(Continued from page 18)

At first, the animal mind was capable of no more than a dim distinction between nice and nasty. Try to enter a primitive consciousness. You are a sea anemone living in a rock-pool. Your senses are stimulated in a certain pattern. Does the pattern signify (in the ancestral memory of the genes) food? Nice -- grab it. It signifies attack or poison? Nasty -- shrink back and reject it.

Evolution proceeds. Soon, the nerves knot together so that patterns of sensation can be played with in an opening mental space. You are, perhaps, a bee, and shifting shapes cross your honeycomb eyes. Wait -- that shape is like the inborn image that means `flower' -- snap! And an impressive sequence of actions is set in train: fly nearer, land, sip the nectar. You have found that only yellow flowers ever have nectar? Then your mental image of flowers is modified; yellow and food are associated

together. Something has been learned about your little patch of world. Awareness has expanded.

Look higher in the scale. Mind-space contains galleries of images, shifting, linking and unlinking in networks of associations. All that matters to you about the world is there in your mind like a map -- a mental representation. Perhaps you are a squirrel: this tree is where your nest is; that one is in your rival's territory -- be cautious. That clump has some sweet-barked saplings. Here, and here, you buried acorns last autumn. Now you gingerly explore the tree that fell in the gale last night. Over there is the farmer's garden, the place your mother taught you to fear. In fact, you can recognise a human a quarter of a mile off, even though they all look quite different -- an idea of that menace `man' has condensed in your mind from a hundred sightings. There is even a very dim sense of the world as surrounding you, as if a woodland clearing of awareness magically opened up around you as you leaped through the trees. But you don't take any notice of that!

Evolution ascends. Perception is brighter and more detailed, the world displays its riches. For some animals, there is a complex social world too, with rule-bound games, sometimes comic, sometimes tragic. Dreams and ponderings dance across the expanding mental arena, clothed in longings, terrors, enmities. Who are you now? Go back to a time before humanity: you are a bit man-like, part of a group walking cautiously through the waving equatorial grass to a clump of trees. Thought of the fruit there elicits an excited murmur, which the rest take up. Someone sees a hyena and gives the hyena-yelp of alarm. You understand well and quicken your pace, drawing a youngster to you, holding his hand, making soothing noises. Language is on its way.

(Continued on page 20)

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