ingenuity displayed by the non-human races—are still lumped together by belated psychologists under the head of ‘instinct,’ by which is meant a blind, unconscious knack of doing the right thing without in any way realising what is being done or what it is being done for! The principle in accordance with which mind is denied to non-human beings would, if carried to its legitimate conclusions, make machines out of all of us, and limit the possession of conscious intelligence to the individual who promulgates the theory. The attitude assumed by many psychologists toward the mental faculties of inferior races reminds one of Heine’s interview with the old lizard at Lucca. In the discussion which ensued between the poet and the reptile, the poet dropped the words, ‘I think.’ ‘Think!’ snapped the lizard with a sharp, aristocratic tone of profound contempt—‘think! Which of you thinks? For 3,000 years, wise sir, I have investigated the spiritual functions of animals, and I have made men and apes the special objects of my study. I have devoted myself to these queer creatures with as great zeal and diligence as Lyonnet to his caterpillars. And as the result of my researches, I can assure you no man thinks. Now and then something occurs to him, and these accidentally occurring somethings he calls thoughts, and the stringing of them together he calls thinking. But you can take my word for it, no man thinks—no philosopher thinks. And, so far as philosophy is concerned, it is mere air and water, like pure vapours in the sky. There is, in reality, only one true philosophy, and that is engraven in eternal hieroglyphics on my own tail’.[7] This attitude of the lordly saurian toward the human race is a stinging burlesque on the anthropocentric conceit which perverts all of man’s views of the other orders of life.