COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY: ITS OBJECTS 
AND PROBLEMS.* 
THE term comparative psychology, in its modern sense, 
gives us the widest desirable scope as including all 
that pertains to the mind or soul of the animal kingdom. 
It may have been at one time considered as highly im- 
pertinent to ask whether the lower animals possess 
mind, and to substitute the term soul would have been 
dangerously suggestive of heterodoxy of a type rapidly 
to be extinguished. However, few persons of any 
degree of culture will now be found prepared to deny 
that the inferior animals have minds. The questions 
now to be settled are: What kind of minds? In how 
far do they resemble, and in how far differ from, our 
own? Few, it is true, have considered that they suffi- 
ciently resemble the human mind to make it worth 
while to investigate the subject at all. Probably the 
great mass of persons have been led to believe that 
man does and always has occupied a distinctive and 
wholly isolated position in the universe of life—a centre 
around whom and for whom all other forms exist, 
This view seems to me totally unwarranted by the state 
of our scientific knowledge at the present day. Further, 
it is a view not only without scientific foundation, but 
calculated to lead to pernicious practical results. 
By experiments on the lower animals, and by this 
means almost wholly, has the science of physiology 
been built up. We argue from the case in animals to 
the case in man, and consider the inferences thus 
derived valuable, even final—possibly too much s0; 
* A Presidential Address delivered before the Society for the 
Study of Comparative Psychology in 1887. 
B 17 
