28 DOGS 



NOTE. We shall never acquire a true and stable view 

 (viz., one not governed by fashions) of nature until the 

 attitude of the best modern biology is properly appreciated. 

 It may be summed up in the following points : (1) Purpose 

 and mentality, like beauty, are pervasive throughout 

 nature ; (2) the lowest animalcules cannot be exhaustively 

 explained in physico-chemical terms ; (3) living creatures 

 are individuals which change and progress ; (4) these 

 changes and progressions are achieved by what we may 

 legitimately call germinal inspirations or ideas as 

 Mother Carey says in the " Water-Babies " : "I make 

 things make themselves " ; (5) a large part of the behaviour 

 of living creatures is other-regarding rather than self- 

 regarding, altruistic rather than selfish ; and as organisms 

 progress in time, the altruistic tends to have a greater 

 survival value than the egoistic. "In fact, we find in 

 Animate Nature* far-reaching correspondence to the ideals 

 of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good correspondences 

 which may suggest to some a possible line of development 

 for Natural Theology." Nature, that is to say, is in our 

 hearts and our heads as well as our bones, and the gospels 

 of Christ, of Shelley, of Blake, of St. Francis, of Words- 

 worth, are the prophetic climax of the evolutionary process. 



I agree with Mr. Tollemache that to despise instinct in 

 animals as a mechanism is a blindness. Instinct is the 

 raw material of intuition, as animal intelligence is that of 

 rationality controlled by an ideal, individuality of per- 

 sonality, the sociability of animals of a true commonwealth, 

 the " experiments in self-expression " we call variations 

 of art, the perceptual of the conceptual, and the law of 

 mates, parental care, and the subordination of the in- 

 dividual to the welfare of the race of the spiritual life. I 



* " Awareness is ubiquitous throughout Nature if here in us in high 

 measure, then in the oak and the acorn, in the molecule and the atom, 

 in their several measures and degrees." PROFESSOR LLOYD MORGAN. 



t " Objective investigation is as favourable to the view of the general 



distribution of consciousness throughout animals as it well could be." 



PROFESSOR H. 8. JENNINGS. 



