CONCLUSION. 751 



the animal itself to every varying contingency. We see, 

 by a thousand actions, that he has the sense of pleasure 

 and pain, and can express his emotions by signs and sounds 

 of the voice intelligible to his fellows and often to us. We see 

 that he is resentful for wrongs, and may take revenge ; and 

 that he is grateful for benefits, and manifests his sense of 

 them by the services he renders us. We know that he com- 

 prehends our commands, and employs the fitting means 

 to perform them ; and that he has a memory of times and 

 events, and draws conclusions from what he remembers, as 

 well as from what passes before his eyes. He can thus 

 will, compare, draw conclusions, and adapt means to the 

 ends which he seeks to attain. If these powers be not at- 

 tributes of the reasoning faculty, in what category are they 

 to be placed ? They cannot surely be instinctive, for then 

 we should be forced to hold, that similar faculties were, in 

 man himself, instinctive. Can it be said, as has again and 

 again been done, that brutes do not form abstract ideas, 

 and therefore cannot reason ? But how do we know that 

 brutes do not form abstract ideas, as they are called, to the 

 degree which their own powers of reasoning require 1 They 

 act precisely as if they did. A dog can avail himself of ex- 

 perience ; but, to apply the results of experience to any kind 

 of actions, necessarily implies the exercise of memory, and 

 a certain degree of generalization or abstraction. If the Dog 

 reasoned only from particulars, and never from generals, how 

 should he apply his knowledge of height, distance, time, and 

 place, to the actions which we see him continually perform. 

 He could not know that a wall was too high for him to leap 

 over unless he tried to leap over this particular wall. But he 

 knows, by the height of a wall, though he may never have 

 seen it, that it is too high for him to scale ; and if this be not 

 abstraction or generalization, we ask what it is ? Whether 

 the Dog can form the abstract conception of right and wrong, 

 our limited means of communication with him do not enable 

 us to determine ; but he knows when he has committed an 



