372 CLASS MAMMALIA. 



The mental faculty of these three classes, if not of all 

 vertebrated animals, will undergo a transient but material 

 change by the operation of spirits, a fact which seems not 

 very easily to be reconciled with the total absence of reason 

 or mind. 



They are individually under the influence of different 

 tempers : horses will strongly evince this : some of these 

 animals are to be impelled by severity ; others a similar 

 government will ruin, but these yield to gentleness and mild 

 treatment. 



Brutes certainly dream : the Dog and the Cat frequently 

 show the most unequivocal signs of it; and although 

 dreaming among ourselves is included in that general ob- 

 scurity which involves the subject of intellect, we have no 

 reason to suppose that it is a mere instinctive action in us, 

 and by analogy therefore not so in lower animals. If our 

 dreams were uniformly directed to the subject of self- 

 preservation, or of propagation, the legitimate obects of 

 instinct, their origin as connected with the instinctive 

 principles would be more probable; but when we know that 

 circumstances of the most trivial or indifferent character, 

 generally, though not always such as have preoccupied the 

 mind, as the meeting a friend, affairs of business, a prize 

 in the lottery, an impossible event, and such like, are 

 frequently the subject of dreams, it seems to follow that 

 they have no connexion with that irresistible impulse of a 

 power from without, uniform in its objects, and perfect in 

 its means, which marks the character of instinct. 



But it is said that brutes possess a principle different 

 from instinct, and analogous to reason, but having no affi- 

 nity with it ; or, in other words, that they have a faculty 

 different from reason, but like it. This position appears, 

 however, to be extremely difficult, if not incapable, of proof, 

 or even of an adequate degree of probability : such an as- 

 sumed principle seems totally abstracted from the intellec- 



