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(1984)–Eugène Marais– rechtenstatus

3 Phyletic and Individual Memory

What is the essential nature of the mental process which the chacma thus translates into behaviour?

If one traces the shadowy occurrence of mental processes in non-primate mammalia and their even more indeterminate appearance in birds, it is obvious that they are far less complex than in the primate. But such comparison does make it possible to form a clear conception of the real nature of the primate's mental process. If we look at the development of mental processes in the primate from one point of view - namely, in relation to the animal's struggle for existence - it is apparent that the process is fundamentally one of memory - memory in the human sense. It is not merely the memory of things in relation to locality, which even insects possess to a high degree. It is the ability to memorise the relation of cause and effect. It is the ability to accumulate what may be termed individual causal memories.⁵

Whatever complexity this mentality may have attained in the primate, evidently the ability to accumulate individual causal memories was an early attribute singled out in the process of natural selection. In the chacma it has become dominant. Individual causal memory generally governs the animal's behaviour in relation to its environment.

Much of the behaviour of higher non-primate mammals is determined by ‘instincts’. These are grouped round three great psychic centres:

1.	Sexual sense (reproduction and care of the young).
2.	Fear of death (counteracting common environmental dangers).
3.	Procuring of food.

These instincts are nearly always correlated to specific somatic modifications, as in insects.

Purely instinctive behaviour is quite determinate in character. The animal cannot voluntarily vary its behaviour. It meets the normal conditions of its environment in a certain definite way and cannot adjust its actions to overcome the hostile element in any unusual environmental occurrence. Instinct in its purest form may therefore be described, from an evolutionary point of view, as a hereditarily established tendency to certain definite behaviour selected as a reaction to, and as most beneficial under, certain normal environmental conditions.

It seems hardly possible to speak of instinct in terms of the higher-primate mentality. They are probably not related functions and it is possible that pure instinct may be described as ‘psychic’ only in the sense that it employs, and in similar manner, the same motor mechanism which the indeterminate mental-

ity makes use of, and that both function through the central nervous system, though quite certainly in different centres. Notwithstanding this, it would still be convenient to speak of instinct as phyletic memory. There are many analogies between memory and instinct, and although these may not extend to fundamentals, they are still of such a nature that the term phyletic memory will always convey a clear understanding of the most characteristic attributes of instinct.

In explanation of my definition of instinct, it must be pointed out that every set of muscular actions originally evolved in an organism by its environment must be either advantageous or disadvantageous. The organism that engages in such reactive muscular movements as would give it a better chance of surviving would retain that chance only by constantly making similar movements under similar conditions, and so certain definite actions become selectively established. That seems to have been the evolutionary pathway of instinct.

Let us turn now to the operation of these two types of mentality - phyletic memory and individual causal memory - in nature. The analysis of mental behaviour which they respectively dominate will give a better idea of their real significance in the scheme of organic existence than a great deal of explanation. For this purpose I shall select behaviour of three types, illustrating three different stages in the pathway of mental evolution:

1.	An organism whose behaviour is entirely governed by phyletic memory; for whom the acquisition of a single individual causal memory seems an impossibility.
2.	The behaviour of an animal in which phyletic memory is still dominant, but in whose action there is a suggestion of the new individual causal memory.
3.	The behaviour of the chacma under analogous conditions; that is, a mentality in which the individual causal memory has assumed predominant control.

Behaviour Governed by Phyletic Memory

The road-making ants of Africa make pathways extending sometimes to a distance of 300 yards from the hole that leads to their underground nest. Along this road, worn smooth and hard by their tiny feet, a continual stream of workers passes. Those going are unladen; those coming back bear a seed. These seeds are taken down into the nest and husked. The husks are then carried out and piled on the side of the hole opposite to that from which the prevailing winds come. These heaps of husks include those of all seeds - grass and shrub - found in the vicinity. The seeds, when extracted, are stored in an underground granary adjoining the nest.

Under certain conditions the ants can be deceived. If a long-used road is blocked and a new road drawn with some smooth hard implement, the workers, after a little hesitation, will follow the new road and it is thus possible to lead them in any direction. One species of road makers have a great aversion to crossing water; if a small trench is dug across the road at some distance from the nest and filled with water, they continue using the road, but they stop at the trench and become very excited, running backwards and forwards until eventually all the workers of the nest are collected at this spot - a confused and apparently aimless crowd. Eventually a new road is made from the point at which the obstruction occurs. This new road and the direction in which it goes is apparently determined by the direction in which most of the workers happen to run in their excitement. Several beginnings will be made by different groups thrown out from the main body. The biggest group will be the first to have a well-worn road, and this will be the one finally selected by all the workers. If the trench is dug near the end of a road immediately anterior to the place where the workers disperse to collect the seeds, and if this trench is filled with water, it often happens that a new road is not decided upon until a day has been spent in futile labour.

