=The Reasoning Powers of Brutes.=--As the genius is to the vulgarian, so the vulgar human mind is to the intelligence of a brute. Compared with men, it is probable that brutes neither attend to abstract characters, nor have associations by similarity. Their thoughts probably pass from one concrete object to its habitual concrete successor far more uniformly than is the case with us. In other words, their associations of ideas are almost exclusively by contiguity. So far, however, as any brute might think by abstract characters instead of by the association of concretes, he would have to be admitted to be a reasoner in the true human sense. How far this may take place is quite uncertain. Certain it is that the more intelligent brutes _obey_ abstract characters, whether they mentally single them out as such or not. They act upon things according to their _class_. This involves some sort of emphasizing, if not abstracting, of the class-essence by the animal's mind. A concrete individual with none of his characters emphasized is one thing; a sharply conceived attribute marked off from everything else by a name is another. But between no analysis of a concrete, and complete analysis; no abstraction of an embedded character, and complete abstraction, every possible intermediary grade must lie. And some of these grades ought to have names, for they are certainly represented in the mind. Dr. Romanes has proposed the name _recept_, and Prof. Lloyd Morgan the name _construct_, for the idea of a vaguely abstracted and generalized object-class. A definite abstraction is called an _isolate_ by the latter author. Neither _construct_ nor _recept_ seems to me a felicitous word; but poor as both are, they form a distinct addition to psychology, so I give them here. Would such a word as _influent_ sound better than _recept_ in the following passage from Romanes? "Water-fowl adopt a somewhat different mode of alighting upon land, or even upon ice, from that which they adopt when alighting upon water; and those kinds which dive from a height (such as terns and gannets) never do so upon land or upon ice. These facts prove that the animals have one recept answering to a solid surface, and another answering to a fluid. Similarly a man will not dive from a height over hard ground or over ice, nor will he jump into water in the same way as he jumps upon dry land. In other words, like the water-fowl he has two distinct recepts, one of which answers to solid ground, and the other to an unresisting fluid. But unlike the water-fowl he is able to bestow upon each of these recepts a name, and thus to raise them both to the level of concepts. So far as the practical purposes of locomotion are concerned, it is of course immaterial whether or not he thus raises his recepts into concepts; but ... for many other purposes it is of the highest importance that he is able to do this."[47]