12 ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE 



seiited to me when a youth by a very profound and 

 much-esteemed school-teacher of mine, who was good 

 enough to give me occasionally the benefit of his own 

 thinkings, and the more I examine myself, and look 

 into the psychic life of others, the more do I feel the 

 force and justness of my teacher's view. 



Are we not in like manner too ready to adopt simple 

 unduly simple explanations of the actions of the 

 animals by which we are surrounded ? You will, of 

 course, not suppose that I would claim that the motives 

 using that term in the widest sense which actuate 

 them are of equal complexity with those that determine 

 the actions of men in many cases ; but in all discussions 

 on animal intelligence, and the entire psychic life of 

 creatures that are, on the whole, lower in the scale than 

 ourselves, we must be careful to distinguish difference 

 in quality from difference in degree. And in the in- 

 vestigation of so important a distinction it seems to me 

 of the greatest moment to compare the human being 

 at various stages of his development with the lower 

 animals in a corresponding way hence, the, to my mind, 

 absolute necessity of investigation of the psychic 

 development of both the lower animals and of man. A 

 dog at different periods of his existence stands, as it 

 were, on different psychic planes. He leaves some 

 features of his early life behind him for good not 

 many, however, while he adds and adds new develop- 

 ments which, in different dogs, vary with their special 

 experience, but not enough to obliterate the general 

 characteristics of the canine mind. Just the same may 

 be said of the human intellect, and there are few more 

 suggestive or fruitful studies for those who have an 

 interest in such investigation than the comparison of 

 the child and the dog at their different epochs of 

 development. Of course, the parallelism is clearer 

 during the earlier epochs, and the dog runs through the 



