Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/525

No. 5.] It is not an essential point in our present argument, but I am disposed to question whether any animal consciousness can be fairly described as a "simple consciousness of sensation," that is to say, a state of pure internality, of diffused inward feeling, without a germinal consciousness of distinction between the feeling self and its surroundings. There is no question here of the developed or reflected consciousness of Ego and non-Ego, but only of that animal awareness of objective facts which is seen in reaction upon stimuli and in purposive adaptation of act to circumstance. It is in action that we have the surest clew to the early stages of the animal and the human consciousness. Knowledge in such creatures exists simply in a practical reference. Consciousness would be a useless luxury unless as putting them in relation to the surrounding world and enabling them to adapt their actions to its varying stimuli. In point of fact, this practical consciousness, so far as we can judge, accompanies animal life from the outset. At least we cannot even imagine a consciousness without the objective reference; i.e. without a felt distinction between the feeling subject and an object which it feels — something different, of whose presence to it it is aware. Once more let it be repeated, we are not speaking of the reflective realization of those distinctions which comes so much later — which comes to the non-human animal not at all, and to human beings only intermittently; we are speaking of the instinctive or direct consciousness which all living creatures possess (in greater or less degree) for the practical ends of living, to enable them to respond to external stimulus and to adapt themselves to their surroundings. Put on this broad ground, it may be said that the reaction off the sensitive organism is the practical recognition of an independent object, — it is the first or earliest form which that recognition takes. Further, there seems no reason to doubt that it is the contrast of activity, and passivity, — of resistance encountered and instinctive effort put forth against the resistance, to which may be added the contrast of want and satisfaction, of restless craving and the stilling of appetite by its appropriate gratification, — it is these contrasts which awaken