1 6 The Animal Mind 



brute beasts/' says Montaigne, ". . . are seen to be sub- 

 ject to the power of imagination ; witnesse some Dogs . . . 

 whom we ordinarily see to startle and barke in their sleep" 

 (501, Bk. I, ch. 20). "Only a few persons," Darwin con- 

 tinues, "now dispute that animals possess some power of 

 reasoning. Animals may constantly be seen to pause, 

 deliberate, and resolve." And he states that his object 

 in the third chapter of the work quoted is "to show that 

 there is no fundamental difference between man and the 

 higher mammals in their mental faculties" (169, p. 66). 

 Romanes is evidently guided by the same desire to humanize 

 animals. 



Now these writers were not led to take such an attitude 

 merely out of general sympathy with the brute creation, 

 like Montaigne; they had an ulterior motive; namely, 

 to meet the objection raised in their time against the 

 doctrine of evolution, based on the supposed fact of a 

 great mental and moral gulf between man and the lower 

 animals. They wished to show, as Darwin clearly states, 

 that this gulf is not absolute but may conceivably have 

 been bridged by intermediate stages of mental and moral 

 development. While this argument against evolution 

 was being pressed, the evolutionary writers were very 

 unsafe guides in the field of animal psychology, for they 

 distinctly "held a brief for animal intelligence," to use 

 Thorndike's phrase. In more recent times interest in both 

 the positive and the negative sides of the objection drawn 

 from man's superiority has died out, and such special 

 pleading has become unnecessary. 



On the other hand, the fact that the greater part of the 

 experiments on animals were until the last ten or fifteen 

 years performed by physiologists has given rise to an 

 opposite tendency in interpreting the animal mind: the 



