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The Seventh Lesson: The Unfoldment of Consciousness.591
As we advance in the scale of life, we are met with constantly increasing
unfoldment of mentation, the simple giving place to the complex
manifestations. Passing by the simple vital processes of the monera, or singlecelled
“things,” we notice the higher forms of cell life, with growing sensibility
or sensation. Then we come to the cell-groups, in which the individual cells
manifest sensation of a kind, coupled with a community-sensation. Food is
distinguished, selected and captured, and movements exercised in pursuit
of the same. The living thing is beginning to manifest more complex mental
states. Then the stage of the lower plants is reached, and we notice the varied
phenomena of that region, evidencing an increased sensitiveness, although
there are practically no signs of special organs of sense. Then we pass on to
the higher plant life, in which begin to manifest certain “sensitive-cells,” or
groups of such cells, which are rudimentary sense organs. Then the forms of
animal life, and considered with rising degrees of sensations and growing
sense apparatus, or sense organs, gradually unfolding into something like
nervous systems.
Among the lower animal forms there are varying degrees of mentation
with accompanying nerve centers and sense-organs, but little or no signs of
consciousness, gradually ascending until we have dawning consciousness in
the reptile kingdom, etc., and fuller consciousness and a degree of intelligent
thought in the still higher forms, gradually increasing until we reach the
plane of the highest mammals, such as the horse, dog, elephant, ape, etc.,
which animals have complex nervous systems, brains and well developed
consciousness. We need not further consider the forms of mentation in the
forms of life below the Conscious stage, for that would carry us far from our
subject.
Among the higher forms of animal life, after a “dawn period” or semiconsciousness,
we come to forms of life among the lower animals possessing
a well developed degree of mental action and Consciousness, the latter
being called by psychologists “Simple Consciousness,” but which term we
consider too indefinite, and which we will term “Physical Consciousness,”