cause of the mad rush of the horse may not have 

 been to save his master's hfe. It may have been 

 pure fright that induced him to take both journeys. 

 There is nothing in this incident indicative of the 

 power of reason, nothing that cannot consistently be 

 attributed to chance, circumstance, training, or habit. 



THE CIRCUS PERFORMING HORSE. 



We shall now consider a more definite test of 

 reason. The circus performing horse, from the many 

 remarkable feats he accomplishes, might be considered 

 a sort of ens rationis, by advocates of the theory of 

 reason in animals, for it is doubtless true that when 

 a well-trained horse is told to bring the cap of one 

 of the spectators, he will obey and accomplish it every 

 time without error. But even in this case there is 

 no evidence of reason, as the horse acts simply as a 

 machine in the hands of his trainer. The horse has 

 been trained to perform this particular feat, and he 

 obeys from sheer force of habit, because it is a notori- 

 ous fact that, were his trainer to command him in 

 the same habitual and persuasive accents to fetch a 

 handkerchief instead of the orthodox cap, he would 

 bring the latter every time without deviating in any 

 way from his accustomed routine, demonstrating un- 

 mistakably that whenever the issue is the least 

 confused he fails to rise to the occasion, because the 

 indispensable power of reason is absent. His natural 

 instinctive faculty cannot enable him to discriminate 

 between a handkerchief and a cap. He fails to dis- 



