26 
TRANSACTIONS OF THE TEXAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 
by that time far out of sight, around a bend in the road / 7 This case 
(and others substantially similar are numerous in the literature of the 
subject) is so striking that the danger is rather of reading into the 
minds of the two dogs quite human ideas and processes than of under- 
rating their intelligence; it will certainly serve to show that animals 
communicate by means of signs. 
On the other hand, as to the possession of the power of judgment, 
the precondition of speech, by man and its absence in animals, it is 
not necessary to give detailed evidence. All authorities, including such 
persistent opponents on the closely allied question of the derivation of 
speech from language as Romanes and Professor St. George Mivart, 
are here agreed, the former cordially accepting the latter’s suggestion 
of the power to “think is,” i. e. to assert or judge, as the distinctive char- 
acteristic separating man off from other animals. 
And now, is it not possible to specify somewhat more narrowly the 
distinctive characteristics of this admittedly human power of judgment? 
Is it not possible to describe with some precision, and in relatively 
familiar terms, the essential properties of judgment? Here again, for- 
tunately,- there is no difference among experts. Romanes, Professors 
Mivart and Lloyd Morgan, and recently Professor Mark Baldwin, all 
agree that self-consciousness is essential to assertion or judgment. As 
the first writer says, “The power to Think is 7 — or, as I should prefer to 
state it, the power to think at all — is the power which is given by intro- 
spective reflection in the light of self-consciousness. It is because the hu- 
man mind is able, so to speak, to stand outside of itself, and thus to 
constitute its own ideas the subject of its own thought, that it is capable 
of judgment. We have no evidence that any animal is capable of ob- 
jectifying its own ideas; and, therefore, we » have no evidence that any 
animal is capable of judgment . 77 How in spite of the difficult-sounding 
technical terms, I am anxious to have it appreciated that this does not 
mean anything impenetrably obscure and far away from popular 
thought; it simply means that man knows what he is about, that he 
knows that he is doing something , and, at least in general, what he is 
doing.* 
It will be of interest to the students of philosophy, and it is worth 
while because of the strong confirmation it brings, to point out that 
the same result is reached from an entirely different point of view, and 
* The slang- phrases being, ‘onto himself’, and knowing what one ‘is up to’, 
suggest what is possible to man and impossible to animals. Another way of 
suggesting the difference leads to the distinction between ordinary wideawake 
conversation and the all but unconscious — more accurately, unself-conscious 
— assents and polite remarks one makes when much bored, with one’s wits 
wandering on more attractive subjects. 
