John Locke, the distinguished writer on metaphysical questions, says:--
“Birds’ learning of tunes, and the endeavors one may observe in them to hit the notes right, put it past doubt with me that they have perception, and retain ideas in their memories, and use them for patterns.... It seems as evident to me that they [brutes] do reason as that they have sense.”
Pritchard, On the Vital Principle, says:--
“Sensation is an attribute of the mind, and the possession of mind certainly extends as far as its phenomena. Whatever beings have conscious feeling, have, unless the preceding arguments amount to nothing, souls, or immaterial minds, distinct from the substance of which they appear to us to be composed. If all animals feel, all animals have souls.”
H. H. Dobney, Future Punishment, p. 101, says:--
“While consciousness, reason, and the sense of right and wrong, are among the highest attributes of man, these in a degree are allowed to be possessed by some at least of the brute creation. Dr. Brown, according to his biographer, Dr. Welsh, ‘believed that many of the lower animals have the sense of right and wrong; and that the metaphysical argument which proves the immortality of man, extends with equal force to the other orders of earthly existence.’”
Similar views are attributed to Coleridge and Cudworth.
Dalton, in his treatise on Human Physiology, p. 428, says:--
“The possession of this kind of intelligence and reasoning power, is not confined to the human species. We have already seen that there are many instinctive actions in man as well as in animals. It is no less true that, in the higher animals, there is often the same exercise of reasoning power as in man. The degree of this power is much less in them than in him, but its nature is the same. Whenever, in an animal, we see any action performed, with the evident intention of accomplishing a particular object, such an act is plainly the result of reasoning power, not essentially different from our own.
“The establishment of sentinels by gregarious animals to warn the herd of the approach of danger; the recollection of punishment inflicted, for a particular action, and the subsequent avoidance or concealment of that action; the teachability of many animals, and their capacity of forming new habits, or improving the old ones, are instances of the same kind of intellectual power, and are quite different from instinct, strictly speaking. It is this faculty which especially predominates over the other in the higher classes of animals, and which finally attains its maximum of development in the human species.”