THE HUMANIZING OF THE BRUTE. 11 



and even weariness of life. In other words, it is from 

 sheer sentimentality that the spiritual affections prop- 

 er to man alone are under similar circumstances 

 attributed to animals; hence it follows that a genuine 

 consciousness of pain, presupposing reason and intel- 

 lect, is ascribed to them. 



"Human folk," says Thorndike in his admirable 

 monograph on animal intelligence, "are as a matter of 

 fact eager to find intelligence in animals. They like 

 to. And when the animal observed is a pet belonging 

 to them or their friends, or when the story is one that 

 has been told as a story to entertain, further implica- 

 tions are introduced. " l ) 



A second reason for this universal anthropomor- 

 phism is touched upon by Peckham when he speaks 

 "of the futility of any attempt to understand the 

 meaning of the actions of animals until one has be- 

 come well acquainted with their life habits. " 2 ) Many 

 animal actions, to all appearances, bear such traces of 

 intelligence that they are almost involuntarily attri- 

 buted to an intellectual principle. A more careful 

 examination and comparison with other actions 

 of the same animal will soon convince us of our 

 error. 



"Thousands of cats on thousands of occasions, sit 

 helplessly yowling, and no one takes thought of it; 

 but let one cat claw at the knob of a door, supposedly as 

 asignal to be let out, and straightway this cat becomes 

 the representative of the cat-mind in all the books. 



') Thorndike, 1. c., p. 4. 



2 ) G. W. Peckham and E. G. Peckham. Oil the Instincts 

 and Habits of the Solitary Wasps, Madison, 1898, p. 230. 



