usness." On the
other hand, as Buechner has remarked in his "Lectures about Darwin's
Theory": "How little can the hard-working wife of a degraded Australian
savage, who hardly ever uses abstract words, and can not count above four,
how little can such a woman exert her self-consciousness, or reflect on the
nature of her own existence!" And in Darwin's _resume_ of his chapters on
the intellectual powers of man and animals, he says, on page 126: "If it
could be proved that certain high mental powers, such as the formation of
general concepts, self-consciousness, etc., were absolutely peculiar to
man, which seems extremely doubtful, it is not improbable that these
qualities are merely the incidental results of other highly-advanced
intellectual faculties: {119} and these again mainly the result of the
continued use of a perfect language."

If Darwin is thus not able to show us in the animal world a single real
analogy which at all approaches self-consciousness, and, in order to supply
this want, must have recourse to the purely hypothetical _possibility_ that
it is not certain whether an old hunting-dog does not reflect upon the past
joys of the chase; if by the uncertainty of the expression that
self-consciousness might be an "_accompanying_" result of other faculties,
he nevertheless gives us to understand that he can not find the
_sufficient_ cause of the origin of self-consciousness in those other
faculties; and, finally, if he closes the last mentioned quotation with a
sentence which has for its premise the wholly illogical thought that
language might have been able to reach "a high state of development" before
the origin of self-consciousness and without its assistance: then, indeed,
the result of all this certainly is that he has given no adequate
consideration to the specific nature of self-consciousness. It is only
under this supposition that it is possible for him to say: "Nevertheless,
the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it
certainly is, is one of degree and not of quality." The authors may
possibly not agree in the definitions of the idea of self-consciousness--we
ourselves perhaps are only an additional example in confirmation of this
fact--; but whatever the definition may be, the fact itself remains, that
self-consciousness does not stand as one of the intellectual faculties
beside the others and cooerdinate with them, but, as an entirely new form of
being, introduces a qualita