The Soul of the Ape by Eugene Marais

The Soul of the Ape by Eugene Marais

Softcover, ISBN 9780958424745
Publisher: Stephan Phillips, 2002

Condition: Very Good. This book is in very good condition. The wraps have some  of handling related wear and the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. This book has clearly been well maintained and looked after thus far.

The Soul of the Ape – Eugene Marais

Eugene Marais, the almost legendary Afrikaans poet, writer and scientist, told friends during the last years of his life about his book The Soul of the Ape, which he was writing in English and which he considered to be his masterpiece.

To the dismay of his many admirers this work was never published and was for many years considered lost. It is now published for the first time, 33 years after his death. When Marais died in 1936 he was well known for his pioneering work in the field of animal behaviour. His study of the habits of chacma baboons in Northern Transvaal’s Waterberg led him to the conclusion that man’s subconscious mentality is in fact the primitive, instinctive mind, or psyche, which in the evolutionary process has been crowded out by the development of a reasoning intellect.

This is the theme of The Soul of the Ape. Published simultaneously in South Africa, Britain and the United States, the book is bound to have a tremendous impact. Introducing this edition with a moving essay on Marais’ life and work, Robert Ardrey [author of African Genesis and The Territorial Imperative] states that this book, “written so long ago, presents better than any other book published thus far, the dawning humanity in the psyche of the higher primate.”

This is indeed the masterpiece of Eugene Marais, of whom Ardrey wrote in African Genesis that he was the first “to penetrate the secrets of the wonderful world of the animal and to apprehend the legitimate mysteries of the wonderful world of man.”