We talk of man being the rational animal; and the traditional intellectualist philosophy has always made a great point of treating the brutes as wholly irrational creatures. Nevertheless, it is by no means easy to decide just what is meant by reason, or how the peculiar thinking process called reasoning differs from other thought-sequences which may lead to similar results.

Much of our thinking consists of trains of images suggested one by another, of a sort of spontaneous revery of which it seems likely enough that the higher brutes should be capable. This sort of thinking leads nevertheless to rational conclusions, both practical and theoretical. The links between the terms are either 'contiguity' or 'similarity,' and with a mixture of both these things we can hardly be very incoherent. As a rule, in this sort of irresponsible thinking, the terms which fall to be coupled together are empirical concretes, not abstractions. A sunset may call up the vessel's deck from which I saw one last summer, the companions of my voyage, my arrival into port, etc.; or it may make me think of solar myths, of Hercules' and Hector's funeral pyres, of Homer and whether he could write, of the Greek alphabet, etc. If habitual contiguities predominate, we have a prosaic mind; if rare contiguities, or similarities, have free play, we call the person fanciful, poetic, or witty. But the thought as a rule is of matters taken in their entirety. Having been thinking of one, we find later that we are thinking of another, to which we have been lifted along, we hardly know how. If an abstract quality figures in the procession, it arrests our attention but for a moment, and fades into something else; and is never very abstract. Thus, in thinking of the sun-myths, we may have a gleam of admiration at the gracefulness of the primitive human mind, or a moment of disgust at the narrowness of modern interpreters. But, in the main, we think less of qualities than of whole things, real or possible, just as we may experience them.

The upshot of it may be that we are reminded of some practical duty: we write a letter to a friend abroad, or we take down the lexicon and study our Greek lesson. Our thought is rational, and leads to a rational act, but it can hardly be called reasoning in a strict sense of the term.

There are other shorter flights of thought, single couplings of terms which suggest one another by association, which approach more to what would commonly be classed as acts of reasoning proper. Those are where a present sign suggests an unseen, distant, or future reality. Where the sign and what it suggests are both concretes which have been coupled together on previous occasions, the inference is common to both brutes and men, being really nothing more than association by contiguity. A and B, dinner-bell and dinner, have been experienced in immediate succession. Hence A no sooner falls upon the sense than B is anticipated, and steps are taken to meet it. The whole education of our domestic beasts, all the cunning added by age and experience to wild ones, and the greater part of our human knowingness consists in the ability to make a mass of inferences of this simplest sort. Our 'perceptions,' or recognitions of what objects are before us, are inferences of this kind. We feel a patch of color, and we say 'a distant house,' a whiff of odor crosses us, and we say 'a skunk,' a faint sound is heard, and we call it 'a railroad train.' Examples are needless; for such inferences of sensations not presented form the staple and tissue of our perceptive life, and our [Chapter XIX] was full of them, illusory or veracious. They have been called unconscious inferences. Certainly we are commonly unconscious that we are inferring at all. The sign and the signified melt into what seems to us the object of a single pulse of thought. Immediate inferences would be a good name for these simple acts of reasoning requiring but two terms,[320] were it not that formal logic has already appropriated the expression for a more technical use.

'RECEPTS.'

In these first and simplest inferences the conclusion may follow so continuously upon the 'sign' that the latter is not discriminated or attended to as a separate object by the mind. Even now we can seldom define the optical signs which lead us to infer the shapes and distances of the objects which by their aid we so unhesitatingly perceive. The objects, too, when thus inferred, are general objects. The dog crossing a scent thinks of a deer in general, or of another dog in general, not of a particular deer or dog. To these most primitive abstract objects Dr. G. J. Romanes gives the name of recepts or generic ideas, to distinguish them from concepts and general ideas properly so called.[321] They are not analyzed or defined, but only imagined.

"It requires but a slight analysis of our ordinary mental processes to prove that all our simpler ideas are group-arrangements which have been formed spontaneously or without any of that intentionally comparing, sifting, and combining process which is required in the higher departments of ideational activity. The comparing, sifting, and combining is here done, as it were, for the conscious agent, not by him. Recepts are received; it is only concepts that require to be conceived.... If I am crossing a street and hear behind me a sudden shout, I do not require to wait in order to predicate to myself that there is probably a hansom-cab just about to run me down: a cry of this kind, and in those circumstances, is so intimately associated in my mind with its purpose, that the idea which it arouses need not rise above the level of a recept; and the adaptive movements on my part which that idea immediately prompts are performed without any intelligent reflection. Yet, on the other hand, they are neither reflex actions nor instinctive actions; they are what may be termed receptual actions, or actions depending on recepts."[322]

"How far can this kind of unnamed or non-conceptional ideation extend?" Dr. Romanes asks; and answers by a variety of examples taken from the life of brutes, for which I must refer to his book. One or two of them, however, I will quote:

"Houzeau writes that while crossing a wide and arid plain in Texas, his two dogs suffered greatly from thirst, and that between thirty and forty times they rushed down the hollows to search for water. The hollows were not valleys, and there were no trees in them, or any other difference in the vegetation; and as they were absolutely dry, there could have been no smell of damp earth. The dogs behaved as if they knew that a dip in the ground offered them the best chance of finding water, and Houzeau has often witnessed the same behavior in other animals....

"Mr. Darwin writes: 'When I say to my terrier in an eager voice (and I have made the trial many times), "Hi! hi! where is it?" she at once takes it as a sign that something is to be hunted, and generally first looks quickly all round, and then rushes into the nearest thicket, to scout for any game, but finding nothing she looks up into any neighboring tree for a squirrel. Now do not these actions clearly show that she had in her mind a general idea, or concept, that some animal is to be discovered and hunted?'"[323]

They certainly show this. But the idea in question is of an object about which nothing farther may be articulately known. The thought of it prompts to activity, but to no theoretic consequence. Similarly in the following example: