an increase of that intuitional knowledge which we share in common with the beast.

But the faculty of forming concepts is something, not simply beyond, but altogether beside the world of sense. Concepts are formed by what is called the faculty of abstraction, a very good word, as expressing the act of dissolving sensuous intuitions into their constituent parts, divesting each part of its momentary and purely intuitional character, and thus imparting to it that general capacity which enables us to gain general, conceptual, real knowledge.

There is, no doubt, considerable difference of opinion among psychologists as to the exact process by which concepts are formed; but, for the object which we here have in view, any theory, from Plato down to Hume, will be acceptable. What is important to us is to see clearly that, as long as we have intuitional knowledge only, as long as we only see, hear, or touch this or that, we cannot predicate, we cannot name, we cannot reason, in the true sense of the word. We can do many things intuitively; perhaps the best things we ever do are done intuitively, and as if by instinct; and for the development of animal instincts, for all the clever things that, we are told, animals do, intuitional knowledge is more than sufficient, and far more important than conceptual knowledge. But, in order to form the simplest judgment, in order to say 'This is green,' we must have acquired the concept of green; we must possess what is generally called the idea of green, with its endless shades and varieties; we must, at least, to speak with Berkeley, 'have made the idea of an individual the representative of a class.' Thus only can we predicate green of any single object which produces in us, besides other impressions, that im

pression also which we have gathered up with many others in the concept and name of 'green.'

The difference between intuitional and conceptual knowledge has been dwelt on by all philosophers; nor do I know of any philosopher of note who has claimed for animals the possession of conceptual knowledge. Even evolutionist philosophers, who admit no difference in kind whatsoever, and who therefore can look upon human reason as a development only of brute reason, seldom venture so far as to claim for animals the actual possession of conceptual knowledge.

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Locke, who can certainly not be suspected of idealistic tendencies, says, 'If it may be doubted whether beasts compound and enlarge their ideas that way to any degree, this, I think, I may be positive in, that the power of abstracting is not at all in them; and that the having of general ideas is that which puts a perfect distinction betwixt man and brutes, and is an excellency which the faculties of brutes do by no means attain to. For, it is evident, we observe no footsteps in them of making use of general signs for universal ideas; from which we have reason to imagine that they have not the faculty of abstracting or making general ideas, since they have no use of words or any other general signs.'

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Few philosophers have studied animals so closely, and expressed their love for them so openly as Schopenhauer. Those,' he says, who deny understanding to the higher animals, can have very little themselves.' It is true,' he says, in another place, animals cannot speak and laugh. But the dog, the only real friend of man, has something analogous,-his own peculiar, expressive, good-natured, and thoroughly honest wagging of the tail. How far better is this natura]

greeting than the bows and scrapings and grinnings of men! How much does it surpass in sincerity, for the present at least, all other assurances of friendship and devotion? How could we endure the endless deceits, tricks and frauds of men, if there were not dogs into whose honest faces one may look without mistrust.'

The same philosopher assigns to animals both memory and imagination (Phantasie). He quotes the case of a puppy, unwilling to jump from a table, as a proof that the category of causality belongs to animals also. But he is too expert a philospher to allow himself to be carried away by fanciful interpretations of doubtful appearances; and when he explains the formation of general notions as the peculiar work of reason, he states, without any hesitation or qualification, that it is this function which explains all those facts which distinguish the life of men from the life of animals.'

I have said again and again that according to the strict rules of positive philosophy, we have no right either to assert or to deny anything with reference to the so-called mind of animals. But to those who think that philosophy may trust to anthropomorphic analogies, and that at least no counter arguments can be brought forward against their assertions that animals generalise, form concepts, and use them for the purpose of reasoning, exactly as we do, I may be allowed to propose at least two cases for explanation. They are selected out of a large mass of stories which have lately been collected in illustration of the animal intellect, and they possess at least this advantage, that they are both told by truly scientific observers.

The first is taken from Autenrieth, in his Ansichten über Natur und Seelenleben, published in 1836.

