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Soul
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made machines, subject to the ordinary laws of physics. The sub-human animals, according to these thinkers, were thus automata, absolutely devoid of Souls. Manifestly, of course, this Cartesian doctrine is opposed to the Jaina theory which endows the sub-human animals with Souls. In defence of the Cartesians, it may be pointed out, that according to them consciousness was identical with thought. No body would deny that man alone has the power of thinking, -So that if consciousness and for the matter of that, Soul is identified with the principle of thinking, man alone is to be endowed with a Soul and no other animal. The psychologists of the present day, however, reject the narrow view of consciousness and Soul, taken by the Cartesians. Consciousness is not limited to the process of thinking only. It is of varying degrees and possibly of different kinds. The movements and activities of the lower animals are not fully explained by purely mechanical laws; they refer to something more. Reasoning, conception and power of comparing may not be found in the sub-human creatures; but these are not the whole of consciousness. Perception and Reaction to stimuli, Feelings of want, of pleasure and pain, of satisfaction and of volitional activities, for example, are also modes of operation of the principle of consciousness; and these are certainly present in the lower animals in various forms and degrees. Some zoologists, while admitting the possibility of consciousness in animals other than man confine the sub-human consciousness to those animals only which have a centralised nervous system. They maintain that while the higher vertebrates and mammals, especially the dogs and the apes, are capable of forming some sorts of judgments and developing even crude forms of thought and reasoning, animals having no nervous system have no consciousness. Darwin, confesses that it is impossible to determine the first stage in the conscious operation in lower animals. Later researches have shown that even the infusoria and the microscopic protists exhibit some expressions which are similar to the expressions of sensation and will of higher animals; that some
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