self-consciousness. On the other hand, as Buchner (45. Conferences sur
la Theorie Darwinienne, French translat. 1869, p. 132.) has remarked,
how little can the hard-worked wife of a degraded Australian savage,
who uses very few abstract words, and cannot count above four, exert
her self-consciousness, or reflect on the nature of her own existence.
It is generally admitted, that the higher animals possess memory,
attention, association, and even some imagination and reason. If these
powers, which differ much in different animals, are capable of
improvement, there seems no great improbability in more complex
faculties, such as the higher forms of abstraction, and
self-consciousness, etc., having been evolved through the development
and combination of the simpler ones. It has been urged against the
views here maintained that it is impossible to say at what point in the
ascending scale animals become capable of abstraction, etc.; but who
can say at what age this occurs in our young children? We see at least
that such powers are developed in children by imperceptible degrees.
That animals retain their mental individuality is unquestionable. When
my voice awakened a train of old associations in the mind of the
before-mentioned dog, he must have retained his mental individuality,
although every atom of his brain had probably undergone change more
than once during the interval of five years. This dog might have
brought forward the argument lately advanced to crush all
evolutionists, and said, I abide amid all mental moods and all
material changes...The teaching that atoms leave their impressions as
legacies to other atoms falling into the places they have vacated is
contradictory of the utterance of consciousness, and is therefore
false; but it is the teaching necessitated by evolutionism,
consequently the hypothesis is a false one. (46. The Rev. Dr. J.
M Cann, Anti-Darwinism, 1869, p. 13.)
LANGUAGE.
This faculty has justly been considered as one of the chief
distinctions between man and the lower animals. But man, as a highly
competent judge, Archbishop Whately remarks, is not the only animal
that can make use of language to express what is passing in his mind,
and can understand, more or less, what is so expressed by another.
(47. Quoted in Anthropological Review, 1864, p. 158.) In Paraguay the
Cebus azarae when excited utters at least six distinct sounds, which
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