The grub of the Nachtphauenauge spins, at the upper end of its case, a double roof of stiff bristles, held together at the end by very fine threads. This roof opens

through a very light pressure from within, but offers a strong resistance to any pressure from without. If the grub acted according to judgment and reason, it would, according to human ideas, have had to consider as follows:-That it might possibly become a chrysalis, and be exposed to all sorts of accidents without any chance of escape, unless it took sufficient precautions; that it would rise from the chrysalis as a butterfly, without having the organs and power to break the covering which it had spun as a grub, or without being able, like other butterflies, to emit a liquid capable of dissolving silky threads; that, therefore, unless it had, while agrub, made preparations for an easy exit from its prison, it would suffer in it a premature death. While engaged in building such a prison the grub ought to have perceived clearly that, in order to escape hereafter as a butterfly, it would have to make a roof so constructed that it should protect from without, but open easily from within, and that this could be effected by means of stiff silky bristles, converging in the middle, but otherwise free. It would also have to know beforehand that, for that purpose, the same silky substance had to be used out of which the whole covering was built up, only with greater art. And yet it could not have been instructed in this by its parents, because they were dead before it escaped from its egg. Nor could it have learnt it by habit and experience, for it performs this work of art once only in its life; nor by imitation, for it does not live in society. Its understanding, too, could be but little cultivated

during its grub-life, for it does nothing but creep about on the shrub on which it first saw the light, eat its leaves, cling to it with its feet, so as not to fall to the ground, and hide beneath a leaf, so as not to be wetted by the rain. To shake off by involuntary contortions its old skin whenever it became uncomfortable, was the whole of its life, the whole of its reasoning, before it began to spin its marvellous shroud.'

The other case is an experiment very ingeniously contrived, with a view of discovering traces of generalisation in the ordinary habits of animals. The experiment was made by Mr. Amtsberg, of Stralsund, and described by Dr. Möbius, Professor of Zoology at Kiel.10

'A pike, who swallowed all small fishes which were put into his aquarium, was separated from them by a pane of glass, so that, when ever he tried to pounce on them, he struck his gills against the glass, and sometimes so violently that he remained lying on his back, like dead. He recovered, however, and repeated his onslaughts, till they became rarer and rarer, and at last, after three months, ceased altogether. After having been in solitary confinement for six months, the pane of glass was removed from the aquarium, so that the pike could again roam about freely among the other fishes. He at once swam towards them, but he never touched any one of them, but always halted at a respectful distance of about an inch, and was satisfied to share with the rest the meat that was thrown into the aquarium. He had therefore been trained so as not to attack the other fishes which he knew as inhabitants of the same tank. As soon, however, as strange fish was thrown into the aquarium, the pike in nowise re

a

spected him, but swallowed him at

once.

After he had done this forty times, all the time respecting the old companions of his imprisonment, he had to be removed from the aquarium on account of his large size.'

The training of this pike,' as Professor Möbius remarks, 'was not, therefore, based on judgment; it consisted only in the establishment of a certain direction of will, in consequence of uniformly recurrent sensuous impressions. The merciful treatment of the fishes which were familiar to him, or, as some would say, which he knew, shows only that the pike acted without reflection. Their view provoked in him, no doubt, the natural desire to swallow them, but it evoked at the same time the recollection of the pain which he had suffered on their account, and the sad impression that it was impossible to reach the prey which he so much desired. These impressions acquired greater power than his voracious instinct, and repressed it at least for a time. The same sensuous impression, proceeding from the same fishes, was always in his soul the beginning of the same series of psychic acts. He could not help repeating this series, like a machine, but like a machine with a soul, which has this advantage over mechanical machines, that it can adapt its work to unforeseen circumstances, while a mechanical machine can not. The pane of glass was to the organism of the pike one of these unforeseen circumstances.'

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Truly scientific observations and experiments, like the two here mentioned, will serve at least to show how much can be achieved by purely intuitional knowledge, possessed in common by men and animals, and without the help of that conceptual knowledge which I re

gard as the exclusive property of

man.

With us, every element of knowledge, even the simplest impression of the senses, has been so completely conceptualised, that it is almost impossible for us to imagine intuitional without conceptual knowledge. It is not always remarked that we men have almost entirely left the sphere of purely intuitional knowledge, and that the world in which we live and move and have our being is a world of concepts; a world which we have created ourselves, and which, without us, without the spectators in the theatre, would vanish into nothing. What do we mean when we say we know a thing? A child which for the first time in his life sees an elephant, may stare at the huge beast, may fix his eyes on its trunk and tusks, may touch its skin, and walk round the monster so as to measure it from every side. While this is going on the child sees the beast, feels it, measures it; but we should never say the first time the child sees an elephant, that he

knows it.

