746 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XIX. No. 489. 



he is still in a sense a product of his en- 

 vironment. Of anything analogous to this 

 among the lower animals there is little, con- 

 sequently in taking account of the state 

 of comparative psychology as it is to-day, 

 and the steps by which it has been brought 

 to its present development, one can not for 

 a moment lose sight of the general trend of 

 thought and the whole sum of the forces 

 that we term environment. If it be a fact, 

 as it is, that men to-day regard animals in 

 a wholly different light from that of the 

 middle ages and long after, it is because 

 our general philosophy of life and our 

 point of view have greatly changed. 



Art is in an especial way the reflection 

 of the thought and feeling of the time, and 

 one cannot but know the indifference with 

 which the old masters treated nature and, in 

 most instances, especially animals, which 

 were with them simply objects to fill in a 

 scene either in the foreground or more fre- 

 quently the background. Man was with 

 them, as with the masses of the people, the 

 center of this mundane universe ; and all 

 things had to be represented as correspond- 

 ingly subordinated to him. It was only 

 comparatively recently that animals were 

 painted simply because they were animals 

 and not the mere servants or playthings of 

 man. It is impossible to conceive of a 

 Landseer in the age of Dante, and one is 

 not greatly surprised that even so eminent 

 a philosopher as Descartes should have re- 

 garded animals merely as automata. Not 

 a few in this room can remember the time 

 when with the masses the attitude toward 

 the dog might be summed up in the ques- 

 tion, Wliat good is he ? The idea that a 

 dog might be a creature worthy of serious 

 study with a view of ascertaining his place 

 in the psychological scale certainly did not 

 enter into the minds of men generally prior 

 to Darwin. But that great transformer, the 

 doctrine of organic evolution, has wrought 

 wonders for psychology as well as biology. 



When man conceived of the world as de- 

 veloping, rather than as completed, the 

 whole attitude of the reflecting animal 

 man was changed. 



It is absolutely impossible to understand 

 the rapidity of the progress of comparative 

 psychology, or even the change of front, 

 within so short a period as twenty years, 

 without bearing in mind this cardinal fact. 

 How truly incomprehensible to most sci- 

 entists must have been even fifty years ago, 

 such a problem as that which has attracted 

 the attention of some of the best biologists 

 and psychologists of late, namely, the de- 

 gree to which consciousness extends back 

 and down into the lower strata of the ani- 

 mal kingdom. Men are now even asking 

 why we should deny all glimmerings of 

 consciousness to plants— whether there is 

 not a nexus between the animate and the 

 inanimate of a kind more intimate than 

 we have supposed. After men began to 

 concede that animals were more than mere 

 living machines worked by their senses— 

 if they even gave enough attention to the 

 subject to get that far— it was some time 

 before intelligent people got beyond 'in- 

 stinct,' the rough-and-ready cant phrase 

 with which to place an animal in a classi- 

 fication that separated it immeasurably 

 from man. People hardly conceived of 

 man as a creature with as many instincts 

 as the brutes. Rapidly, however, of late 

 have the masses begun to realize that not 

 instinct alone, but intelligence, must be in- 

 voked to explain animals. As a natural 

 consequence of this change— this prepara- 

 tion of the soil of the human mind to re- 

 ceive new ideas — there came a wave of en- 

 thusiasm which led some of those who were 

 naturally lovers of animals, and also serious 

 students of the nature of their inner life, 

 to go too far— to attempt to explain the 

 animal too fully by the man, to read into 

 him all that characterized the creature of 

 the highest intelligence. However, this is, 



