Again, after the chicken is hatched, it grows more feathers and bones and
blood, but we still say that it knows nothing about all this. What then
do we say it _does_ know? One is almost ashamed to confess that we only
credit it with knowing what it appears to know by processes which we find
it exceedingly easy to follow, or perhaps rather, which we find it
absolutely impossible to avoid following, as recognising too great a
family likeness between them, and those which are most easily followed in
our own minds, to be able to sit down in comfort under a denial of the
resemblance. Thus, for example, if we see a chicken running away from a
fox, we do admit that the chicken knows the fox would kill it if it
caught it.
On the other hand, if we allow that the half-hatched chicken grew the
horny tip to be ready for use, with an intensity of unconscious
contrivance which can be only attributed to experience, we are driven to
admit that from the first moment the men began to sit upon it—and earlier
too than this—the egg was always full of consciousness and volition, and
that during its embryological condition the unhatched chicken is doing
exactly what it continues doing from the moment it is hatched till it
dies; that is to say, attempting to better itself, doing (as Aristotle
says all creatures do all things upon all occasions) what it considers
most for its advantage under the existing circumstances. What it may
think most advantageous will depend, while it is in the eggshell, upon
exactly the same causes as will influence its opinions in later life—to
wit, upon its habits, its past circumstances and ways of thinking; for
there is nothing, as Shakespeare tells us, good or ill, but thinking
makes it so.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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