REA80NINO. 353 



Thus, then, the characters extracted by animals are 

 very few, and always related to their immediate interests 

 or emotions. That dissociation by varying concomitants, 

 which in man is based so largely on association by similarity, 

 hardly seems to take jDlace at all in the mind of brutes. 

 One total thought suggests to them another total thought, 

 and they find themselves acting with propriety, they know 

 not why. The great, the fundamental, defect of their minds 

 seems to be the inability of their groujjs of ideas to break 

 across in unaccustomed places. They are enslaved to 

 routine, to cut-and-dried thinking ; and if the most prosaic 

 of human beings could be transported into his dog's mind, 

 he would be appalled at the utter absence of fancy which 

 reigns there,* Thoughts will not be found to call up their 

 similars, but only their habitual successors. Sunsets will 

 not suggest heroes' deaths, but supper-time. This is why 

 man is the only metaphysical animal. To wonder why the 

 universe should be as it is presupposes the notion of its being 

 different, and a brute, which never reduces the actual to 

 fluidity by breaking up its literal sequences in his imagina- 

 tion, can never form such a notion. He takes the world 

 simply for granted, and never wonders at it at all. 



Professor Striimpell quotes a dog-story which is prob- 

 ably a type of many others. The feat performed looks like 

 abstract reasoning; but an acquaintance with all the cir- 

 cumstances shows it to have been a random trick learned 

 by habit. The story is as follows : 



" I have two dogs, a small, long-legged pet dog and a rather large 

 watch-dog. Immediately beyond the house-court is the garden, into 

 which one enters through a low lattice-gate which is closed by a latch 



ed person is a genius spoiled in the making. I think it will be admitted 

 that all eminently muddle-headed persons have the temperament of genius. 

 They are constantly breaking away from the usual consecutions of con- 

 cretes. A common associator by contiguity is too closely tied to routine to 

 get muddle-beaded. 



'•■ The horse is a densely stupid animal, as far as everything goes except 

 contiguous association. We reckon him intelligent, partly because he 

 looks so handsome, partly because he has such a wonderful faculty of 

 contiguous association and can be so quickly moulded into a mass of set 

 habits. Had he anything of reasoning intelligence, he would be a less 

 faithful slave than he is. 



