The Scottish Naturalist. 209 



at least the highest animal has something of the capacity for 

 improvement possessed by even the lowest human savage, we 

 should not be asked to admit that it is the same kind of being 

 that the improvement is to affect. Especially as secondly, in 

 the reverse way, if animals had had the self-consciousness and 

 the abstract cognitive faculty that gave man his powers of 

 attainment and progress, it may well be asked, How is it that 

 animals do not benefit in the same way by the endowment ? 

 Have they not yet had their opportunity ? What arrest has 

 been laid on the natural tendency of the faculty that in them 

 it has remained thus, not only stunted but altogether unger- 

 minative ? These considerations do not make it hopeful that 

 any direct inspection of the psychical phenomena of animals 

 shall ever discern in them a likeness to human thought, or in 

 their principle a subject identical with the human soul. 



4. Animals are sometimes credited with the principle of 

 prudence— that outward self-love that refuses a present good in 

 order to secure a future greater good. In man the "reflex 

 ego " is never busier with its reflex functions, never more 

 occupied with itself than in an act of prudence. Through all 

 such prudential actions in him, there constantly shoots the 

 warm light of self-consciousness, making the end, the motive, 

 and the means clear to the mind, personal, self-regarding, and 

 self-determined. If the animal be capable of such action in a 

 true human fashion, it is as much a person, self-conscious and 

 free, as any of us. But is it true that the mole, while he stores 

 his worms — even granting that he employs ingenious means of 

 keeping them fresh — is exercised in mind much as the husband- 

 man is when he stores his harvest ? Even if there had not 

 been found far down in the animal series, such a typical storer 

 as the bee or ant, I do not know that it would have been much 

 less easy than with that circumstance it is seen to be, to answer 

 the question. But with an entomological claim on the dignity 

 of prudential motive and conduct, the anthropological preroga- 

 tive must be held safe, sacred, and incommunicable. 



5. The moral and religious faculties — the highest powers of 

 humanity, still remain. They again stand or fall with self- 

 hood ; and self-hood stands or falls with them. If there is no 

 will, no personality, no self determining agency, the foundations 

 of morality are not laid. It is because man is not pre- 

 determined, but is a law to himself that he is moral and 

 responsible. The animal receiving its law, all the conditions 



