This is the simple life and it was the life of our ancestors before civilization began. It had been the best kind of life possible in all the preceding aeons of the world's history. Without civilization it would be the existence to which all human beings now on the earth would forthwith revert. It is man's starting point.[13] But what about the mind? What was going on in the heads of our untutored forbears? We are apt to fall into the error of supposing that because they had human brains they must have had somewhat the same kinds of ideas and made the same kind of judgments that we do. Even distinguished philosophers like Descartes and Rousseau made this mistake. This assumption will not stand inspection. To reach back in imagination to the really primitive mind we should of course have to deduct at the start all the knowledge and all the discriminations and classifications that have grown up as a result of our education and our immersion from infancy in a highly artificial environment. Then we must recollect that our primitive ancestor had no words with which to name and tell about things. He was speechless. His fellows knew no more than he did. Each one learned during his lifetime according to his capacity, but no instruction in our sense of the word was possible. What he saw and heard was not what we should have called seeing and hearing. He responded to situations in a blind and impulsive manner, with no clear idea of them. In short, he must have _thought_ much as a wolf or bear does, just as he _lived_ much like them. We must be on our guard against accepting the prevalent notions of even the animal intellect. An owl may look quite as wise as a judge. A monkey, canary, or collie has bright eyes and seems far more alert than most of the people we see on the street car. A squirrel in the park appears to be looking at us much as we look at him. But he cannot be seeing the same things that we do. We can be scarcely more to him than a vague suggestion of peanuts. And even the peanut has little of the meaning for him that it has for us. A dog perceives a motor-car and may be induced to ride in it, but his idea of it would not differ from that of an ancient carryall, except, mayhap, in an appreciative distinction between the odor of gasoline and that of the stable. Only in times of sickness, drunkenness, or great excitement can we get some hint in ourselves of the impulsive responses in animals free from human sophistication and analysis. Locke thought that we first got simple ideas and then combined them into more complex conceptions and finally into generalizations or abstract ideas. But this is not the way that man's knowledge arose. He started with mere impressions of general situations, and gradually by his ability to handle things he came upon distinctions, which in time he made clearer by attaching names to them.