Yet we must protest against the exaggerated estimate of the
conscious pain which so many read into these millions of years of
struggle. Probably there was no consciousness at all during the
greater part of the time. The wriggling of the worm on which you
have accidentally trodden is no proof whatever that you have
caused conscious pain. The nervous system of an animal has been
so evolved as to respond with great disturbance of its tissue to
any dangerous
or injurious assault. It is the selection of a certain means of
self-preservation. But at what level of life the animal becomes
conscious of this disturbance, and "feels pain," it is very
difficult to determine. The subject is too vast to be opened
here. In a special investigation of it* I concluded that there is
no proof of the presence of any degree of consciousness in the
invertebrate world even in the higher insects; that there is
probably only a dull, blurred, imperfect consciousness below the
level of the higher mammals and birds; and that even the
consciousness of an ape is something very different from what
educated Europeans, on the ground of their own experience, call
consciousness.
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