'...nothing about our shared ancestry with the ape can be thought of as altering the fact that human beings are the creators of history and culture. If 'mind' and 'soul' are not entities in their own right, they are at least terms that have been found useful for describing aspects of the expression and self-experience of our very complex nervous system. The givens of our nature, that we are brilliantly creative and brilliantly destructive, for example, would persist as facts to be dealt with, even if the word 'primate' were taken to describe us exhaustively.'
Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self, p.xi.
