[B] Darwin, Power of Movement in Plants, pp. 107-109.
[112] Comstock, The Study of Insects, p. 145.
[113] Mr. George Griffiths, Griffiths' Cove, Chilhowee, Blount County, Tennessee.
[114] In the case of the cat and dog the use of this stratagem is not instinctive; it is the rational use of means to obtain a certain desired end. The fact that the dog "inherited the act" from its mother is not a proof of inherited instinct. Instincts are not formed in a single generation.—W.
CONCLUSION
Judging wholly from the evidence, I think that it can be safely asserted and successfully maintained that mind in the lower animals is the same in kind as that of man; that, though instinct undoubtedly controls and directs many of the psychical and physical manifestations which are to be observed in the lower animals, intelligent ratiocination also performs an important rôle in the drama of their lives.[115]
The wielders of the instinct club bitterly deny that any of the lower animals ever show an intelligent appreciation of new surroundings, that they ever evince intelligent ratiocination. They close their eyes even to the data collected by the chiefs of their tribe, Agassiz, Kirby, Spence, et al., and go on their way shouting hosannas to omniscient, all-powerful Instinct! When one of the lower animals evinces unusual intelligence, or gives unmistakable evidences of reason, they account for it by saying that "it is only instinct highly specialized, or, at least, a so-called 'intelligent' accident."
So far from being "intelligent accidents" are the ratiocinative acts of some of the lower animals (that is, lower than man), that I think that it can be demonstrated analogically that some of these acts are incited by one of the highest qualities of the mind—abstraction.
I do not mean that abstraction which renders the civilized human being so immeasurably superior to all other animals, but rather that primal, fundamental abstraction from which the highly specialized function of man has been developed. The faculty of computing in animals is one evidence of the presence of this psychical trait in its crude and undeveloped state. The quality of abstraction in such ideation is not very high, it is true, yet it is abstraction, nevertheless.