If a narrow bridge is placed across the water-trench directly in the middle of the old road, many, or perhaps all, workers in the collected crowd will one after another carefully test the bridge, but these attempts never go beyond an ant's length, so that the hind legs are still on the ground while the body is on the bridge. The presence of the water in the trench is apparently the deciding factor, since they will cross a bridge with no water underneath. If a small soilcovered board is placed opposite the bridge, and ants are allowed to collect on it, it is possible to transport them across the trench in considerable numbers at a time. Now a singular thing happens. All the workers thus transported across the line of water immediately travel to the end of the road and disperse to search for seeds. They come back to the road each carrying a seed, travel to the trench, and at once cross the bridge. The operation is naturally far more risky for an ant struggling with a burden several times bigger than itself than it would be for an unladen ant. One can continue carrying the ants across the trench for a great length of time. By marking individuals with red paint it can be ascertained that in the course of time the same ones are carried across repeatedly. If the waiting ants commence a new road, it is only necessary to obliterate it in order to concentrate them at the bridge again.

And after one's patience has been exhausted, their behaviour is still the same. Not one of those coming from the nest will ever cross the bridge, while those returning, encumbered with seeds, cross at once. It may be thought that holding a large seed in the mouth possibly prevents a sight of the water, and that the fearless crossing from the far side is due to this fact. But this is not the

case. If the seeds are taken from the ants just before they reach the bridge, they will continue their journey and cross just as readily as their laden fellows. And an ant will continue behaving in this manner after it has been carried over the water a great many times and crossed the bridge on the homeward journey.

The instincts involved will of course at once be apparent to the student of behaviour. On the far side of the bridge a double ‘pull’ is exerted. There is the instinct to secure food and in addition there is the mightier ‘homing’ instinct, which is sometimes stronger than the fear of death itself. But the most remarkable thing is the apparent impossibility of teaching the workers that if there is no danger in crossing the bridge with a load, there must be less danger in crossing it without one. If they could only learn that the bridge is safe to cross, it would constitute a causal memory of the simplest kind. But the ants cannot remember.

Compare this behaviour with that of an animal in which the instinctive mentality is still dominant but where there is a suggestion of individual causal memory.

Suggestion of Individual Causal Memory

Game birds are protectively coloured and, as their main environmental danger comes from soaring birds-of-prey, they have developed by selection a tendency to crouch down in the grass and lie still. So strong is this instinct that when an unaccustomed danger threatens, the same method is adopted even when it increases rather than diminishes the risk. If the danger becomes too pressing, the bird will, as a last resort, try to save itself by flying or running to some new hiding-place.

For more than a hundred years game birds have been hunted with dogs and shot at as they fly, yet still they crouch and wait until man and dog get so close that their chance of escape is reduced to a minimum. The same bird may be wounded several times, but still he crouches and waits to be killed. However, a certain adaptation of behaviour to new conditions becomes apparent, even where these constitute a completely new experience. In districts where birds are regularly shot, they fly farther, faster and scatter more widely than they do in districts where they have not been hunted, or than they would do when pursued by an eagle. There is, therefore, a causal memory. The bird remembers and its behaviour is to some extent dictated by that memory; but only to a small extent. The individual causal memory is not powerful enough to inhibit the phyletic memory which has become so highly disadvantageous under the new conditions.

Control by Individual Causal Memory

The third stage in the pathway of mental evolution is that of an animal in which the causal memory has become predominant. For this purpose I shall review our troop of wild baboons under conditions somewhat analogous to those illustrating the second type of mental behaviour.

For some five years they had had no experience of a man with a rifle. We had taught them not to fear man as such. The result was that they allowed any man with a rifle to come very close to them. During this time many babies had been born and had grown up who had perhaps never heard a gun fired, and certainly had never had the experience of having a gun fired at them. When, towards the end of our period of observation, the troop was approached by two men armed with rifles, the older individuals at once uttered first the ‘warning’ and then the ‘alarm’ loudly and insistently; thereafter they stood not upon the order of their going. The youngsters, frightened by the cries of their elders, ran to their parents and a precipitate retreat was beaten. But when they realised that the two men were the only cause of all this commotion, they began to lag behind in their frantic race uphill and eventually stopped, watching the approaching men and the fleeing adults alternately. Two shots were fired at them. One young female was killed and another wounded. And that was the last time the scalp-hunters had an opportunity of shooting them in this manner.

