REASONING. 359 



sessiiig self-consciousness or reflective knowledge of him- 

 self as a thinker. But this capacity also flows from our 

 criterion, for (without going into the matter very deeply) 

 we may say that the brute never reflects on himself as a 

 thinker, because he has never clearly dissociated, in the 

 full concrete act of thought, the element of the thing 

 thought of and the operation by which he thinks it. They 

 remain always fused, conglomerated — just as the interjec- 

 tional vocal sign of the brute almost invariably merges in 

 his mind with the thing signified, and is not independently 

 attended to in se.* 



Now, the dissociation of these two elements probably 

 occurs first in the child's mind on the occasion of some 

 error or false expectation which would make him experience 

 the shock of difference between merely imagining a thing 

 and getting it. The thought experienced once with the 

 concomitant reality, and then without it or with opposite 

 concomitants, reminds the child of other cases in which the 

 same provoking phenomenon occurred. Thus the general 

 ingredient of error may be dissociated and noticed per se, 

 and from the notion of his error or wrong thought to that of 

 his thought in general the transition is easy. The brute, no 

 doubt, has plenty of instances of error and disappointment 

 in his life, but the similar shock is in him most likely al- 

 ways swallowed up in the accidents of the actual case. An 

 expectation disappointed may breed dubiety as to the reali- 

 zation of that particular thing when the dog next expects 

 it. But that disappointment, that dubiety, while they are 

 present in the mind, will not call up other cases, in which 

 the material details were different, but this feature of pos- 



* See the ' Evolution of Self-consciousness ' in ' Philosophical Discus- 

 sions,' by Chauucey Wright (New York: Henry Holt & Co. , 1877). Dr. Ro- 

 manes, in the book from which I have already quoted, seeks to show that 

 the ' consciousness of truth as truth ' and the deliberate intention to predi- 

 cate (which are the characteristics of higher human reasoning) presuppose 

 a consciousness of ideas as such, as things distinct from their objects ; and 

 that this consciousness depends on our having made signs for them by 

 language. My te.xt seems to me to include Dr. Romanes's facts, and formu- 

 lates them in what to me is a more elementary way, though the reader who 

 wishes to understand the matter better should go to his clear and patient 

 exposition also. 



