ANIMAL AND PLANT INTELLIGENCE 



II 



Huxley thought that because of the absence of 

 language the brutes can have no trains of thought 

 but only trains of feeling, and this is the opinion of 

 most comparative psychologists. I am myself quite 

 ready to admit that the lower animals come as near 

 to reasoning as they come to having a language. 

 Their various cries and calls — the call to the mate, 

 to the young, the cry of anger, of fear, of alarm, 

 of pain, of joy — do serve as the medium of some 

 sort of communication, but they do not stand for 

 ideas or mental concepts any more than the various 

 cries of a child do. They are the result of simple 

 reactions to outward objects or to inward wants, 

 and do not imply any mental process whatever. A 

 grown person may utter a cry of pain or fear or 

 pleasure with a mind utterly blank of any ideas. 

 Once on a moonlight night I lay in wait for some 

 boy poachers in my vineyard. As I suddenly rose 

 up, clad in a long black cloak, and rushed for one 

 and seized his leg as he was hastening over the 

 fence, he uttered a wild, agonized scream precisely 

 as a wild animal does when suddenly seized. He 

 told me afterward that he was fairly frightened 

 out of his wits. For the moment he was simply 

 an unreasoning animal. 



A language has to be learned, but the animals 

 all use their various calls and cries instinctively. 

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