To give sign, we and they are His children, one family here.
Romanes claims for the horse an intelligence less than that of the larger carnivora, the elephant, or even the ass. Yet he asserts that the emotional life of the horse is remarkable, and that working through the emotions wonderful results of training have been secured. He says it is an affectionate animal, pleased at being petted, jealous of companions receiving favor, greatly enjoying play with others of its kind, and thoroughly entering into the sport of the hunting-field. Horses also exhibit pride in a marked degree, as also do mules, being unmistakably pleased with gay trappings.
Now is it inconceivable that these animals might some day, somehow, find a door open whereby they could enter into the realm of speech. To feel is certainly a large step towards expression, and to my mind, the possession of the one power suggests the close proximity of the other.
I read with great interest the arguments—as different from the mere assumptions—of those who assert that the instinct of animals, and the reason of human beings, are two separate and distinct things; there is a deep gulf between them which can never be passed by the lower order. I do not believe this. Rather do I hold with Romanes that:
No distinct line can be drawn between instinct and reason. Whether we look to the growing child or to the ascending scale of animal life, we find that instinct shades into reason by imperceptible degrees.
Instinct certainly involves some kind of mental operations, and by this feature it is clearly distinguished and differentiated from reflex action. One bold difference between instinct and reason, I contend, is that the actions of instinct are uniform, though performed by different individuals of the same species, while reason—however limited in its operations—leads to the performance of individualistic actions, limited to single personalities. Instinct implies “mental action directed towards the accomplishment of adaptive movement, antecedent to individual experience, without necessary knowledge of the relation between the means employed and the ends attained, but similarly performed under the same appropriate circumstances by all the individuals of the same species.”[[2]]
In all these particulars instinct differs from reason, in that it, “besides involving a mental constituent, and besides being concerned in adaptive action, is always subsequent to individual experience, never acts but upon a definite and often laboriously acquired knowledge of the relation between means and ends, and is very far from being always similarly performed under the same appropriate circumstances by all the individuals of the same species.”[[3]]
Where there is an intentional adaptation of means to ends there is clear indication of reason. This adaptation I claim Captain possesses, as distinctively, though of course on a much lower plane than I myself possess it. For instance: When Captain, of his own volition, after finding his groom asleep after being awakened, went to him again and pulled the covers from his bed, that may have been accident the first time. It led to the groom’s awakening, arising and feeding the horse. Now was it not conscious adaptation of means to that end when, the next morning, on the groom, failing to arise and feed him, Captain deliberately went and pulled the bed clothes from him, and has done it ever since?
Romanes, in his Animal Intelligence, clearly suggests the processes by which we may study or investigate the operations of animal intelligence. Says he:
If we contemplate our own mind, we have an immediate cognizance of a certain flow of thoughts or feelings, which are the most ultimate things, and indeed the only things, of which we are cognizant. . . . But in our objective analysis of other or foreign minds we have no such immediate cognizance; all our knowledge of their operations is derived, as it were, through the medium of ambassadors—these ambassadors being the activities of the organism. . . . Starting from what I know subjectively of the operation of my own individual mind, and the activities which in my own organism they prompt, I proceed by analogy to infer from the observable activities of other organisms what are the mental operations that underlie them.[[4]]