382 ZOOLOGICAL PHILOSOPHY 



subject, you hear everything and yet grasp nothing, and you are entirely 

 ignorant what has been said because your organ was not prepared by 

 attention to receive the ideas communicated to you. 



How often it happens that we read an entire page of a work, when 

 thinking of something different from what we are reading, and without 

 taking in anything of what we have completely read. To this state of 

 intellectual preoccupation is given the name of distraction. 



But if your inner feehng, on being aroused by some need or interest, 

 suddenly causes your nervous fluid to flow towards the point of your 

 intellectual organ that corresponds to the sensation of some object 

 before your eyes, or some sound that affects your ear, or some body 

 that you are teaching, your attention then prepares this point of your 

 organ to receive the sensation of the object in question and you immedi- 

 ately acquire some idea of that object ; if you pay it enough attention, 

 you even acquire all the ideas that its shape, size, and other quaUties 

 can impress on you through the medium of the various sensations. 



It is, then, only noticed sensations, that is, those which arrest attention, 

 that give rise to ideas : thus every idea of whatever kind is the real 

 produce of a noticed sensation, or of an act which prepares the in- 

 tellectual organ to receive the characteristic outlines of that idea ; and 

 every sensation, that is not noticed, but finds the organ of intelhgence 

 unprepared by attention, fails to form any idea. 



Mammals have the same senses as man and, like him, receive sensa- 

 tions of whatever affects them. But since they do not dwell on most 

 of these sensations, nor fix their attention upon them, but only notice 

 those that are immediately related to their usual needs, these animals 

 have but a small number of ideas, which are always more or less the same 

 with Uttle or no variation. 



Hence except for objects which may satisfy their needs and give 

 rise to ideas in them through being noticed, everything else is non- 

 existent for these animals. 



Nature offers to the eyes of the dog or cat, horse or bear, etc., nothing 

 that is wonderful, curious, or interesting, but only what ministers 

 directly to their needs or comfort ; these animals see everything else 

 without noticing it, that is to say without fixing their attention on it ; 

 consequently they can acquire no idea of it. Nor could this be other- 

 wise so long as circumstances do not compel the animal to vary its 

 intellectual acts, to develop the organ which produces them, and to 

 acquire by necessity ideas different from those that their usual needs 

 produce. The results of the education forced upon certain animals are 

 well known. 



I am therefore justified in the statement that these animals dis- 

 tinguish scarcely anything of what they perceive, and that everything 



