Address to the British Association 213 



to associate feelings and images of sensible phenomena, vari- 

 ously related, in complex aggregations ; but not to apprehend 

 sensations as ' facts ' at all, still less as internal facts, which 

 are the signs of external facts. It may be conceived as 

 marking successions, likenesses and unlikenesses of pheno- 

 mena, but not as recognising such phenomena as true. 

 Animals, as I have fully admitted, apprehend things in 

 different relations, but no one that I know of has brought 

 any evidence that they apprehend things as related, or their 

 relations as relations. A dog may feel shame, or possibly 

 (though I do not think probably) a migrating bird may feel 

 agony at the imagination of an abandoned brood ; but these 

 feeKngs have nothing in common with an ethical judgment, 

 such as that of an Australian, who, having held out his leg 

 for the punishment of spearing, judges that he is wounded 

 more than his tribal common-law warrants. 



Animals, it is notorious, act in ways in which they would 

 not act had they reason ; while, as far as I have observed or 

 read, all they do is explicable by the association of sensations, 

 imaginations, and emotions, such as take place in our own 

 lower faculties. We cannot, of course, prove a negative, but 

 we have no right to assume the existence of that for which 

 there is no evidence, without which all the facts can be ex- 

 plained, and which if it did exist would make a multitude of 

 observed facts of animal stupidity impossible. As a friend of 

 mine, Professor Clarke,^ has put it : 'In ourselves sensations 

 presently set the intellect to work ; but to suppose that they do 

 so in the dog is to beg the question that the dog has an in- 

 tellect. A cat to bestir itself to obtain its scraps after dinner 

 need not entertain any helief that the clattering of the plates 

 when they are washed is usually accompanied by the presence 

 of food for it, and that to secure its share it must make cer- 

 tain movements ; for quite independently of such belief, and 



^ QneMiotu on Psychology, p. 9. 



