While I cannot say with Homer Davenport that I have been so profoundly interested in horses that at three years and nine months old I drew illustrations of Arab horses, I can say with truth that I have always been interested in any animal that showed any approach to what is generally regarded as human intelligence. I was born and brought up as a good Methodist. God, to me, was the Creator of all things, and however my belief in other matters of religion may have been modified or altered, in that particular I believe as I have ever believed. If, then, God is the Creator of all things, animate and inanimate, every creature high or low, is a manifestation of His thought, His care, His love, and all are born—created—of the same Spirit, and therefore, are akin. To me this is a truth more powerful than mere logic can ever make it. There is a Spirit within me—of the Creator, undoubtedly—that bears witness to this truth. Hence I know no difference between the spirit in the horse and that in the man, except in the degree of its outward manifestation. However, my good friend, John Burroughs, writes:
We know that the animals do not think in any proper sense as we do, or have concepts and ideas, because they have no language. Thinking in any proper sense is impossible without language; the language is the concept. Our ideas are as inseparable from the words as form is from substance. We may have impressions, perceptions, emotions, without language, but not ideas. The child perceives things, discriminates things, knows its mother from a stranger, is angry, or glad, or afraid, long before it has any language or any proper concepts. Animals know only things through their senses, and this “Knowledge is restricted to things present in time and space.” Reflection, or a return upon themselves in thought,—of this they are not capable. Their only language consists of various cries and calls, expressions of pain, alarm, joy, love, anger. They communicate with each other and come to share each other’s mental or emotional states, through these cries and calls. A dog barks in various tones also, each of which expresses a different feeling in the dog. . . . The lowing and bellowing of horned cattle are expressions of several different things. The crow has many caws, that no doubt convey various meanings. The cries of alarm and distress of the birds are understood by all the wild creatures that hear them; a feeling of alarm is conveyed to them—an emotion, not an idea. We evolve ideas from our emotions, and emotions are often begotten by our ideas. A fine spring morning or a prospect from a mountain top makes one glad, and this gladness may take an intellectual form. But without language this gladness could not take form in ideal concepts. . . . We have only to think of the animals as habitually in a condition analogous to or identical with the unthinking and involuntary character of much of our lives. They are creatures of routine. They are wholly immersed in the unconscious, involuntary nature out of which we rise, and above which our higher lives go on.[[1]]
This logic seems complete and unassailable. Yet, nevertheless, there is within me something that is not satisfied. I grant Burroughs the argument, and then fall back upon my own inner consciousness with reasoning somewhat after this line: We do not now know the language of the animals; we do not know whether they have one or not. Their lives seem imprisoned within the dark pent-house of brute-life where no gleam of our kind of intellectual light reaches them. But may it not be that they feel this imprisonment and are striving to escape from it. The Indians have many legends that speak of a time when gods, men, animals and all nature had a common tongue. May this not be true, or if not true of the past, a vision of the natural outgrowth of the future? If God be the Creator He must comprehend all His creation. As we approximate nearer to Him—and Browning asserts we are all gods, though in the germ—may we not begin to understand more fully the languageless animals?
Our acceptance of the Hebraic Law as set forth in the Old Testament has made us look upon the animals as created solely for our benefit, ours to use just as we choose. Unfortunately this power to use has given to those with small modicum of kindness in their disposition the feeling that they are also within their manly rights to misuse the animals. Considering the greatness of the Universe and the finiteness of man as compared with the whole, does not this idea seem preposterous?
The Buddhist and Hindu religions teach that all life is One—that on its journey from unconsciousness to self-consciousness it passes through all the kingdoms of nature,—mineral, vegetable, molluscar, reptilian, bird, animal, human, up to superhuman. They say about this life that “it sleeps in the mineral, dreams in the flowers, awakens in the animal, and becomes active in the human.” Hence the Hindu treats the animals as his younger brothers, and the slaughter and abuse of them tolerated and practiced in the West is practically unknown in the East, except where the so-called Western civilization has intruded. This view, too, would transcend the arguments and logic of Burroughs.
Then, too, may it not be our privilege to help the animals escape from their dark prison cell into the light of mental exercise? I see no reason why animals should not evolve, ascend in the scale, and develop language, reason, concepts, ideas, as well as man. It is certainly going to do no harm to believe it possible, to hope for it, and to work for it. Love is a great revelator in many ways, and the love of man, intelligently exercised in relationship to animals, may be of wonderful help in opening the door of their brute prison-houses.
Hence, I hail every effort, whether of child with its pet, shepherd with his dog, woman with her parrot, or educated scholar with his horses, to find the way that shall help the animal know his kinship with the human. Too long have we assumed that there was no crossing the gulf between the animal and the human. Man’s assumptions have shut knowledge away from him. Instead of “assuming” that the horse had no intelligence why did he not go to work scientifically to find out what he did have? Just as Sir John Lubbock experimented with all kinds of creatures as to their powers of taste, smell, touch, etc., only in a larger and higher way, man might have tested the intelligence of horses, and then sought to improve it.
There is too much assumption in human beings about most things,—animal instinct and human reason not excluded. What I wish to protest against, with emphasis and vigor, is the assumption that we know all there is to know about intelligence—that we know the limits Nature herself has placed upon its development, and that all efforts to foster further development are useless. I affirm that we do not know; that we have never, as yet, even tried to know; and that until men with loving, devoted, sympathetic singleness of heart and purpose seek to develop all there is in the mentality of all the lower animals,—dogs, cats, deer, as well as horses,—shall we begin to have a real foundation for our assumptions upon the subject.
I am still simple enough to believe implicitly in the Spiritual Controller of the Universe we call God. I am still enamoured of the belief that as Browning says in “Saul”
God made all the creatures and gave them our love and our fear,