WAYS OF NATURE 



we need not be surprised to meet a winged horse, or 

 a centaur, or a mermaid at any time. 



It is as plain as anything can be that the animals 

 share our emotional nature in vastly greater mea 

 sure than they do our intellectual or our moral 

 nature; and because they do this, because they 

 show fear, love, joy, anger, sympathy, jealousy, 

 because they suffer and are glad, because they form 

 friendships and local attachments and have the 

 home and paternal instincts, in short, because their 

 lives run parallel to our own in so many particulars, 

 we come, if we are not careful, to ascribe to them the 

 whole human psychology. But it is equally plain 

 that of what we mean by mind, intellect, they show 

 only a trace now and then. They do not accumulate 

 a store of knowledge any more than they do a store 

 of riches. A store of knowledge is impossible with 

 out language. Man began to emerge from the lower 

 orders when he invented a language of some sort. 

 As the language of animals is little more than vari 

 ous cries expressive of pleasure or pain, or fear or 

 suspicion, they do not think in any proper sense, 

 because they have no terms in which to think no 

 language. I shall have more to say upon this point 

 in another chapter. One trait they do show which is 

 the first step toward knowledge curiosity. Nearly 

 all the animals show at times varying degrees of 

 curiosity, but here again an instinctive feeling of 

 possible danger probably lies back of it. They even 

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