“Well, neither.  Any life form with a central nervous system has some consciousness—­awareness of existence and of its surroundings.  And anything having a brain thinks, to use the term at its loosest.  What I meant was that only the sapient mind thinks and knows that it is thinking.”

He was perfectly safe so far.  He talked about sensory stimuli and responses, and about conditioned reflexes.  He went back to the first century Pre-Atomic, and Pavlov and Korzybski and Freud.  The globe never flickered.

“The nonsapient animal is conscious only of what is immediately present to the senses and responds automatically.  It will perceive something and make a single statement about it—­this is good to eat, this sensation is unpleasant, this is a sex-gratification object, this is dangerous.  The sapient mind, on the other hand, is conscious of thinking about these sense stimuli, and makes descriptive statements about them, and then makes statements about those statements, in a connected chain.  I have a structural differential at my seat; if somebody will bring it to me—­”

“Well, never mind now, Dr. Mallin.  When you’re off the stand and the discussion begins you can show what you mean.  We just want your opinion in general terms, now.”

“Well, the sapient mind can generalize.  To the nonsapient animal, every experience is either totally novel or identical with some remembered experience.  A rabbit will flee from one dog because to the rabbit mind it is identical with another dog that has chased it.  A bird will be attracted to an apple, and each apple will be a unique red thing to peck at.  The sapient being will say, ’These red objects are apples; as a class, they are edible and flavorsome.’  He sets up a class under the general label of apples.  This, in turn, leads to the formation of abstract ideas—­redness, flavor, et cetera—­conceived of apart from any specific physical object, and to the ordering of abstractions—­’fruit’ as distinguished from apples, ‘food’ as distinguished from fruit.”

The globe was still placidly blue.  The three judges waited, and he continued: 

“Having formed these abstract ideas, it becomes necessary to symbolize them, in order to deal with them apart from the actual object.  The sapient being is a symbolizer, and a symbol communicator; he is able to convey to other sapient beings his ideas in symbolic form.”

“Like ’Pa-pee Jaak’?” the judge on his right, with the black mustache, asked.

The globe flashed red at once.

“Your Honors, I cannot consider words picked up at random and learned by rote speech.  The Fuzzies have merely learned to associate that sound with a specific human, and use it as a signal, not as a symbol.”

The globe was still red.  The Chief Justice, in the middle, rapped with his gavel.