24. ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE 
to enable us to determine exactly the limit of mental 
and moral capacity in the lower animals. As yet we 
neither know adequately what they are or of what they 
are capable. Both these subjects are worthy of human 
investigation. Their elucidation must tend to give man 
a better knowledge of himself, if only by contrast. 
To return to the question of the moral nature of 
animals. The study of the dog alone, in the light 
of observations accumulated in the literature which are 
often true of special individuals in a degree not of the 
average animal (a fact which does not, however, at all 
invalidate their force), or the study of any dog we may 
ourselves own, can not but convince us that a sense of 
right and wrong is possessed by that animal. It may 
be that the dog does not rise to these conceptions 
as understood by the learned divine discoursing from 
the pulpit; but neither does a large proportion of the 
congregation when transacting the business of the week. 
It may be, and perhaps is, largely true that the right 
with the dog means what is in accord with his master’s 
will; that is, the dog may end at the stage in which 
every child, even the most highly endowed, is found at 
some period of his development. It is a condition 
unquestionably in advance, by far, of that of scores 
of tribes. Moreover, as in the child, and the less 
endowed morally of men, even such ideas of the right 
are powerfully operative in producing courses of useful 
conduct. They lead to action on the one hand, and to 
restraint on the other, instances of which, in the case 
of the dog, are abundant, and some of them of a most 
touching, we might almost say ennobling, character. 
To affirm that the idea of right and wrong of the lower 
animals does not rise above the hope of reward and the 
fear of punishment is not to keep to the facts, unless 
we include as the only reward, in many cases, the 
master’s approbation, and the only punishment his 
