FACTORS IN ANIMAL LIFE 



that acts without proof or experience. The principle 

 of life in organic nature seeks in all ways to express 

 and to perpetuate itself. It finds many degrees of 

 expression and fulfillment in the vegetable world ; it 

 finds higher degrees of expression and fulfillment in 

 the animal world, reaching its highest development 

 in man. 



That the animals, except those that have been 

 long associated with man, and they only in occa- 

 sional gleams and hints, are capable of any of our 

 complex mental processes, that they are capable of 

 an act of reflection, of connecting cause and effect, 

 of putting this and that together, is to me void of 

 proof. Why, there are yet savage tribes in which the 

 woman is regarded as the sole parent of the child. 

 When the mother is sick at childbirth, the father 

 takes to his bed and feigns the illness he does not 

 feel, in order to establish his relationship to the child. 

 It is not at all probable that the males of any spe- 

 cies of animals, or the females either, are guided 

 or influenced in their actions by the desire for off- 

 spring, or that they possess anything like knowledge 

 of the connection between their love-making and 

 their offspring. This knowledge comes of reflection, 

 and reflection the lower animals are not capable of. 

 But I shall have more to say upon this point in an- 

 other chapter, entitled " What do Animals Know ? " 

 I will only say here that animals are almost as much 

 under the dominion of absolute nature, or what we 

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