The Evolution of Mind

In this fluently-at times brilliantly-written essay, Mr. McCabe seeks to solve the cosmic problem of the birth and development of mind. It is usual, he tells us, to postulate two evolutionary series: the material, where ''all varieties of energy and matter arise out of the abysmal womb of ether," and the mental, which "set in when the earth reached a certain stage of its development." Is this dualism tenable? When, and in what form, did consciousness first appear? Can mind be brought into the cosmic unity by tracing its gradual emergence from the etheric matrix? These are the questions which the present work essays to answer.

All living matter, whether plant or animal, shows, when it has freedom of movement, two properties which we may, if we will, term 'mental' or 'psychical:' namely, sensitiveness or irritability or responsiveness to stimulation, and spontaneous or self-initiated movement. But sensitiveness is also a widespread attribute of inorganic matter; and spontaneous movement always turns out, on careful scrutiny, to be a response to environmental stimuli. Here, therefore, is no evidence of consciousness; if we speak of 'mind' at all, we are stripping the word of the distinctive significance that it has in our own experience. What we are looking for is proof of consciousness.

But what, then, the reader may ask, is consciousness? "I make no attempt to define consciousness," replies our author, "partly because it defines itself more clearly than words can do, partly because all attempts to define it have proved abortive." Nevertheless, he knows very well what he is in search of. "The question to be answered is not, can we find any actions in a lower animal which are consistent with a theory of consciousness, but can we find any which are inconsistent with a purely neural action. The question of consciousness does not arise till then." "What I am chiefly seeking to determine is whether a new reality, or agency, besides ether, intervenes at some point in the earth's story." "The plain purpose I have in view is to see whether, and when, a new reality, other than ether and its products or aspects, enters into the tissue of our planetary life." And so he works up the scale of organic evolution, and reaches one negative conclusion after another. "There is no proof that consciousness had appeared before the Devonian period, or has since developed in any of the modern representatives of Pre-Devonian animals." "We have no clear or cogent indication of conscious states in the whole invertebrate world, or in any type of animal that lived before the Permian revolution in the earth's history." "We have not found a single pre-Tertiary animal whose activities cannot be explained without an assumption of consciousness." The whole history so far is a history of the progress of mechanism....

-The American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 22