Sensation, Perception, Conception

I had a brilliant train journey today, from Chennai to Bangalore. My N72 was wondeful company and Ayn Rand kept my mind working most of the time. I felt that this particular paragraph from her book 'For the New Intellectual' has to be put up on my blog. The logic seems just perfect. Though I tried to come up with arguments against the logic and reason that she gives in the paragraph, I couldnt really help but get convinced by her thoughts.

''Man's consciousness shares with animals the first two stages of its development; sensations and perceptions; but it is the third state, conceptions, that makes him man. Sensations are intergrated into perceptions automatically, by the brain of a man or of an animal. But to integrate perceptions into conceptions by a process of abstraction, is a feat that man alone has the power to perform - and he has to perform it by choice. The process of abstraction, and of concept-formation is a process of reason, of thought; it is not automatic nor instinctive nor involuntary nor infallible. Man has to initiate it, to sustain it and to bear responsibility for its results. The pre-conceptual level of consciousness is nonvolitional; volition begins with the first syllogism. Man has the choice to think or to evade - to maintain a state of full awareness or to drift from moment to moment, in a sem-conscious daze, at the mercy of whatever associational whims the unfocused mechanism of his consciousness produces. ''

P.S: I am an animal. I will, very soon, be a man.