2. Its aim is always practical. It should never be forgotten that at the outset, the faculty of cognition is essentially utilitarian, and cannot be otherwise, because it is employed solely for the preservation of the individual (in finding food, distinguishing enemies from prey, and so on). Animals exhibit only applied reasoning, tested by experience; they feel about and choose between several means,—their selection being justified or disproved by the final issue. Correctly speaking, the logic of images is neither true nor false; these epithets are but half appropriate. It succeeds or fails; its gauge is success or defeat; and as we maintained above that it is the secret spring of æsthetic invention, let it be noticed that here again there is no question of truth or error, but of creating a successful or abortive work.
Accordingly, it is only by an unjustifiable restriction that the higher animals can be denied all functions beyond that of association, all capacity for inference by similarity. W. James (after stating that, as a rule, the best examples of animal sagacity “may be perfectly accounted for by mere contiguous association, based on experience”), arrives virtually at a conclusion no other than our own. After recalling the well-known instance of arctic dogs harnessed to a sledge and scattering when the ice cracked to distribute their weight, he thus explains it: “We need only suppose that they have individually experienced wet skins after cracking, that they have often noticed cracking to begin when they were huddled together and that they have observed it to cease when they scattered.” Granting this assumption, it is none the less true that associations by contiguity are no more than the material which serves as a substratum for inference by similarity, and for the act which follows. Again, a friend of James, accompanied by his dog, went to his boat and found it filled with dirt and water. He remembered that the sponge was up at the house, and not caring to tramp a third of a mile to get it, he enacted before his terrier (as a forlorn hope) the necessary pantomime of cleaning the boat, saying: “Sponge, sponge, go fetch the sponge.” The dog trotted off and returned with it in his mouth, to the great surprise of his master. Is this, properly speaking, an act of reasoning? It would only be so, says James, if the terrier, not finding the sponge, had brought a rag, or a cloth. By such substitution he would have shown that, notwithstanding their different appearance, he understood that for the purpose in view, all these objects were identical. “This substitution, though impossible for the dog, any man but the stupidest could not fail to do.” I am not sure of this, despite the categorical assertion of the author; yet, discussion apart, it must be admitted that this would be asking the dog to exhibit a man’s reason.[21] As a matter of fact, notwithstanding contrary appearances, James arrives at a conclusion not very different from our own. “The characters extracted by animals are very few, and always related to their immediate interests and emotions.” This is what we termed above, empirical reasoning.[22]
G. Leroy said: “Animals reason, but differently from ourselves.” This is a negative position. We advance a step farther in saying: their reasoning consists in a heritage of concrete or generic images, adapted to a determined end,—intermediary between the percepts and the act. It is impossible to reduce everything to association by similarity, much less by contiguity, alone; since such procedure results necessarily in the formation of unchangeable habits, in limitation to a narrow routine, whereas we have seen that certain animals are capable of breaking through such restrictions.
ON CHILDREN.
We are here concerned with children who have not yet learned to speak, and with such alone. In contradistinction to animals, and to deaf-mutes when left to themselves, infancy represents a transitory state of which no upper limit can be fixed, seeing that speech appears progressively. The child forms his baby-vocabulary little by little, and at first imposes it upon others, until such time as he is made to learn the language of his country. We may provisionally neglect this period of transition, studying only the dumb, or monosyllabic and gesture phase.
The problem proposed at the end of the seventeenth century (perhaps before), which divided philosophers into two camps, was whether the human individual starts with general terms, or with particulars. At a later time, the question was proposed for the human race as a whole, in reference to the origin of language.
Locke maintained the thesis of the particular: “The ideas that children form of the persons with whom they converse resemble the persons themselves, and can only be particular.”
So, too, Condillac, Adam Smith, Dugald Stewart, and the majority of those who represent the so-called sensationalist school.
The thesis of the general was upheld by authors of no less authority, commencing with Leibnitz: