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 



