Mind in the Loioer Animals. 177 



of them to multiply. They can certainly learn and improve, even 

 in many such actions as have been called instructive. They even 

 show abuse of humor and fun, some appreciation of the beautiful, 

 and would appear in some instances to have a knowledge of right 

 a,nd wrong. It is admitted that the moral sense, if developed at 

 all in the lower animals, is very rudimentary. But the same may 

 be said with some degree of seriousness of many human beings, 

 especially of young children and idiots. A young child, if arrest- 

 ed in its moral development at an early period, would, so far as 

 signs can show, be a mere human animal, not equal perhaps to 

 an intelligent monkey. It might be expected a ;priori, that if the 

 lower animals should fail anywhere in a comparison with man, it 

 would be in respect to the higher faculties. And this is found 

 to be actually true. But if the lower animals show but liitle, if 

 any evidence of possessing a moral and especially a religious sense 

 and capacity, let it be remembered, as already said, that some 

 time elapses in the human being before the conscience is developed 

 so as to beget what is called accountability. A young child is not 

 held to be accountable for its acts, when they lead to bad conse- 

 quences, any more than is a mere animal. So after all, it would 

 seem from the confessedly superficial view of the case, we cannot 

 refuse to admit that the lower animals have minds similar to men, 

 at least in Idnd^ on the score of radical difference in their mental 

 phenomena. 



2. Then to what shall we ascribe the mental phenomena ex- 

 hibited by the lower animals, if not to mind ? It has been the 

 custom to refer them to what has been called instinct. But what is 

 instinct? When an act is performed by an animal without hav- 

 ing learned to perform it, as when a bird builds a nest without 

 ever having learned to do it, or when a bee builds its cell of a cer- 

 tain geometrical figure without any previous instruction or de- 

 monstrable plan to follow, or when a pig will begin twenty-four 

 hours before an approaching storm to gather materials for a bed, 

 and in making which, it will heap them up on the side from which 

 the storm is to approach, etc., such actions are called instinctive or 

 automatic. The animal does them loithout purpose or design. 

 Many such actions are performed like the leaping of a headless 

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