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CHAPTER I. 



POPULAR OR SCIENTIFIC ANIMAL PSYCHOLOGY. 



Clearness is the only way to truth. 



T is nowadays fashionable to admit animal intelli- 

 gence, and it has become a mania to humanize the 

 brute. It is considered unscientific to use the word 

 "instinct," and even more so to explain all psychic 

 manifestations of the animal from its instinctive sensitive 

 life. On closer investigation, however, we soon notice 

 whence this fashion originates. We become convinced 

 that its proper home is to be found not in the truly 

 scientific, but in the so-called popular scientific circles, 

 especially those societies which have been instituted for 

 the protection and love of animals, and gather their 

 psychological knowledge of animal life from the works 

 of such men as Buechner and Brehm. Having been led 

 astray by these and similar writers, many try to solve 

 the enigma of animal life by shifting their own range 

 of thought into the brain of the brute. Then they in- 

 nocently draw out their own ideas, and believe them to 

 be the n.ental activities of the animal. But genuine 

 scientists, even adherents of the Darwinian theory of 

 evolution, judge otherwise. With these men the point 

 of discussion is a very different one. The question is 

 not, whether the adaptive actions of animals have in 

 general to be explained by instinct or intelligence, for 

 these scientific opponents willingly acknowledge, that 

 the psychic phenomena of animal life are mostly of an 

 instinctive nature, whilst those which they ascribe to 

 "intelligence" are understood to proceed from a faculty 



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