WAYS OF NATURE 
his experience may have given him. He learns 
to avoid traps, but he does not learn to improve 
upon his dam or lodge building, because he does not 
need to; they answer his purpose. If he had new 
and growing wants and aspirations like man, why, 
then he would no longer be a beaver. He reacts to 
outward conditions, where man reflects and takes 
thought of things. His reason, if we prefer to call it 
such, is practically inerrant. It is blind, inasmuch 
as it is unconscious, but it is sure, inasmuch as it 
is adequate. It is a part of living nature in a sense 
that man’s is not. If it makes a mistake, it is such 
a mistake as nature makes when, for instance, a 
hen produces an egg within an egg, or an egg with- 
out a yolk, or when more seeds germinate in the soil 
than can grow into plants. 
A lower animal’s intelligence, I say, compared 
with man’s is blind. It does not grasp the subject 
perceived as ours does. When instinct perceives an 
object, it reacts to it, or not, just as the object is, or 
is not, related to its needs of one kind or another. 
In many ways an animal is like a child. What comes 
first in the child is simple perception and memory 
and association of memories, and these make up 
the main sum of an animal’s intelligence. The child 
goes on developing till it reaches the power of reflec- 
tion and of generalization — a stage of mentality 
that the animal never attains to. 
All animal life is specialized; each animal is an 
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