2IO Address to the British Association 



one the apprehension of which is a necessary preliminary to 

 a successful investigation of animal psychology. It is, of 

 course, impossible for us thoroughly to comprehend the minds 

 of dogs or birds, because Ave cannot enter into the actual 

 experience of such animals, but by understanding the dis- 

 tinction between our own higher and lower faculties,^ we 

 may, I think, more or less approximate to such a compre- 

 hension. 



It may, I believe, be affirmed that no animal but man has 

 yet been shown to exhibit true concerted action, or to 

 express by external signs distinct intellectual conceptions — 

 processes of which all men are normally capable. But just 

 as some plants simulate the sense-perceptions, voluntary 

 motions and instincts of animals, without there being a real 

 identity between the activities thus superficially similar, so 

 there may well be in animals actions simulating the intel- 

 lectual apprehensions, ratiocinations, and volitions of man 

 without there being any necessary identity between the 

 activities so superficially aUke. More than this, it is certain 

 a 'priori that there must be such resemblance, since our 

 organisation is similar to that of animals, and since sensations 

 are at least indispensable antecedents to the exercise of our 

 intellectual activity. 



I have no wish to ignore the marvellous powers of animals 

 or the resemblance of their actions to those of man. No 

 one can reasonably deny that many of them have feelings, 

 emotions, and sense-perceptions similar to our own; that 

 they exercise voluntary motion and perform actions grouped 



^ Certain writers (as, for example, Professor Ewald Hering, of Prague) 

 have used the word 'memory' to denote what should properly be called 

 'organic habit,' i.t. the power and tendency which living beings have to 

 perpetuate, in the future, effects wrought on them in the past. But to call 

 auch action as that by which a tree as it grows preserves the traces of scars 

 inflicted on it years before, ' memory,' is a gross abuse of language — a use of 

 the word as unreasonable as would be the employment of the word 'sculptor' 

 to denote a quarryman, or * sculpture ' to indicate the fractures made in rocks 

 by the action of water and frost. 



