Mental Processes in Animals. 



357 



accurate muscular adjustments. Kemember how largely 

 these muscular adjustments enter into our perceptual world 

 as constructed in vision. And then remember, on the 

 other hand, that the bee is encased in a hard skin (the 

 chitinous exoskeleton), and that its tactile sensations are 

 mainly excited by means of touch-hairs seated thereon. 

 Remember its compound eye with mosaic vision, coarser 

 by far than our retinal vision, and its ocelli of proble- 

 matical value, and the complete absence of muscular 

 adjustment in either the one or the other. Can we con- 

 ceive that, with organs so different, anything like a similar 

 perceptual world can be elaborated in the insect mind ? I 

 for one cannot. Admitting, therefore, that their perceptions 

 may be fairly surmised to be analogous, that their world is 

 the result of construction, I do not see how we can for one 

 moment suppose that the perceptual world they construct 

 can in any accurate sense be said to resemble ours. For 

 all that, the processes of discrimination, localization, out- 

 ward projection ; the formation of vague constructs, their 

 definition through experience, and the association of re- 

 constructs or representations; all these processes are 

 presumably similar in kind to those of which we have 

 evidence in ourselves. 



In considering such organisms as ants and bees, however, 

 we must be careful to avoid the error of supposing that, 

 because they happen to have no backbones, they are neces- 

 sarily low in the scale of life and intelligence. The tree of 

 life has many branches, and, according to the theory of 

 evolution, these divergent branches have been growing up 

 side by side. There is no reason whatever why the bee and 

 the ant, in their branch of life, should not have attained as 

 high a development of structure and intelligence as the 

 elephant or the dog in their branch of life. I do not say 

 that they have. As it is difficult to compare their structure, 

 in complexity and efficiency, with that of vertebrates, so is 

 it difficult to compare their intelligence. The mere matter 

 of size may have necessitated the condensation of intelli- 

 gence into instinct in a far higher degree than was required 



