ANIMAL PSYCHOLOGY 183 



that it is the fuel which keeps the fire going, and has, therefore, placed 

 (without being taught), a single stick of wood on the dying embers. 



Not only this, the child when it grows up teaches others, and our 

 schools and colleges are all arranged for the sole purpose of making a 

 young man and woman at an early age know what it would take a very 

 old person centuries to learn by personal experience. No animal is 

 known to teach another a trick which it itself has learned from a third 

 individual, unless, of course, the act is instinctive and would have been 

 learned anyway. 



Whether one thinks of man as but a more highly developed lower 

 animal, or whether one looks at man as a being apart, all agree that, 

 man can reason, whether he often does or not. All agree that man has 

 larger brain-hemispheres of finer texture than organisms on a lower 

 scale ; that he has an upright posture and a more delicate hand ; that 

 he can use tools, and has the foresight to be able to raise his own food 

 and to live in cold climes by understanding the use of fire ; and above 

 all that he is set apart from other creatures not only in having a lan- 

 guage, but in also having a knowledge of what he should and should not 

 do in other words, that he has a moral sense. 



So, too, all are agreed that the trial and error method of learning 

 shows infantile or animal intelligence and not human intelligence. All 

 education, all colleges and universities have been brought into existence 

 to present principles, that is, to present a mental and cultural gauge, 

 so that each individual need not try out every detail of experience for 

 himself; but, by learning the principles and laws which govern nature,, 

 he can sit back and "figure out" or " reason out" whether a given con- 

 clusion can or cannot be true. 



This is just as workable in the political and religious world as it 

 is in the scientific. Here is shown the difference between the educated 

 and the uneducated man. One must not feel hurt or surprised if an edu- 

 cated man, knowing his principles and his laws, laughs at one who pro- 

 poses a problem or a solution of a problem which can be seen to be 

 erroneous immediately. The uneducated man cannot understand or see 

 this until it has been tried and found unworkable. 



From what has been said in this chapter, if we wish to be sure that 

 we are right, we must be sure of what a writer means by his terms; 

 we must be sure that we are not reading too much of our own thoughts 

 into an animal's acts ; we must be sure that we are consistent in our 

 interpretations and that if we explain an animal's behavior in terms of 

 tropisms that we must also interpret man's in much the same way; we 

 must insist that the observer who is attempting to convince us that his 

 theories are correct, has a scientific training and knows how to distin- 

 guish all these things of which we have been speaking. That is, he 

 must be able to separate fact from inference. We must insist that he 

 be intimately acquainted with the habits of the animal he is discussing, 



