BREAKING AND HANDLING. 267 



appreciates the vast scope and complexity of the subject in 

 its psychological phases the short chapter which is here 

 devoted to the theme is insufficient to contain a concise state- 

 ment of the elementary principles. It may afford some im- 

 perfect data, however, to those who wish to pursue the 

 investigation further. If a spirit of observation and inves- 

 tigation could be once aroused, it would certainly result in 

 removing the dog from the grade of purely instinctive or- 

 ganisms, to which he has arbitrarily been relegated by man, 

 to his natural place in the domain of reasoning animals. 

 Let the intelligent sportsman once begin to study the dog's 

 acts and habits closely with a view to analyzing their pur- 

 poses and to classify the associated mental phenomena, 

 and he will become involved in a thousand perplexities and 

 inconsistencies if he attributes the capability of the dog to 

 acquire knowledge and retain it, to instinct. 



That the subject may be treated fairly, we will briefly 

 consider the commonly accepted reasons on which the belief 

 that the dog's acts are instinctive are founded, to wit : 

 Man is a reasoning animal, therefore there are no other rea- 

 soning animals palpably a very illogical premise. All the 

 inferior mental and physical attributes of the lower animals 

 are carefully noted by man, but those which are analogous 

 to his own are studiously ignored. 



It might be anticipated that an extremely complex meta- 

 physical process of reasoning would be required to prove 

 that the dog is rational. Such is unnecessary. The most 

 common phenomena are all that afford data for mental sci- 

 ence, whether in respect to man or the lower animals; when 

 dealing with abstractions of abstractions, the matter becomes 

 wholly speculative, and then no two philosophers agree in 

 their inferences. In respect to man, by observing his per- 

 ception of means to ends, of cause and effect, we deduce 

 that he is a reasoning animal, and although no man has 



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