In dealing with animal psychology Plutarch makes a strong point of the inherent improbability that, while feeling and imagination are the common share of all animated beings, reason should be apportioned only to a single species. “How can you say such things? Is not every one convinced that no being can feel without also possessing understanding, that there is not a single animal which has not a sort of thought and reason just as he comes into the world with senses and instinct?” Nature, which is said to make all things from one cause and to one end, has not given sensibility to animals simply in order that they should be capable of sensations. Since some things are good for them, and others bad, they would not exist for a single instant if they did not know how to seek the good and shun the bad. The animal learns by his senses what things are good and what are bad for him, but when, in consequence of these indications, of his senses, it is a question of taking and seeking what is useful and of avoiding and flying from what is harmful, these same animals would have no means of action if Nature had not made them up to a certain point capable of reason, of judgment, of memory, and of attention. Because, if you completely deprived them of the spirit of conjecture, memory, foresight, preparation, hope, fear, desire, grief, they would cease to derive the slightest utility from the eyes or ears which they possess. Plutarch might have added that a mindless animal would resemble not a child or a savage, but an idiot. He does point out that they would be better off with no senses at all than with the power of feeling and no power of acting upon it. But, he adds, could sensation exist without intelligence? He quotes a line from I do not know what poet:— “The spirit only hears and sees—all else Is deaf and blind.” If we look with our eyes at a page of writing without seizing the meaning of a word of it, because our thoughts are preoccupied, is it not the same as if we had never seen it? But even were we to admit that the senses suffice to their office, would that explain the phenomena of memory and foresight? Would the animal fear things, not present, which harm him, or desire things, not present, which are to his advantage? Would he prepare his retreat or shelter or devise snares by which to catch other animals? Only one theory can be applied to mind in man and mind in animals.