A plant must feed itself in order to live; the sunlight, the water, the chemicals it needs are the values its nature has set it to pursue;
its life is the standard of value directing its actions. But a plant has no choice of action; there are alternatives in the conditions it
encounters, but there is no alternative in its function: it acts automatically to further its life, it cannot act for its own destruction.^5Animals possess a primitive form of consciousness; they cannot know the issue of life and death, but they can know
pleasure and pain; an animal's life depends on actions automatically guided by its sensory mechanism.
An animal is equipped for sustaining its life; its senses provide it with an automatic code of action, an automatic knowledge of
what is good for it or evil. It has no power to extend its knowledge or to evade it. In conditions where its knowledge proves
inadequate, it dies. But so long as it lives, it acts on its knowledge, with automatic safety and no power of choice, it is unable to
ignore its own good, unable to decide to choose the evil and act as its own destroyer.^6Given the appropriate conditions, the appropriate physical environment, all living organisms—with one
exception—are set by their nature to originate automatically the actions required to sustain their survival. The
exception is man.
Man, like a plant or an animal, must act in order to live; man, like a plant or an animal, must gain the values his life
requires. But man does not act and function by automatic chemical reactions or by automatic sensory reactions;
there is no physical environment on earth in which man could survive by the guidance of nothing but his
involuntary sensations. And man is born without innate ideas; having no innate knowledge of what is true or false,
he can have no innate knowledge of what is good for him or evil. Man has no automatic means of survival.
Man's basic means of survival is his mind, his capacity to reason. " Reason is the faculty that identifies and
integrates the material provided by man's senses."^7
For man, survival is a question—a problem to be solved. The perceptual level of his consciousness—the level of
passive sensory