What occurs or does not occur within the animal mind is, as a matter of
fact, wholly hidden from us. We have no way of determining this except by
analogy with ourselves, and therefore our idea of it is necessarily
anthropomorphic. And apologists are undoubtedly right when they maintain
that this is far too much the case. To reach a more unprejudiced attitude
towards the customary anthropomorphisation of animals, it is profitable to
study Wundt’s lectures on “The Human and the Animal Mind” (see especially
Lecture XX.). Perhaps it is true that, notwithstanding all the
much-praised cleverness, intelligence and teachableness of elephants,
dogs, and chimpanzees, they are incapable of forming “general ideas,”
“rules,” and “laws,” of forming judgments in the strict sense, and
constructive syllogisms, that they have only associations of ideas, and
expectations of similar experience, but no thinking in conceptual terms,
and cannot perceive anything general or necessary, that they recognise _à
posteriori_ but not _à priori_, as Leibnitz supposed, and that they form
only perceptual inferences, not judgments from experience. But it is not
easy to see that this contributes anything of importance to our problem.
It does not even help us in regard to the interesting question of a
physical guarantee for the indestructibility of the soul. For even if the
psychical acts of animals were fewer and less important than they are
admitted to be, they have certainly sensations, images, feelings,
pleasure, pain, and desire. All these are of a psychical nature,
immaterial, and underivable from the material. And it is difficult to see,
for instance, why the forming of judgments should be regarded as more
durable and indestructible than sensation and desire. The difference lies
higher than this,—not in the fact that man has a few “capacities” more
than the animal, but in the difference in principle, that the psychical in
man can be developed to spirit, and that this is impossible anywhere else.
The very example that naturalism loves to cite in its own favour makes its
error clear. It asks whether the difference, let us say, between a Fuegian
and one of the higher mammals such as an ape, is not much less than that
between a Fuegian and a European. This sounds obvious, if we measure
simply by habits, morals, and possibly also the content of feeling and
imagination in a “savage” as we find him. And yet it is obviously false. I
can _train_ a young ape or an elephant, can teach it to open wine-bottles
and perform tricks. But I can _educate_ the child of the savage, can
develop in him a mental life equal in fineness, depth, and energy,
frequently more than equal, to that of the average European, as the
mission to the Eskimos and to the Fuegians proves, and as Darwin frankly
admitted. Psychical capacity is nothing more than raw material. It is in
the possibility of raising this to the level of spirit, of using the raw
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