Animal Psychology, the Old and the New 21 



performances of the creatures described. Both these 

 tendencies frequently lead to reading into an animal's 

 actions an unwarrantable amount of sagacity. But 

 more powerful than these motives, especially during 

 the Christian era, have been the various theological 

 prepossessions of different schools. In the iyth and 

 1 8th centuries we meet with two opposed tendencies 

 in the interpretation of animal behavior; one toward 

 attributing the actions of animals to the same facul- 

 ties that are possessed by human beings and leading 

 to a limitation of the sphere of instinct, or even to 

 denying instinct altogether; the other toward explain- 

 ing animal behavior, so far as possible, in terms of 

 instinct or automatism, with the limitation of reason 

 and all higher mental attributes to man alone. The 

 philosophical skeptics, in general, were partial to- 

 ward the first; the defenders of the faith toward the 

 second. The one class of writers attempted to link 

 man and animal more closely together, and to show 

 their fundamental kinship; the other tried to make 

 the gap between man and animal as wide as pos- 

 sible, and to show that there is an essential differ- 

 ence between them. "After the error of atheism," 

 says Descartes, "there is none which leads weak 

 minds further from the path of virtue than the idea 

 that the minds of animals resemble our own, and 

 therefore that we have no greater right to a future 

 life than have gnats and ants, while on the contrary, 

 our mind is quite independent of the body, and does 

 not necessarily perish with it," 