When the child sees the same elephant, or another elephant, a second time, and recognises the animal as the same, or nearly the same which he saw before, then, for the first time, we say that the child knows the elephant. This is knowledge in its lowest and crudest form. It is no more than a connecting of a present with a past intuition or phantasm; it is, properly speaking, remembering only, and not yet cognition. The animal intellect, according to the ordinary interpretation, would go as far as this, but no farther.

But now let us take, not exactly a child, but a boy who for the first time sees an elephant. He, too,

does not know the elephant, but he knows that what he sees for the first time, is an animal. What does that mean? lt means that the boy possesses the concept of a living and breathing being, different from man, and that he recognises this general concept in the elephant before him. Here, too, cognition takes place by means of recognition, but what is recognised is not connected with a former intuition, but with a concept, the concept of animal.'1

Now, an animal, as such, has no actual existence. A boy may have seen dogs, cats, and mice, but never an animal in general. The concept of animal is therefore of man's own making, and its only object is to enable man to know.

But now let us make a further step, and instead of a child or a boy, take a young man who knows the elephant, not only as what he has seen in the Zoological Garden, not only as an animal, but scientifically, as we call it, as a vertebrate. What is the difference between his knowledge and that of the boy? Simply this, that he has formed a new concept-that of the vertebrate-comprehending less than the concept of animal, but being more definite,more accurate, and therefore more useful for knowing one class of animals from another. These scientific concepts can be made narrower and narrower, more and more accurate and scientific, till at last, after having classed the elephant as a vertebrate, a mammal, a pachydermatous animal, and a proboscidate, we leave the purely physical classification, and branching off into metaphysical language, call the elephant a living object, a material object, an object in general. this, and in no other way, do we

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gain knowledge, whether scientific or unscientific; and if we should ever meet with an intuition for which we have no concept whatsoever, not even that of material object, then that intuition would be inconceivable, and utterly unknowable; it would transcend the limits of our knowledge.12 The whole of what we call the human intellect consists of these concepts, a kind of net for catching intuitional knowledge, which becomes larger and stronger with every draught that is brought to land. Wonderful as the human intellect may appear, when we look upon it as a whole, its nature is extremely simple. It separates and combines, it destroys and builds up, it throws together at haphazard or classifies with the minutest care, the materials supplied by the senses, and it is for this very reason, because it intermixes, or interlaces, or interlinks, that it was called the Inter-lect, softened into Intellect. The more concepts we possess, the larger is our knowledge; the more carefully we handle or interlink our concepts, the more closely do we reason; and the more freely we can tumble out the contents of these pigeon-holes, and throw them together, the more startling is our power of imagination.

We now come to the next point, How is this work of the human intellect, the forming and handling of concepts, carried on? Are concepts possible, or, at least, are concepts ever realised without some outward form or body? I say decidedly, No. If the Science of Language has proved anything, it has proved that conceptual or discursive thought can be carried on in words only. There is no thought without words, as little as there are words without thought. We can, by abstraction, distinguish between

words and thought, as the Greeks did, when they spoke of inward (ivdiáberos) and outward (popopikós) Logos, but we can never separate the two without destroying both. If I may explain my meaning by a homely illustration, it is like peeling an orange. We can peel an orange, and put the skin on one side and the flesh on the other; and we can peel language, and put the words on one side and the thought or meanings on the other. But we never find in nature an orange without peel, nor peel without an orange; nor do we ever find in nature thought without words, or words without thought.

It is curious, however, to observe how determinately this conclusion has been resisted. It is considered humiliating that what is most spiritual in us, our thoughts, should be dependent on such miserable crutches as words are supposed to be. But words are by no means such miserable crutches. They are the very limbs, aye, they are the very wings of thought. We do not complain that we cannot move without legs. Why then should we consider it humiliating that we words?

cannot think without

The most ordinary objection to this view of thought and language is, that if thought were dependent on words, the deaf and dumb would. be without conceptual thought altogether. But, according to those who have best studied this subject, it is perfectly true13 that deaf and dumb persons, if left entirely to themselves, have no concepts, except such as can be expressed by less perfect symbols-and that it is only by being taught that they acquire some kind of conceptual thought and language. Were this otherwise, however, we, at all events, could