184 General Biology 



that it is the fuel which keeps the fire going, and has, therefore, placed 

 (without being taught), a single stick of wood on the dying embers. 



Not only this, but the child, when it grows up, teaches others, and 

 our schools and colleges are all arranged for the sole purpose of making 

 a young man and woman at an early age know what it would take a 

 very old person centuries to learn by personal experience. No animal 

 is known to teach another a trick which it itself has learned from a 

 third individual, unless, of course, the act is instinctive and would have 

 been learned anyway. 



Whether one thinks of man as but a more highly developed lower 

 animal, or whether one looks at man as a being apart, all agree that 

 man can reason, whether he often does or not. All agree that man has 

 larger brain-hemispheres of finer texture than organisms on a lower 

 scale ; that he has an upright posture and a more delicate hand ; that 

 he can use tools, and has the foresight to be able to raise his own food 

 and to live in cold climes by understanding the use of fire ; and above 

 all, that he is set apart from other creatures not only in having an articu- 

 late language, but also in having a knowledge of what he should and 

 should not do — in other words, that he has a moral sense. 



So, too, all are agreed that the trial-and-error method of learning 

 shows infantile, or animal, intelligence and not human intelligence. All 

 education, all colleges and universities have been brought into existence 

 to present principles, that is, to present a mental and cultural gauge, 

 so that each individual need not try out every detail of experience for 

 himself; but, that he can, by learning the principles and laws which 

 govern nature, sit back and "figure out" or "reason out" whether a given 

 conclusion can or cannot be true. 



This comparison is just as workable in the political and religious 

 world as it is in the scientific. Here is shown the difference between 

 the educated and the uneducated man. One must not feel hurt or sur- 

 prised if an educated man, knowing his principles and his laws, laughs 

 at one who proposes a problem or a solution of a problem which can 

 immediately be seen to be erroneous. The uneducated man cannot 

 understand or see this until it has been tried and found unworkable. 



From what has been said in this chapter we must, if we wish to be 

 sure that we are right, know what a writer means by his terms ; we 

 must be sure that we are not reading too much of our own thoughts 

 into an animal's acts ; we must be sure that we are consistent in our 

 interpretations and that, if we explain an animal's behavior in terms of 

 tropisms, we must also interpret man's in much the same way; we must 

 insist that the observer who is attempting to convince us that his theories 

 are correct, has a scientific training and can justly weigh all matters 

 that make a distinguishing difference in our interpretations. That is, he 

 must be able to separate fact from inference. We must insist that he 

 be intimately acquainted with the habits of the animal he is discussing, 

 so that he will not assume, for example, that an animal, like many 



