ccessive ages--the
procession of life, as it may be called--it will be useful to consider
the evolution of animal behaviour.

Evolution of Mind

A human being begins as a microscopic fertilised egg-cell, within which
there is condensed the long result of time--Man's inheritance. The long
period of nine months before birth, with its intimate partnership
between mother and offspring, is passed as it were in sleep, and no one
can make any statement in regard to the mind of the unborn child. Even
after birth the dawn of mind is as slow as it is wonderful. To begin
with, there is in the ovum and early embryo no nervous system at all,
and it develops very gradually from simple beginnings. Yet as mentality
cannot come in from outside, we seem bound to conclude that the
potentiality of it--whatever that means--resides in the individual from
the very first. The particular kind of activity known to us as thinking,
feeling, and willing is the most intimate part of our experience, known
to us directly apart from our senses, and the possibility of that must
be implicit in the germ-cell just as the genius of Newton was implicit
in a very miserable specimen of an infant. Now what is true of the
individual is true also of the race--there is a gradual evolution of
that aspect of the living creature's activity which we call mind. We
cannot put our finger on any point and say: Before this stage there was
no mind. Indeed, many facts suggest the conclusion that wherever there
is life there is some degree of mind--even in the plants. Or it might be
more accurate to put the conclusion in another way, that the activity we
call life has always in some degree an inner or mental aspect.

[Illustration: OKAPI AND GIRAFFE

The Okapi is one of the great zooelogical discoveries. It gives a good
idea of what the Giraffe's ancestors were like. The Okapi was unknown
until discovered in 1900 by Sir Harry Johnston in Central Africa, where
these strange animals have probably lived in dense forests from time
immemorial.]

In another part of this book there is an account of the dawn of mind in
backboned animals; what we aim at here is an outline of what may be
called the inclined plane of animal behaviour.

A very simple animal accumulates a little store of potential energy, and
it proceeds to expend this, like an explosive, by acting on its
environment. It does so in a very characteristic self-preservative
fashion, so that it burns without being co