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Chief Justice said that it would. He got out a cigar and lit it. Mamma Fuzzy
wanted a puff; she didn't like it. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Mike
and Mitzi, Flora and Fauna scamper-ing around and up the steps behind the
bench.
When he looked again, they were all up on it, and Mitzi was showing the court
what she had in her shoulder bag.
He got up, with Mamma and Baby, and crossed to where Leslie Coombes was
sitting. By this time, somebody was bringing in a coffee urn from the
cafeteria. Fuzzies ought to happen oftener in court-
The gavel tapped slowly. Little Fuzzy scrambled up onto Jack Holloway's lap.
After five days in court, they had all learned that the gavel meant for
Fuzzies and other people to be quiet. It might be a good idea, Jack thought,
to make a little gavel, when he got home, and keep it on the table in the
living room for when the family got too boisterous. Baby, who wasn't
gavel-trained yet, started out onto the floor;
Mamrna dashed after him and brought him back under the table.
The place looked like a courtroom again. The tables were ranged in a neat row
facing the bench, and the witness chair and the jury box were back where they
belonged. The ashtrays and the coffee urn and the ice tubs for beer and soft
drinks had vanished. It looked like the party was over. He was almost
regretful;
it had been fun. Especially for seventeen Fuzzies and a Baby Fuzzy and a
little black-and-white kitten.
There was one unusual feature; there was now a fourth man on the bench, in
gold-braided Navy black;
sitting a little apart from the judges, trying to look as though he weren't
there at all-Space Com-modore
Alex Napier.
Judge Pendarvis laid down his gavel. "Ladies and gentlemen, are you ready to
present the opinions you have reached?" he asked.
Lieutenant Ybarra, the Navy psychologist, rose. There was a read-ing screen in
front of him; he snapped it on.
"Your Honors," he began, "there still exists considerable difference of
opinion on matters of detail but we are in agreement on all major points. This
is quite a lengthy report, and it has already been incor-porated into the
permanent record. Have I the court's permission to summarize it?"
The court told him he had. Ybarra glanced down at the screen in front of him
and continued:
"It is our opinion," he said, "that sapience may be defined as differing from
nonsapience in that it is characterized by conscious thought, by ability to
think in logical sequence and by ability to think in terms other than mere
sense data. We - meaning every member of every sapient race - think
consciously, and
we know what we are thinking. This is not to say that all our mental activity
is conscious. The science of psychology is based, to a large extent, upon our
realiza-tion that only a small portion of our mental activity occurs above the
level of consciousness, and for centuries we have been diagraming the mind as
an iceberg, one-tenth exposed and nine-tenths submerged. The art of psychiatry
consists largely in bringing into consciousness some of the content of this
submerged nine-tenths, and as a practi-tioner I
can testify to its difficulty and uncertainty.
"We are so habituated to conscious thought that when we reach some conclusion
by any nonconscious process, we speak of it as a 'hunch,' or an 'intuition,'
and question its validity. We are so habit-uated to acting upon consciously
formed decisions that we must laboriously acquire, by systematic drill, those
automatic responses upon which we depend for survival in combat or other
emergencies. And we are by nature so unaware of this vast submerged mental
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area that it was not until the first century Pre-Atomic that its existence was
more than vaguely suspected, and its nature is still the subject of
acrimonious professional disputes."
There had been a few of those, off and on, during the past four days,too.
'T we depict sapient mentation as an iceberg, we might depict nonsapient
mentation as the sunlight reflected from its surface. This is a considerably
less exact analogy; while the nonsapient mind deals, consciously, with nothing
but present sense data, there is a consid-erable absorption and re-emission of
subconscious memories. Also, there are occasional flashes of what must be
conscious mental activ-ity, in dealing with some novel situation. Dr. van
Riebeek, who is es-pecially interested in the evolutionary aspect of the
question, suggests that the introduction of novelty because of drastic
environmental changes may have forced nonsapient beings into more or less
sus-tained conscious thinking and so initiated mental habits which, in time,
gave rise to true sapience.
"The sapient mind not only thinks consciously by habit, but it thinks in
connected sequence. It associates one thing with another. It reasons
logically, and forms conclusions, and uses those conclusions as premises from
which to arrive at further conclusions. It groups as-sociations together, and
generalizes.
Here we pass completely beyond any comparison with nonsapience. This is not
merely more con-sciousness, or more thinking; it is thinking of a radically
different kind. The nonsapient mind deals exclusively with crude sensory
ma.-terial. The sapient mind translates sense impressions into ideas, and then
forms ideas of ideas, in ascending orders of abstraction, almos;t without
limit.
"This, finally, brings us to one of the recognized overt manifeg-tations of
sapience. The sapient being is a symbol user. The nolu-sapient being cannot
symbolize, because the nonsapient mind is inex-pable of concepts beyond mere
sense images."
Ybarra drank some water, and twisted the dial of his readir,g screen with the
other hand.
"The sapient being," he continued, "can do one other thing. It is;a
combination of the three abilities already enumerated, but combinill!
I9 them creates something much greater than the mere sum of the parts. The
sapient being can imagine.
He can conceive of something whidh has no existence whatever in the
sense-available world of reahty, arld then he can work and plan toward making
it a part of reality. He not only imagine, but he can also create."
He paused for a moment. "This is our definition of sapience. When we encounter
any being whose mentation includes these char-acteristics, we may know him for
a sapient brother. It is the consij-ered opinion of all of us that the beings
called Fuzzies are such beings."
Jack hugged the small sapient one on his lap, and Little Fuzzl.y looked up and
murmured, "He-inta?"
"You're in, kid," he whispered. "You just joined the people."
Ybarra was saying, "They think consciously and continuously. We know that by
instrumental analysis of their electroencephalograph~c patterns, which compare
closely to those of an intelligent human child of ten. They think in connected
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