126 THE BIOLOGY OF THE SEASONS 



in a simple way at least. We cannot redescribe these 

 activities to ourselves without using psychological terms, 

 without supposing that the animal draws inferences of 

 some sort and thinks in the concrete at least. Thus when 

 a spider departs from its beaten path to make a web adapted 

 to entirely novel circumstances for instance, to the wind 

 on the seashore when a bee mends its web in a fashion 

 that we cannot help calling ingenious, when a monkey 

 works a screwdriver, when an elephant helps to make a 

 railway, and so on, we must allow at least a spice of intelli- 

 gence, and often much more. There is room, of course, 

 for much difference of opinion ; perhaps if the truth were 

 known, for man to speak of " admitting " the intelligence 

 of, say, an elephant or a collie is not far from the absurd. 

 We have to steer between two extremes on the one hand, 

 of regarding animals as automatic machines of an amazing 

 intricacy ; on the other hand, of reading the man into the 

 beast. Because the hive-bee makes such beautiful hexagons, 

 it is not to be spoken of as mathematical ; on the other 

 hand, every naturalist must deprecate the arrogance of a 

 recent pronouncement that men were brain-organisms and 

 animals gut-organisms. 



But there is a higher level still that of rational activity ; 

 and, so far as we know, we have this field all to ourselves. 

 By rational, as distinguished from intelligent, is meant, 

 that we cannot imagine the activities being carried out 

 without general ideas, without conceptual inference as 

 distinguished from perceptual inference, without thinking 

 in the abstract. No one will suppose for a moment that 

 man is always on this high level ; in fact, he is on it far too 

 little, much of our industry, for instance, being in details 

 non-rational and even non-intelligent. Nor dare we deny 

 that some of the higher animals may show the beginnings of 

 conceptual inference or of rational activity. From an 