For a long while the troop still tolerated unarmed human beings in their vicinity, but even this stopped when they had been caught once or twice by men with concealed rifles. Here we have behaviour shaped entirely by the new memory. The animal is burdened by no ready-made hereditary memory useful only in meeting customary events in its environment and likely to become highly disadvantageous in the presence of new and unaccustomed conditions.

If I have perhaps unduly emphasised certain aspects of these three types of behaviour, it has been done only to make more apparent an essential attribute of the two great types of mentality in nature which they serve to illustrate. It must not be thought that I am trying to prove the absence of individual causal memory in all animals outside the order of the primates. Its development, like all evolutionary processes, can be continuously traced as existing in different degrees in different species. In insects and other lowly organisms it is almost entirely absent. Here the individual in its relation to its environment is completely dominated by hereditary memories only. In the highest mammal, behaviour is, generally speaking, determined in this manner, but there is always an adumbration of the individual causal memory. However, it is only when we reach the primates that this soul of individual causal memory takes the predominant share in fashioning the behaviour of the animal in relation to its envi-

ronment, and it is here that its real place in the scheme of mental evolution becomes clear.

Nor, on the other hand, is instinct - or phyletic memory - absent in the primate. Its activity is submerged by the soul of individual memory (cf. Freud's theories), and as we ascend higher in the scale to the anthropoids, the more noticeable does this submergence become. This process is correlated to definite organic modifications.

Two other facts must always be kept in view if we are to form any clear understanding of the chacma's mentality:

1.	The new mentality is not in any sense an evolutionary product of instinct.
2.	The new mentality does not take the place of the old - they exist side by side. Where the new mentality has become dominant, as in the chacma, the old mentality has become functionally submerged, but it is still there. In the primate the relation of the new mentality to the old one is of reason towards instinct.

The essential difference between these two types of mind - those largely governed by individual causal memory and those by phyletic memory - has been recognised by many thinkers, and various speculative attempts have been made to ascertain their selective cause. Professor Henri Bergson, for instance, writes in L'Evolution Créatrice:

‘From the fact that instinct is always more or less intelligent it has been concluded that instinct and intelligence are things of the same kind, and that there is only a difference of complexity or perfection between them, and above all, that one of the two is expressible in terms of the other. In reality, they accompany each other because they are complementary, and are complementary only because they are different, what is instinctive in instinct being opposite to what is intelligent in intelligence.’

I must confess that the concluding portion of this statement does not convey a very clear meaning to me. Nor can I quite agree with Professor Bergson's further assertion that these two types of mind are the outcome of two divergent pathways in evolution, and I shall attempt in the next chapter to arrive at an understanding of the probable evolutionary course of the new mind as inferred from an analysis of behaviour.

In the meantime I wish to emphasise that this speculation of Professor Bergson's seems irrefutable: One cannot speak of ‘intelligence’ as the evolutionary culmination of ‘instinct’, in the same sense as one would speak of the wing of the bird as the evolutionary outcome of the fore-arm of the reptile. It must always be remembered that we are dealing with functions and not with organs, and there can be no question that ‘intelligence’ is the function of a new organ -

an organ quite different from that which governs instinct. In the brains of primates and non-primates the organs of instinct and intelligence function in different degrees. It would therefore be incorrect to speak of ‘intelligence’ as a transformation of ‘instinct’ as one might perhaps speak of flying in the bird as a transformation of walking in the reptile, which is an evolved general function of the same transformed organ - in the case of instinctive and intelligent mentality they are different functions of different organs.

Both types of mentality can therefore be recognised and distinguished in all the higher mammalia in different degrees, but between the highest non-primate animal and the lowest primate there is a considerable hiatus in their relative activity. The low primate compared with the high non-primate seems somewhat beyond the mere transition stage. It is the position of the climber well over the top of the hill compared with the climber still on the nearer slope. But it is quite possible that wider research may prove this hiatus to be more apparent than real. It remains now to examine more closely the outstanding attributes of these two kinds of mind.

