ILS N'ONT QUE DE L'AME : 

 AN ESSAY ON BIRD-MIND 



/LS n'ont pas de cerveau — Us rCont que de 

 Vame.^ A dog was being described, with all 

 his emotion, his apparent passion to make 

 himself understood, his failure to reach compre- 

 hension ; and that was how the French man of 

 letters summed up the brute creation — * pas de 

 cerveau — que de» PdmeJ' 



Nor is it a paradox : it is a half-truth that is more 

 than half true — more true at least than its converse, 

 which many hold. 



There is a large school to-day who assert that 

 animals are ' mere machines.' Machines they may 

 be : it is the qualification which does not fit. I 

 suppose that by saying ' mere ' machines it is meant 

 to imply that they have the soulless, steely quality 

 of a machine which goes when it is set going, stops 

 when another lever is turned, acts only in obedience 

 to outer stimuli, and is in fact unemotional — 3, bundle 

 of operations without any quality meriting the name 

 of a self. 



It is true that the further we push our analysis of 

 animal behaviour, the more we find it composed of a 



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