The Descent of Man

never reflects on his past pleasures or pains in
the chase? And this would be a form of selfconsciousness.
On the other hand, as Buchner
(45. 'Conferences sur la Theorie Darwinienne,'
French translat. 1869, p. 132.) has remarked,
how little can the hard- worked wife of a degraded
Australian savage, who uses very few
abstract words, and cannot count above four,
exert her self-consciousness, or reflect on the
nature of her own existence. It is generally admitted,
that the higher animals possess memory,
attention, association, and even some imagination
and reason. If these powers, which
differ much in different animals, are capable of
improvement, there seems no great improbability
in more complex faculties, such as the higher
forms of abstraction, and self- consciousness,
etc., having been evolved through the
development and combination of the simpler
ones. It has been urged against the views here
maintained that it is impossible to say at what
point in the ascending scale animals become