Instinctive Mentality

The term ‘phyletic memory’, which I have selected as preferable to ‘instinct’, seems to imply the existence of ‘consciousness’ in the human sense, since consciousness is a necessary adjunct of human memory. But I have already explained that by the term ‘memory’ I do not wish to predicate any identity with human memory. The term was selected only in view of certain striking analogies, and consciousness does not seem to be one of these. A question which occurs sooner or later to every student of animal behaviour is: Is there any consciousness in instinctive actions?

It is of course essentially a matter of definition whether consciousness means either (a) a mental picture of the end towards which behaviour tends, or (b) a conception of cause and effect in the behaviour adopted. One would at once be inclined to say that there can be no consciousness in instinctive action.

In the first definition there can be no knowledge of an end outside individual experience. The weaver finch hatched under a canary commences, under certain conditions, to weave its beautifully patterned nest. It has never seen a completed nest. It has never gone through the difficult and complex process of tying the first straws, and yet it completes the nest in just the same way that the wild bird does. It is hardly conceivable that the bird can have any knowledge of the end towards which its labour tends. It cannot, as it works, have a mental picture of the completed work which it has never seen. But we must not forget that such a conclusion is entirely anthropomorphic. We are judging the bird's mentality by our own. We cannot know a thing we have not experienced and

therefore cannot prejudge the weaver finch. This reasoning has its weakness. We cannot weave a nest we have not seen and yet the finch certainly does. In other words, if the tendency to such complex actions is hereditary, why cannot the mental picture also be hereditary?

And the matter becomes even more difficult when we consider complex instinctive actions performed by a ‘conscious’ being - say, by a chacma or a human being. It is difficult to imagine a human being engaging in purposive actions where the purpose is unknown to him. It seems a contradiction in terms. And yet it does occur. George McCall Theal mentions the wonderful homing instinct of the Bushmen. Young children taken by wagon great distances from their homes found their way back through pathless wildernesses. This same ‘instinct’ is present in most primitive peoples, and we had an opportunity here in Waterberg of examining just such a case of ‘homing’ in a descendant of the so-called ‘vaalpens pygmies’ that at one time inhabited the Bushveld of the northern Transvaal.

A boy of about fourteen was taken a roundabout journey of approximately 280 miles by road and rail to a new home which, because of an intervening big mountain range, was, in fact, no more than 40 miles away from his starting-point. He had never been any distance away from his original home and certainly knew nothing of the surrounding country. Shortly after his arrival he set out in the night and reached his old home two days later. His spoor was followed and it was found that his route was as nearly straight a line as the nature of the country would permit. It seems an impossible performance. Unfortunately, the intelligence of the boy was of a very low order. Careful questioning elicited no information other than the constantly repeated refrain: ‘I did not know where my home was, I ran away because I wanted to go home.’

Here is another case: A baby chacma was reared for us by a lady in Waterberg, who took charge of it a few hours after birth. It was taken away from her when it was about eight months old, and transported a distance of 60 miles over two ranges of mountains through uninhabited country. During the journey it was shut up in a dark box and every means was employed to destroy its sense of direction. The little animal was passionately devoted to the human being who had taken the place of its mother. When released at its new home it showed acute distress, running about restlessly and climbing to the tops of trees and houses, constantly calling for its human protectress. Later in the day it became quiet but deeply melancholy and refused to be comforted. It would take no food and ignored the overtures of the strange children about it, although it had never known playmates other than children. Before daybreak the next morning it had disappeared and six days later it reached its old home in the last stages of exhaustion and hunger, but showed the wildest delight when again embraced by its human foster-mother.

In both these cases we clearly have purposive action towards an unknown purpose. At first glance it is hard to understand how a conscious human being can undertake a distinctly purposive action without a clear mental picture of the end towards which his action is directed and of each step to be taken to attain it. But it is just this ‘subconscious’ behaviour of conscious beings which affords us perhaps the strongest ground for inferring that there is no ‘conscious’ mental picture in purely instinctive action. It is quite certain that a conscious being can carry out highly complex purposive actions of which it is not conscious. There is no mental picture, no conscious reasoning, no memory involved in its performance. If such a mental process can occur in a mind ordinarily dominated by ‘consciousness’, then it is certainly conceivable that it may occur in the instinctive mentality.

Intelligent Mentality

But we are on surer ground when we come to consider the question of the mental concept of cause and effect in instinctive behaviour. It is certain that in the purely instinctive mind there is no conception of the relation between cause and effect in the world of the senses. If, for instance, a purely instinctive animal is prevented from attaining the object of its actions, it will continue its futile efforts indefinitely, never realising that success is impossible. Even if the impediment is so simple that the most elementary conception of causality would at once make clear a method of overcoming it, that method will never be adopted if it entails a deviation from the customary course of action.

