654 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



but there is, if our interpretation is correct, a growing emancipation 

 from the trammels of the flesh. More cautiously, keeping, though 

 without dogmatism, to our personal monistic way of looking at 

 things, we mean that the higher animals are increasingly Mind- 

 bodies as distinguished from BoDY-minds. Concretely, we mean that 

 although the bird at the breeding season is profoundly swayed by 

 the chemical messengers called "hormones" that are distributed 

 by the blood throughout its body, strong keys unlocking doors long 

 shut, the nightingale's lyric illustrates what we would literally, not 

 fancifully, call an emancipation beyond the "body". We may be 

 wrong, but we cannot get away from the conviction that the bird 

 feels joyous, and that its joy is just as real in its own way as are its 

 hormones in theirs. Moreover, for some birds that have a well- 

 defined breeding and brooding "territory", such as a particular 

 oak-tree or alder-tree, it seems, as Mr. Eliott Howard has shown, 

 impossible to make sense of their behaviour without crediting them 

 with an imagery of their home and a power of reviving it. 



The extreme "behaviourists" — who have nevertheless done good 

 service in showing what the body as body can do — deny that 

 "mind" functions as an appreciable vera causa; but it is easy to 

 bring forward analogical evidence to show that the animal often 

 acts on the strength of some psychical activity, such as is implied 

 in a memory, or a mental image, or a surge of emotion. An animal 

 will act on the remembrance of an injury or a kindness long past. A 

 chimpanzee will whittle a stick with its teeth till it is of a size to fit 

 into the hollow end of a bamboo rod, thus making out of two sticks 

 one that is long enough to reach a desired fruit lying outside the 

 cage. Many an animal will fight to the death for its family, or 

 expose itself to hopeless odds to shelter a young one; and a deer 

 has even come to die at the spot where its mate was shot. 



The extreme behaviourists maintain that mind, though present 

 as an epiphenomenal by-play, does not count in animal behaviour; 

 but the very reverse seems to us to be indicated by the animal's 

 search for suitable environments, by such subtle life-saving devices 

 as some forms of death-feigning in higher animals like the fox, by 

 persistent endeavours towards a distant and often unseen goal 

 which once brought pleasure or even joy, by cases of perceptual 

 purposiveness such as the chimpanzee's piling one box on the top 

 of another to the number of four, so as to reach a banana hanging 

 from the roof out of normal reach, by the often elaborate training 

 of the young in the art of life, as in the case of otters, by the many 

 conventions of animal societies, and by occasional instances of 

 intelligent co-operation with man, as in tamed elephants or in 

 sheep-dogs. Mistakes have been made here and there in appreciating 

 the mental aspect of animal behaviour too generously; but there is 

 cumulative evidence in favour of the conclusion that mind counts. 



