ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE, AND HOW TO STUDY IT 3 



If Tom Jones is not interested equally in all the 

 dogs he meets, it is because he believes they do not 

 possess the qualities of his own Carlo. They do not fit 

 into his mental world as well, they are not equally a 

 reflex of himself. Every boy if left to follow his 

 natural tendencies must believe that his dog's thoughts 

 and feelings are the counterpart of his own. Were it 

 otherwise, why should he talk to his dog, play with 

 him, impute motives to him, blame or praise him, etc. ? 



The change of view so general among civilised people 

 calls for an explanation : and here we must distinguish 

 between the clearly defined belief of the philosopher 

 and the loose views probably little more than pre- 

 judices of the vast proportion of people. 



The creed of the many in Europe and America as 

 regards the relations of man to the world by which he 

 is surrounded is in no small measure shaped by religious 

 teachers. The result of this has been that man has 

 been placed on a pedestal raised high above all other 

 creatures and that is quite right too, but with this 

 there has been interwoven the idea of the great in- 

 feriority of the brutes which is again correct but 

 then there were associated with these views others 

 which, in my opinion, have served to divorce man's 

 sympathies from his fellows lower in the scale, and to 

 lead him to view them in a distorted fashion. In 

 attempting to glorify man, many well-meaning teachers 

 have thought that they must depreciate his fellows, even 

 to the point of denying to the lower animals any 

 intellectual life proper at all all was to be explained 

 by " blind instinct " ; so that by the time Tom Jones 

 became a mature man he was unwilling to believe that 

 his dog thought and felt as he did, and especially was 

 he disinclined to set forth any such creed in words, and 

 by no means would he have dared to do so before his 

 teachers, lest he should seem to be thereby bringing 