This, therefore, is one tangible example of the fundamental difference between the two types of memory: in the one there enters the element of causal comprehension, in the other it is absent.

And there is one other difference no less significant. Phyletic memories, as the name implies, are hereditary; causal memories are not. The ability to accumulate individual causal memories is of course transmitted, but the work done, the accumulated memories themselves, are never inherited by progeny from parents. The weaver finch comes into existence latently equipped with all the complex memories necessary to overcome all the usual difficulties of its natural environment. Without instruction or individual experience, it knows how to build its nest and what material to use. It knows what its natural food is, where to look for it and how to secure it. It knows what to do to find a mate, and when the eggs are laid it incubates them and feeds the young on just the right food.⁶ It knows what dangers threaten its existence, and if they appear, it knows exactly what to do in order to escape them. And it does these things without ever having seen them done.

The chacma seems a poor helpless thing when compared with this perfect

hereditary knowledge of the weaver finch. Often it does not inherit even the most important environmental knowledge from its ancestors. Without instruction or individual experience, it does not know what food to eat and what to avoid; it just has no idea where to look for food. It does not know where to seek a safe shelter in the night or what to do to protect itself from the weather. It does not recognise real danger, a danger that has perhaps destroyed members of its race for a thousand years. Even the sexual sense is frequently not correctly orientated hereditarily. However, evolution has more than recompensed the chacma for this loss of hereditary memories.

It has become the fashion in certain popular ‘natural history’ books to ascribe all manner of human psychic attributes to animals. Among other marvels, the mother is described as teaching her young one necessary environmental knowledge. This is no doubt very affecting and naturally appeals to deep human sentiments. Nonetheless, I do not think that these stories, or other tales of the immediate memorising of complex new causes and effects, give a true picture of the animal's mind. Outside the order of primates there are no such processes in nature. It is only in primate behaviour that tradition first appears as a determining element.⁷ The young otter needs no instructions from its mother in the art of swimming and capturing fish, even if she were capable of imparting it, since it is born equipped with all the knowledge its mother possesses. It would be interesting to study this question of the inheritance of the instinctive mentality in higher mammals under experimental conditions. However, we did have an opportunity of effecting a convincing comparison between the otter and the chacma in this respect, and a record of their respective behaviour makes clear the profound difference between these two animals as far as the inheriting of environmental memories is concerned.

Both baboon and otter were taken away from their mothers shortly after birth. The baboon was reared under our own supervision by a human fostermother. The baby otter, whose captured mother died from wounds immediately after its birth, was placed among a litter of puppies and accepted by the bitch.⁸ Both were carefully kept from all contact with their own kind and all knowledge of their natural environment.

The otter was reared thirty miles from the nearest running stream. The only water supply in the vicinity was in a deep well, and it never, at any one time, saw more water than was necessary to quench its thirst. It never saw a fish or crab and was fed exclusively on raw meat. When fully grown, it was taken for the first time to a river pool. It ran down to the water, smelled it and drank some. Then it struck the surface two or three times with its paw and immediately plunged in, diving, swimming and ‘playing’ just as a wild otter does. It had not been fed for some considerable time, and within half an hour it had captured a small fish and then a crab.

Our artificially reared baboon came from a district where its natural food supply would have consisted almost exclusively of insects and wild fruit. The wild baboon obtains insects by turning over all big stones in its line of march and is especially fond of the very abundant scorpions. This is a delicacy relished by wild baboons throughout South Africa and they show great ingenuity in catching them. The scorpion is rapidly beaten about with the hand until half-dazed, and is then turned on its back by a flick of the fingers and seized by the legs. In this position it cannot sting. The tail containing the sting and poison sac is carefully removed before eating. I have never seen a wild baboon stung by a scorpion during this process. Among the wild fruit commonly eaten there are several tempting-looking drupes and berries which are poisonous. Two species of fruit-bearing shrubs are remarkable because of the very close resemblance they bear to each other. These are the sandappel or the grysappel (Parinarium capense) and gifblaar (Dichapetalum cymosum). The fruits are very different in colour and size, but the plants themselves can hardly be distinguished from one another. The fruit of the gifblaar is bright red in colour and very tempting in appearance - but the plant secretes a strictuous poison of extreme virulence and the fruit is especially rich in the deadly substance. The fruits of the two plants are far less conspicuously coloured. Both are edible and much esteemed by wild baboons and their human neighbours. I have never seen a wild baboon meddle with a poison plant or attempt to pick a poison fruit. They carefully avoid them. Quite small youngsters seem to know the danger. How the individual acquires this knowledge I am not sure, but not even in their case would I care to suggest purposive maternal tuition.

