ANTS AND SOME OTHER INSECTS. II 



by words, as a higher stage in generalisation. All these things 

 give man a colossal advantage, since he is thereby enabled to stand 

 on the shoulders of the written encyclopaedia of his predecessors. 

 This is lacking in all animals living at the present time. Hence, if 

 we would compare the human mind with the animal mind, we must 

 turn, not to the poet or the savant, but to the Wedda or at any rate 

 to the illiterate. These people, like children and animals, are very 

 simple and extremely concrete in their thinking. The fact that it 

 is impossible to teach a chimpanzee brain the symbols of language 

 proves only that it is not sufficiently developed for this purpose. 

 But the rudiments are present nevertheless. Of course the "lan- 

 guage" of parrots is no language, since it symbolises nothing. On 

 the other hand, some animals possess phyletic, i. e., hereditarily 

 and instinctively fixed cries and gesture, which are as instinctively 

 understood. Such instinctive animal languages are also very widely 

 distributed and highly developed among insects, and have been 

 fixed by heredity for each species. Finally it is possible to develop 

 by training in higher animals a certain mimetic and acoustic conven- 

 tional language-symbolism, by utilising for this purpose the pecu- 

 liar dispositions of such species. Thus it is possible to teach a 

 dog to react in a particular manner to certain sounds or signs, but 

 it is impossible to teach a fish or an ant these things. The dog 

 comprehends the sign, not, of course, with the reflections of human 

 understanding, but with the capacity of a dog's brain. And it is, 

 to be sure, even more impossible to teach its young an accomplish- 

 ment so lofty for its own brain as one which had to be acquired by 

 training, than for the Wedda or even the negro to transmit his ac- 

 quired culture by his own impulse. Even the impulse to do this is 

 entirely lacking. Nevertheless, every brain that is trained by man 

 is capable of learning and profiting much from the experience of 

 its own individual life. And one discovers on closer examination 

 that even lower animals may become accustomed to some extent to 

 one thing or another, and hence trained, although this does not 

 amount to an understanding of conventional symbols. 



In general we may say, therefore, that the central nervous sys- 

 tem operates in two ways : automatically and plastically. 



