340 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN ANIMALS. 



brutes all he maintains is that " they have not the power of 

 forming judgments ;"* that is, in his own definition of a 

 judgment, the power of reflective or self-conscious Thought. 

 In my subsequent work I shall have much to say upon the 

 psychology of Judgment ; but here it is enough to observe 

 that I hold the power of reflective thought, which the forma- 

 tion of a judgment implies, to constitute no essential part of 

 a process of reason as such, although when present it unques- 

 tionably affords that process much new material with which to 

 be concerned. As I have said, I regard reasoning to be a process 

 of consciously inferring, and therefore conclude that it should 

 make no difference to our classification of the rational faculty 

 whether the subject matter on which it may happen to be 

 exercised has reference to the sphere of feeling or to that of 

 thought. And, as Mr. Mivart allows that animals perform 

 " practical inferences," I further conclude that my difference 

 with the school which he represents has reference, so far, only 

 to a matter of terminology. There is, without question, some 

 enormous distinction between the psychology of man and 

 that of the lower animals, and hereafter I shall have to 

 consider at much length what this distinction is. Here I 

 am only concerned with showing that it does not consist in 

 animals having no vestige of the faculty of Season in the 

 sense above defined. And, in order to show this, I feel, as I 

 have already remarked, that it would be superfluous to render 

 specific instances of the display of animal reason ; for they 

 have already been given in such abundance in my former 

 work. 



" Is not the earth 

 With various living creatures, and the air 

 Eeplenished? .... know'st thou not 

 Their language and their ways ? They also know 

 And reason not contemptibly." — Milton. 



ft 



Lessons from Nature, p. 217. 



