206 The Scottish Naturalist. 



knowledge or to impulse, modified in the animal in a manner 

 totally different from what is presented in man — so modified 

 indeed that they can no longer be called the same faculties. 

 Leaving aside meanwhile the lower faculties of sensitive per- 

 ception, memory, and the simply representative, as distinguished 

 from the creative, imagination, and taking thought proper — that 

 conceptual power by which man reduces to knowledge and 

 truth the real, and that idealising power by which he can deal 

 with the possible and body forth the desirable ; where is the 

 evidence that animals can, even in the most rudimentary fashion, 

 abstract, generalise, ideally create, extract the thoughts that 

 are in things, or have a sense of certitude, or realise the dimmest 

 feeling of axiomatic necessity, or taste in any way the joy of 

 knowledge, or even rise to the dignity of being curious about 

 knowledge. Their knowing is not of the human type. Hence 

 it is at this point of abstract and notional knowledge that Locke 

 found the fundamental distinction between animals and man. 

 Max Millie* does the same, though he prefers to signalise the 

 distinction by the outward expression of it in language. To 

 him the brute creation constitutes what Lord Erskine called the 

 "mute creation:" man, on the other hand, is "articulately 

 speaking." He embodies in words the generalised thoughts 

 that are his mental interpretation of the universe. 



It may of course be expected that it will not be easy to show, 

 by a direct appeal to the psychical phenomena of animals, 

 either that they have or have not the power of conceptional 

 thought. I appeal here only to the following considerations. 

 It is this power that makes man the possessor of truth, and the 

 architect of science and literature, and that therefore bestows 

 on him, as it makes him capable of, the boon of progressive 

 civilisation, and the promise of indefinite perfectibility. All 

 these characteristics man owes to his notionalising and ela- 

 borate powers of mind. Now, first, these characteristics are 

 strikingly distinctive of man, and peculiar to him, indicating 

 that the mental ground of them is also distinctive and peculiar. 

 The amassing of knowledge, self-culture, the power of in- 

 definite unprovability, is absent in the animal, — of course, 

 is it not? with the absence of the self to cultivate. There is 

 no amassing of knowledge, no science, competent to animals, — 

 is it not because the real condition of true knowledge and its 

 end they lack — self-hood ? What have they done for self- 

 development, for the improvement of their knowing powers, 



