altogether agreed. It seems, however, probable that animals
rarely, if ever, achieve the distinct separation of ideas and
perceptions which human beings attain; and that they do not,
therefore, understand relations or employ the concept in the
form in which developed language permits the human to do.

The acts of certain of the apes, however, and occasional
performances of some of the higher mammals, indicate a
very considerable degree of original and intelligent reaction
to sensory stimulations. It must be remembered of course
that the higher animals differ in mental capacity from the
very low animals only less than they differ from men. The
animal consciousness is probably much more exclusively and
continuously monopolised by mere awareness of bodily con-
ditions than the human consciousness; it is much more
preoccupied by recurrent and uncontrolled impulses, and
much more rarely invaded in any definite manner by inde-
pendent images of past experience. Meantime, we have to
remember that the nervous system of the higher animals
seems to afford all the necessary basis for the appearance and
development of the simpler forms of rational consciousness,
and the only difference in these processes, as compared with
those of man, of which we can speak dogmatically and with
entire confidence, is the difference in complexity and elabora-
tion. Consciousness appears, then, everywhere as the index
of problem-solving adaptive acts.

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