338. Animal Life and Intelligence. 



simplicity of the emergent consciousness in very lowly 

 organisms is like. But I think that we may fairly believe 

 that some dim form of discrimination is the germ from 

 which the spreading tree of mind shall develop.* 



I assume, then, that, granting the theory of evolution, 

 the early stages of the process of construction — discrimina- 

 tion, localization, and outward projection — are the same 

 in kind throughout the whole range of animal life, wherever 

 we are justified in surmising that psychical processes occur, 

 and the power of registration and revival in memory has 

 been established. As will be gathered, however, from what 

 I have already said, I hold that the nature of the con- 

 structs produced is and must be for us human-folk, since 

 we are human-folk, to a large extent a matter of specula- 

 tion. Eemembering this, then, endeavouring never to lose 

 sight of it for a moment, let us consider what we may 

 fairly surmise concerning the constructs and the process 

 of construction in animals. 



There can be no question that the animals nearest us 

 in the scale of life — the higher mammalia — form constructs 

 analogous to, if not closely resembling, ours. I do not 

 think the resemblance can be in any sense close, seeing to 

 how large an extent our constructs are literally our handi- 

 work. For though in many animals the tongue and lips 

 are delicate organs of touch — not to mention the trunk of 

 the elephant — and though in the monkeys and many 

 rodents the hands are used for grasping, still we have no 

 reason to suppose that in any other mammal the geome- 

 trical sense of touch plays so determining a part in the 

 formation of constructs as in man. On the other hand, 

 in the dog and the deer, for example, not only must the 

 marvellously acute sense of smell have a far higher sug- 



* Or perhaps we may say, in the language of analogy, that when the 

 germinal psychoplasrn of some dim form of organic memory is fertilized by 

 the union therewith of the more active male element of discrimination, a 

 process of segmentation of the psychoplasrn sets in by which, in process of 

 differentiation, the tissues and organs of the mind are eventually developed. 



