d thus
constituted would be simply an admirable piece of unconscious
machinery, the working out of which lay potentially in its primitive
composition; pleasure and pain would have no place in it; it would be
a veritable Garden of Eden without any tree of the knowledge of good
and evil. The question of the moral government of such a world could
no more be asked, than we could reasonably seek for a moral purpose in
a kaleidoscope.

4. How far down the scale of animal life the phenomena of
consciousness are manifested, it is impossible to say. No one doubts
their presence in his fellow-men; and, unless any strict Cartesians
are left, no one doubts that mammals and birds are to be reckoned
creatures that have feelings analogous to our smell, taste, sight,
hearing, touch, pleasure, and pain. For my own part, I should be
disposed to extend this analogical judgment a good deal further. On
the other hand, if the lowest forms of plants are to be denied
consciousness, I do not see on what ground it is to be ascribed to the
lowest animals. I find it hard to believe that an infusory animalcule,
a foraminifer, or a fresh-water polype is capable of feeling; and, in
spite of Shakspere, I have doubts about the great sensitiveness of the
"poor beetle that we tread upon." The question is equally perplexing
when we turn to the stages of development of the individual. Granted a
fowl feels; that the chick just hatched feels; that the chick when it
chirps within the egg may possibly feel; what is to be said of it on
the fifth day, when the bird is there, but with all its tissues
nascent? Still more, on the first day, when it is nothing but a flat
cellular disk? I certainly cannot bring myself to believe that this
disk feels. Yet if it does not, there must be some time in the three
weeks, between the first day and the day of hatching, when, as a
concomitant, or a consequence, of the attainment by the brain of the
chick of a certain stage of structural evolution, consciousness makes
its appearance. I have frequently expressed my incapacity to
understand the nature of the relation between consciousness and a
certain anatomical tissue, which is thus established by observation.
But the fact remains that, so far as observation and experiment go,
they teach us that the psychical phenomena are dependent on the
physical.

In like manner, if fishes, insects, scorpions, and such animals as the
pearly nautilus, possess feeling, then undoubtedly consc