MENTAL STATES AND PROCESSES. 41 



downwards, but I may best render it in the words of 

 Locke : — ' It may be doubted, whether beasts compound 

 and enlarge their ideas that way to any degree ; this, I 

 think, I may be positive in, that the power of abstract- 

 ing is not at all in them.' " 



Mr. Romanes, by this quotation, introduces to the 

 mind of his reader the suggestion that beasts have 

 " ideas," and that " our ideas " are things similar to the 

 " ideas " of brutes, only compounded and enlarged.* 

 And this suggestion is quietly introduced, as if it was a 

 simple, uncontested matter, instead of being a doctrine 

 which his opponents regard as a fatal and radical error. 



We define an idea as " a similitude of any object or 

 action, generated in and by the intellect," and distin- 

 guish it fundamentally from a sense-perception, which 

 we define as " the phantasm of an object or action 

 generated in and by the imagination." 



The passage quoted contains, further, the following 

 statement as to brutes : " If they have any ideas at all, 

 and are not bare machines (as some would have them), 

 we cannot deny them to have some reason. It seems 

 evident to me, that they do some of them in certain 

 instances reason, as that they have sense ; but it is only 

 in particular ideas, just as they received them from their 

 senses. They are the best of them tied up within those 



* We do not, of course, object to the term " idea " being used 

 in so broad a sense as to include both intellectual and sense per- 

 ceptions, if a distinction is carefully drawn between the term as 

 used in a wide and in a strict sense. Such a distinction, carefully- 

 maintained, would obviate the confusion to which we object. But 

 that confusion is part of the very system of Mr. Romanes, and 

 hence his mode of using the term. 



