INTRODUCTION. 9 



although the unprejudiced sensational philosopher, Locke, 

 had doubted the capacity of animals for abstract thought, 

 and had laid just in this the distinction between animal and 

 human minds. 



In spite of all this the old strife, whether animals were 

 machines or thinking and conscious creatures, went on as 

 vigorously and as indecisively as ever, and found great sup- 

 port in the ignorance of the laity, or the mass of the people, 

 who even down to th'c present day are more inclined to 

 embrace the Cartesian ideas than those opposed to them. 

 The great and famed era of philosophic speculation at the 

 end of the la<t and the commencement of the present cen- 

 tury mastered very little of this difficult question, owing to 

 its fondness of theoretic, and its dislike of experimental 

 methods. Even the great Konigsberg sage, by means of 

 whose learning many now strive so vainly to rebuild the 

 crumbled philosophy of the schools, stood helpless and 

 powerless before it, owing to his philosophical prejudices, as 

 before the question of the relations between the brain and 

 the soul, or the brain and the mind.* For him the animal, 

 like the plant and the mineral, is a mere thing, and is quite 

 excluded from right and morality, which belong only to men. 

 It has no reason, .no judgment, it knows no rights and no 

 duties, and is not capable of education but can only be dis- 

 ciplined. Man only owes to animals the duty of kindness, and 

 this not for the animals' sake but for his own. " And such 

 things were taught," cries Sheitlin, indignantly, "in the 

 Kantian primer of morality and orthodoxy fifty years ago." 



From similar views about animals started Kant's famous 

 disciple, the philosophical idealist and metaphysical egoist, 

 Fichte, who, from the standpoint of so-called "pure reason,'' 

 declares that animals are things without freedom, per- 

 sonality, reason or rights. Philosophy, noblest and 

 highest of all sciences, how pitiable thou appearest in the 

 eyes of the lovers of Truth, when thou submittest to be led, 

 not by experience and fact, but by the clinging to precon- 

 ceived opinions, and by philosophic rules and axioms accepted 

 as eternally valid ! 



Far better than Kant and Fichte did their noble and 



* Compare the author's treatment of the brain in the second volume 

 of his " Physiological Types." (Loipsig, Thomas, 1875.) 