To this, its natural environment, our captive baboon was suddenly introduced for the first time when it was nearly full grown. It had been deprived of food for long enough to make it extremely hungry, but although it was in the midst of unturned stones covering innumerable insects, it had no idea of turning them over, nor could direct suggestion awake any hereditary memory. When a stone was turned exposing a number of scuttling beetles and scorpions, it leaped away in terror and for a long time it showed the greatest fear of a scorpion. After a great deal of coaxing it was at length induced to eat two from which the stings had been removed. It was then shown a third one under a stone and this time it greedily seized the insect and was promptly stung in the palm of the hand. Each kind of wild fruit it handled with the greatest caution, first smelling it repeatedly and then nibbling small bits. When it was eventually introduced to the two plants mentioned, its confidence had grown to such an extent that it plucked and ate a grysappel without hesitation. There was just a little hesitation when it reached the poison plant. It picked a fruit and at once placed the whole of it in its cheek pouch and when it was prevented from plucking another, it at once commenced chewing the one it had. It was only then that

the sense of taste must have come to the rescue, as the masticated fragments were at once ejected with every sign of distaste and fear, and never after that could our chacma be induced even to handle the leaves or fruit of the gifblaar.⁹

It becomes clear that, generally speaking, in the non-primate most memory necessary for it to exist in a certain definite environment is phyletic and can remain latent for an indefinite time until it is called into activity through some suggestion from without. In the primate, little such memory is inborn.

In recapitulating the facts briefly, we must recall:

(a)	that the behaviour of all organisms is controlled by two different types of mentality;
(b)	that the foundation of the newer mentality is the ability to accumulate memories with causal comprehension;
(c)	that the one is not the evolutionary culmination of the other;
(d)	that phyletic mentality is inhibited by individual causal mentality and becomes inactive where the latter controls behaviour;
(e)	that the one is inherited as a complete mechanism for reacting to the customary environmental events;
(f)	that in the other the heredity extends only to the ability to accumulate individual memories, which renders possible beneficial reaction to all environmental events, whether customary or unusual; and
(g)	that both these types of mentality exist in different degrees of activity in all the higher mammalia.

The great frontier between the two types of mentality is the line which separates non-primate mammals from apes and monkeys. On one side of that line behaviour is dominated by hereditary memory, and on the other by individual causal memory. The animal whose behaviour is dominated by the individual causal mentality inherits no directing memories other than those which control its behaviour during infancy. As the capacity for registering causal memories develops in the individual, so does the soul of phyletic memories become submerged.

All these stages that we see in nature in different degrees in different animals are convincingly portrayed in the ontogenetic, or individual, development of the primate soul. It is known that the development, both embryonic and postnatal, of the organism is to a certain extent a recapitulation of the evolution of the species. To this general rule mental evolution affords no exception. The phyletic history of the primate soul can clearly be traced in the mental evolution of the human child. The highest primate, man, is born an instinctive animal. All its behaviour for a long period after birth is dominated by the instinctive mentality. The knowledge of its natural food supply and where to

seek it is inborn. It has a knowledge and fear of falling, a phyletic memory of an arboreal past. It clings to the mother. It knows how to show distress by its cries. But it has no memory, no conception of cause and effect, no consciousness. Then, as it grows, the new mentality slowly, by infinite gradations, emerges. The earliest sign of its dawning is the dim appearance of memory, and a mother's first glad exclamation in recognition of its coming has always been, ‘My baby remembers.’ Its mind can register, vaguely and uncertainly at first, an individual causal memory. And it is here that the wonderful transition occurs, a transition which the phyletic evolution of the soul of the chacma exemplifies. As the new soul, the soul of individual memory slowly emerges, the instinctive soul becomes just as slowly submerged.

The one is not an outgrowth of the other. The individual soul seems gradually to overshadow the instinctive one. For a time it is almost as though there were a struggle between the two. The control is divided. But in the end the new soul ousts the instinctive one from directing the mechanism which controls the behaviour of the individual, and assumes forever after the predominant place. Surely in this manner and in no other, the higher primate soul evolved from that shadowy beginning of individual causal memory which we first clearly see in the higher mammals.

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