any consciousness 

 accompanies it, then the nearest human analogy to such 

 consciousness is to be found in organic sensations, and these, 

 as has just been said, must necessarily be in the human mind 

 wholly different in quality from anything to be found in an 

 animal whose structure is as simple as the Amoeba's. 



A consequence of this lack of qualitative variety in the sense 

 experiences of an Amoeba is a lack of what we may call com- 

 plexity of structure in that experience. The number of 

 stimulus differences which are in the human mind represented 

 by differences in the quality of sensations is so great that at 

 any given moment our consciousness of the external world is 

 analyzable into a large number of qualitatively different sen- 

 sations. At the present instant the reader's consciousness 

 "contains," apart from the revived effects of previous stimu- 

 lation, many distinguishable sensation elements, visual, audi- 

 tactile, organic, and so on. The Amoeba's conscious- 

 .ess, if it possesses one, must have a structure inconceivably 

 impler than that of any moment of our own experience. 



A second point in which the mind of an Amceba must, if it 

 exists, differ from that of a human being, consists in its entire 

 lack of mental imagery of any sort. Not only has the Amceba 



t three or four qualitatively different elements in its expe- 

 rience, but none of these qualities can be remembered or 

 revived in the absence of external stimulation. How may 

 we be sure of this ? If our primitive animal could revive its 

 experiences in the form of memory images, it would give some 

 evidence of the influence of memory in its behavior. Indeed, 



