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sight of his master attracts his attention to the exclusion of the 
other persons composing the crowd, and who are equally per- 
ceptible to his senses; and the same is true of generalization. 
The animal, having learned by experience that a certain object 
is prejudicial to it, will generalize from that object, and avoid 
for the future all objects which present the same appearance ; 
if, for example, a dog has been injured by a bull, it will aftei- 
wards avoid not only the bull which has injured it, but all bulls ; 
and thus it plainly both remembers and generalizes. I am not, 
of course, speaking here of these intellectual processes in theii 
higher forms, nor do I mean to say that the animal has any 
rational control over them ; in fact, it is not, perhaps, so correct 
to say that the animal generalizes and abstracts as it is to say 
that the objects which he encounters, or rather their appear- 
ances, abstract and generalize themselves in his brain. Ihere 
are, as it is needless for me to state, generalizations and 
abstractions of which only the highest minds are capable ; but 
these processes do not differ except in degree from the analogous 
processes which we observe in the psychology of the brute. 
Hence Locke’s ground of distinction between men and brutes 
— that the latter do not possess general ideas or the power of 
abstraction — is insufficient ; for the brute generalizes whatever 
impressions may be capable of awakening his desires, whether 
we choose to term those impressions ideas or not. 
“This I think I may be positive in, that the power of abstracting is not 
at all in them, and that the having of general ideas is that which puts a 
perfect distinction betwixt man and brutes, and is an excellency which the 
faculties of brutes do by no means attain to, for it is evident we observe no 
footsteps in them of making use of general signs for universal ideas, from 
which we have reason to imagine that they have not the faculty of abstracting 
or making general ideas, since they have no use of words or any other genoial 
signs.” * 
The fact that the brute does not possess the degree of 
generalization required by Locke’s illustration does not, how- 
ever, prove that the process is never found in brutes. The real 
distinction between men and brutes in this respect is, apart 
from the question of degree, that generalization and abstraction 
are, if I may be allowed the term, mechanical in the brute, 
whereas in man the same processes, although essentially auto- 
'* Locke Essay concerning Human Undo- standing. Locke’s estimate 
of abstraction and generalization is evidently formed on his conception of 
these processes as he perceived them in his own mind. 
