190 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



simply objects in most instances to fill in a scene, either in the fore- 

 ground, or more frequently the background. Man was with them, as 

 with the masses of the people, the centre in this mundane universe ; and 

 all things had to be represented as correspondingly subordinated to 

 him. It was only comparatively recently that animals were painted, 

 simply because they were animals and not the mere servants or play- 

 things of man. It is impossible to conceive of a Landseer in the age 

 of Dante, and one is not greatly surprised that even so eminent a 

 philosopher as Descartes should have regarded animals merely as 

 automata. Not a few in this room can remember the time when with 

 the masses the attitude towards the dog might be summed up in the 

 question. What good is he? The idea that a dog might be a creature 

 worthy of serious study with a view of ascertaining his place in the 

 psychological scale, certainly did not enter into the minds of men 

 generally prior ta Darwin. But that great transformer, the doctrine of 

 organic evolution, has wrought wonders for psychology as well as 

 biology. When man conceived of the world as developing, rather than 

 as completed, the whole attitude of the reflecting animal man was 

 changed. 



It is absolutely impossible to understand the rapidity of the pro- 

 gress of comparative psychology, or even the change of front, within 

 so short a period as twenty years, without bearing in mind this cardinal 

 fact. How truly incomprehensible to most , scientists even must 

 have been fifty years ago, such a problem as that which has attracted 

 the attention of some of the best biologists and psychologists of late, 

 namely, the degree to which consciousness extends back and down into 

 the lower strata of the animal kingdom. It is now even asked 

 why we should deny all glimmerings of consciousness to plants, even 

 whether there is not a nexus between the animate and the inanimate of 

 a kind more intimate than we have supposed. Even after men began 

 to concede that animals were more than mere living machines worked 

 by their senses — if they even gave enough attention to the subject to 

 get that far — it was some time before intelligent people got beyond 

 "instinct,'^ the rough-and-ready cant phrase with which to place an 

 animal in a classification that separated it immeasurably from man. 

 People hardly conceived of man as a creature with as many instincts as 

 the brutes. Eapidly, however, of late have the masses begun to realize 

 that not instinct alone but intelligence must be invoked to explain 

 animals. As a natural consequence of this change — this preparation 

 of the soil of the human mind to receive new ideas — there came a wave 

 of enthusiasm which led some of those who were naturally lovers of 

 animals, and also serious students of the nature of their inner life to go 

 too far — to attempt to explain the animal too fully by the man, to read 



