REASON AND UNDERSTANDING ACCORDING TO COLERIDGE.
(Vol. v., p. 535.)
Your correspondent C. Mansfield Ingleby will pardon me if I deny the discrepancy in Coleridge's statements on the difference between these faculties. Coleridge refuses to brutes the possession of reason as a contemplative faculty; he allows them, that which in kind differs from reason, the understanding in a certain degree, and asserts that they do possess, in a very marked and characteristic manner, instinct, which, in degree only, falls below understanding. Instinct is distinguishable in degree from understanding. Reason is distinguishable from it in kind. Some kinds of brutes, as dogs and elephants, possess more intelligence than others, as tigers and swine; and some individual dogs possess more of this intelligence than others. This intelligence arises from the superior activity of the "faculty judging according to sense;" and, when Coleridge says that it is not clear to him "that the dog may not possess an analogon to words," he might have gone, I think, further, and have said, with much probability of truth on his side, that the dog has this analogon of words. I am sure I have often known a dog's thoughts by his own way of expressing them, far more distinctly than I am sometimes able to gather a fellow man's meaning from his words. Nay, much as I love and venerate Coleridge—his goodness, his genius, his writings, his memory—I find a dog sometimes far more intelligible. Language is a property of the understanding, but it cannot be developed in words unless there be in the creature an adequate degree of the faculty. This degree of the faculty, dogs have not. If they had it, they might fairly be expected to speak, read, and write. What we want is the man, or the observation and experiment, which shall show us where the line is to be drawn, if in the nature of such gradations lines can be drawn at all, which shall distinguish the degree at which instinct overlaps understanding. The case is perhaps too hopelessly complicated. Coleridge has carefully guarded his expressions, that they should not seem to assert for brutes more than he can prove that they possess, by the use of the words "analogous or fully equivalent." That brutes can and do reflect, abstract, and generalise, it needs but an understanding of the terms, and some observation of their habits, to feel assured.
Caspar.