5o6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



vidual liberty wliicli it is the special province of Government 

 to conserve, and this, too, without any loss of individual zeal and 

 initiative. 



Let us repeat it : A governmental activity whicli compels, is 

 mischievous ; an activity which says : " Thou mayst ; lo, here are 

 the means," is helpful. 



IS MAN THE ONLY REASONER ? 



By JAMES SULLY. 



THE " whirligig of time " may he said to be bringing to the 

 much-neglected brutes an ample revenge. The first naive 

 view of the animal mind entertained by the savage and the child 

 is a respectful one, and may perhaps be roughly summed up in 

 the formula in which a little boy once set forth his estimate of 

 equine intelligence : " All horses know some things that people 

 don't know, and some horses know more things than a great many 

 people." But this pristine unsophisticated view of the animal 

 world, though its survival may be traced in mythology and re- 

 ligious custom, has long since been scouted by philosophers. 

 Thinkers, from Plato downward, have, not unnaturally perhaps, 

 regarded the faculty of rational thought, which they themselves 

 exhibited in the highest degree, as the distinguishing prerogative 

 of man. The Christian religion, too, with its doctrine of immor- 

 tality for man and for man alone, has confirmed the tendency to 

 put the animal mind as far below the human as possible. And so 

 we find Descartes setting forth the hypothesis that animals are 

 unthinking automata. 



Not forever, however, was the animal world to suffer this in- 

 dignity at the hands of man. Thinkers themselves prepared the 

 way for a Tapiyrocliertie7it between the two. More particularly 

 the English philosophers from Locke onward, together with their 

 French followers, pursuing their modest task of tracing back our 

 most abstract ideas to impressions of sense, may be said by a sort 

 of leveling-down process to have favored the idea of a mental 

 kinship between man and brute. This work of the philosophers 

 has been supplemented by the leveling-up work of the modern 

 biologist. There is not the least doubt that the wide and accurate 

 observation of animal habits by the naturalists of the last century 

 has tended to raise very greatly our estimate of their mental pow- 

 ers. So that it would seem as if in the estimation of animal intel- 

 ligence, scientific knowledge is coming round to the opinion of 

 the vulgar, and as if " the conviction which forces itself upon the 

 stupid and the ignorant, is fortified by the reasonings of the in- 



