50 Riley Presidential Address. 



to within recent years, have been so effectually discarded that 

 they are even renounced by the more advanced theologians. I 

 refer to the belief that organisms were specially created as they 

 now exist, and that man was apart from, and not a part of, the 

 rest of the animal world. It is my judgment that a third 

 equally prevalent notion is essentially false, and will have to be 

 abandoned before we can properly appreciate the psychology of 

 animals. I refer to the notion that the lower animals do not 

 reason, and are incapable of conscious reflection and thought. 

 It would be easy to occupy your time for hours with accounts of 

 their actions which can be explained only upon the views here 

 set forth, and which are utterly at variance with the popular 

 notions and prejudices. 



The insects to which I have referred to-night are admitted to 

 be among the more intelligent of their class; but they are only 

 illustrations of an intelligence which is found throughout the 

 other orders, and which impresses us in proportion as we study 

 it and come to realize and recognize it. We can never properly 

 appreciate, nor properly bring ourselves into sympathy with these 

 lower creatures, until we recognize that they are actuated by the 

 same kind of intelligence as we ourselves. There are certain acts 

 which all creatures necessarily perform, as an outgrowth of their 

 organization. These are essentially the instinctive acts, and are, 

 for the most part, inevitable and often unconscious. A great 

 many of the acts of rational men are, in this view, instinctive, 

 and from birth to maturity many of them are prompted solely by 

 the consecutive development of different parts of the organization, 

 and are much less the result of training and teaching than is 

 generally believed. Most of the acts of insects are instinctive 

 and explicable upon this same view, but no one can study them 

 carefully and without bias and not feel that these instinctive and 

 inevitable actions are associated with many others which result 

 from the possession of intelligence of conscious reasoning and 

 reflective powers. In this view of the case is the whole world 

 truly kin, and is man brought more fully into sympathy with 

 and appreciation of it. 



Is it not significant also, that, just as in man, among mammalia, 

 the higher intellectual development and social organization is 

 found correlated with the longest period of dependent infancy; 

 that this helpless infancy has been, in fact, as Fiske has shown, 



