THE DOG. 45 



life and range of mental vision, and therefore 

 perforce makes his artificial surroundings square 

 with them. It has been said that a man stands 

 to his dog in the position of a god ; but when 

 we consider that our own conceptions of deity 

 lead us to the general idea of an enormously 

 powerful and omniscient man, who loves, hates, 

 desires, rewards, and punishes in human - like 

 fashion, it involves no strain of imagination to 

 conceive that from the dog's point of view his 

 master is an elongated and abnormally cunning 

 dog, — of different shape and manners certainly 

 from the common run of dogs, yet canine in 

 his essential nature. 



The more one considers the matter, the more 

 probable does this view become. If we, with 

 our much wider range of mental vision, and 

 infinitely greater imaginative grasp of remote 

 possibilities, the result of our reading and ex- 

 perience, are still bound by the tether of our 

 own brain limits to anthropomorphic criteria 

 when endeavouring to analyse superhuman ex- 

 istences, still more is it likel)- that the dog, 

 with his mere chink of an outlook on the small 

 world around him, is completely hedged in by 

 canine notions and standards when his mind 



