Coming now to the invertebrates, much has been written concerning the
psychology and intelligence of ants and bees. What shall we say
concerning their constructs? For reasons already given, I think we may
suppose that they are analogous to ours; but it can scarcely be that
they in any way closely resemble ours. Their sense-organs are
constructed on a different plan from ours; they have probably senses of
which we are wholly ignorant. Is it conceivable, by any one who has
grasped the principle of construction, that with these differently
organized senses and these other senses than ours, the world they
construct can much resemble the world we construct? Remember how largely
our perceptual world is the product of our geometrical senses--of our
delicate and accurate sense of touch, and of our binocular vision, with
its delicate and accurate muscular adjustments. Remember how largely
these muscular adjustments enter into our perceptual world as
constructed in vision. And then remember, on the other hand, that the
bee is encased in a hard skin (the chitinous exoskeleton), and that its
tactile sensations are mainly excited by means of touch-hairs seated
thereon. Remember its compound eye with mosaic vision, coarser by far
than our retinal vision, and its ocelli of problematical value, and the
complete absence of muscular adjustment in either the one or the other.
Can we conceive that, with organs so different, anything like a similar
perceptual world can be elaborated in the insect mind? I for one cannot.
Admitting, therefore, that their perceptions may be fairly surmised to
be analogous, that their world is the result of construction, I do not
see how we can for one moment suppose that the perceptual world they
construct can in any accurate sense be said to resemble ours. For all
that, the processes of discrimination, localization, outward projection;
the formation of vague constructs, their definition through experience,
and the association of reconstructs or representations;--all these
processes are presumably similar in kind to those of which we have
evidence in ourselves.
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