The early phase of mind where consciousnesses are wholly un-unified from within by any central or continuous consciousness, and whose solidarity is wholly in an unconscious integration is so foreign to us who have minds where experience of experience is continually in process, that it is with the utmost difficulty we can in any wise conceive it. It is evident that a very low organism may have consciousnesses, but no mind, that is, no self-unifying whole of consciousnesses. It does not possess a mind, but during its whole life it attains psychoses which are merely _disjecta_ reached to help an immediate necessity of existence, and then fading completely away. Each psychosis is achieved more easily than the former by reason of the former, though there is no consciousness of connection with it. The increment and qualifying of a given experience by past experience is not reached by it. Some differentiation is attained under pressure of struggle for existence, and experience is constituted, but is wholly unknowing of itself and in no wise self-formative.
We have now, however, to consider the problem, how experience came to itself, and how and why representation and emotion should arise in the struggle of existence.
At the first, as we have seen, organisms responded in conscious form only in pleasure and pain, and this only when the actual damage or benefit to the individual was very considerable. When the hurt was critical, then only was pain accomplished as a function to secure self-preservative action, but gradually through survival of the fittest the greater susceptibility was attained, so that minor lesions are felt in pain terms, and some general sensing and objectifying lead to some differentiation in adjustment. The external parts of the body become specially sensitive, and ciliate extensions are formed. Injury to these results in pain and consequent reactions, and in this wise by injury to a small part great harm to the organism as a whole is prevented. The low forms of life are thus enabled to avoid the hurtful before they meet it in full annihilatory force. These practically anticipatory reactions—though there is no real anticipation in consciousness, no real experience of experience—I term the method of incipiency. Pain reactions are thus reached with less and less actual harm until the very slightest injury to a minute tentacle will suffice to awaken pain.