We took a perverse pleasure in arguing, without the least suspicion
that we were reducing ourselves to absurdity, that all the books in the
British Museum library might have been written word for word as they
stand on the shelves if no human being had ever been conscious, just
as the trees stand in the forest doing wonderful things without
consciousness.
And the Darwinians went far beyond denying consciousness to trees.
Weismann insisted that the chick breaks out of its eggshell
automatically; that the butterfly, springing into the air to avoid the
pounce of the lizard, 'does not wish to avoid death; knows nothing about
death,' what has happened being simply that a flight instinct evolved by
Circumstantial Selection reacts promptly to a visual impression produced
by the lizard's movement. His proof is that the butterfly immediately
settles again on the flower, and repeats the performance every time the
lizard springs, thus shewing that it learns nothing from experience,
and--Weismann concludes--is not conscious of what it does.
It should hardly have escaped so curious an observer that when the cat
jumps up on the dinner table, and you put it down, it instantly jumps
up again, and finally establishes its right to a place on the cloth by
convincing you that if you put it down a hundred times it will jump up a
hundred and one times; so that if you desire its company at dinner you
can have it only on its own terms.
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