t yet been attained.
The most important of these questions is, "Does the animal possess
consciousness, and is it like the human consciousness?" Comparative
psychologists divide into three groups on this question.

[Footnote C: Since the present treatise is intended for the larger
public, this brief resume will probably be welcome to many.]

The one group allows consciousness to the lower forms, but emphasizes
the assertion that between the animal and the human consciousness there
is an impassable gap. The animal may have sensations and memory-images
of sensations which may become associated in manifold combinations. Both
sensations and memory images are believed to be accompanied by
conditions of pleasure and of pain (so-called sensuous feelings), and
these in turn, become the mainsprings of desire. The possession of
memory gives the power of learning through experience. But with this,
the inventory of the content of animal consciousness is exhausted. The
ability to form concepts[D] and with their aid to make judgments and
draw conclusions is denied the lower forms. All the higher intellectual,
aesthetic and moral feelings, as well as volition guided by motives, are
also denied. Among the ancients this view was held by Aristotle and the
Stoics; and following them it was taught by the Christian Church. It
pervaded all mediaeval philosophy, which grew out of the teachings of
Aristotle and the Church. It is this philosophy, in the form of
Neo-Thomism, which still obtains in the Catholic world.

[Footnote D: Ideas are copies of former sensations, feelings and
other psychic experiences and retain also the accidental signs which
belonged to those earlier experiences. They are images in the
concrete, such as the memory of a certain horse in a certain
definite situation ... say a well fed, long-tailed one standing at a
manger. A concept, on the other hand, is a mental construct which
has its rise in ideas, or memory-images, in that their essential
characteristics are abstracted. For this reason the concept has not
a definite image-content. (Thus the thought of "horse" in general,
is a concept. Not so the thought of a certain individual
horse,----that is an idea, with a definite image-content.)]

During the 17th century, even though temporarily, another conception of
the consciousness of lower forms came to prevail and was introduced by
Descartes, the "Father" of modern phil