Carlile. — Oil Animal Intelligence. 349 



Art. XXVII. — Animal Intelligence. 



By William W. Caklilb. 



[Read before the Wellington Philosophical Society, 29th July, 1891.'] 



It has come to be recognised only of late years that for the 

 adequate comprehension of the phenomena of mind in man 

 some knowledge with regard to the manifestations of mind in 

 the lower animals is in the highest degree necessary ; and the 

 attention of late paid to comparative psychology has already 

 revolutionised much of human psychology, with its cognate and 

 derivative sciences. Take the one fact of its having drawn at- 

 tention to the great principle of heredity, more especially to 

 the heredity of acquired faculty. The importation of this con- 

 ception alone into philosophy goes far to render all the older 

 philosophies obsolete, or, at any rate, to reduce their interest 

 for mankind to an historical interest only. It is not by 

 any means in the region of metaphysics and psychology 

 alone that it thus operates. Dr. Kuno Fischer, in his work on 

 " Francis Bacon of Verulam," traces the course of the Anglo- 

 Gallic empiricism from Bacon through Hobbes, Locke, Berke- 

 ley, Hume, Voltaire, Eousseau, Condillac, and the Encyclo- 

 paedists down to such English writers as Macaulay and J. S. 

 Mill ; and points out truly that in all of them, with the single 

 exception of Hume, the mode of thought was anti-historical. 

 As an instance of this anti-historical mode of thought it is 

 sufficient to point to Hobbes's theory of government as rest- 

 ing on a fancied contract between king and people. This, as 

 Dr. Fischer says, became " a revolutionary theory in the mind 

 of Eousseau. The anti-historical mode of thought became an 

 anti-historical mode of action. The French Eevolution came 

 to an incurable rupture with history. The theoretical Eous- 

 seau was followed by the practical Eobespierre, in whom the 

 anti-historical mode of action became not only barbarous but 

 grotesque." Dr. Fischer, with justifiable complacency, com- 

 pares this mode of thought with that which, in Germany, took 

 its rise in Leibnitz, and flowed down to our times through 

 Lessing, Kant, Goethe, Hegel, and the other idealists. What- 

 ever its failings were, it was, at any rate in the main, free 

 from the failing of being anti-historical. If Dr. Fischer had 

 traced the course of English empiricism down a little fur- 

 ther, however, than he did, he would have found that it had 

 learnt to think historically ; that, indeed, in the philosophy 

 based on the theory of evolution, it had come to converge with 

 the stream of German thought that flowed in upon us through 

 the channel of Thomas Carlyle's writings. When Hegel tells 



