Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/461

XII.] is a difference of kind, and how far one of degree only, we are quite at a loss to tell. To say that the animal is governed by instinct instead of reason does not help the difficulty; it is but giving a name to a distinction of which we do not comprehend the nature. Wherever the line may require to be drawn between the "blind instinct," as we sometimes style it, of the bee and ant, and the "free intelligence" of man, that line is certainly long passed when we come to some of the higher animals—as, for example, the dog. No one can successfully deny to the dog the possession of an intelligence which is real, even though limited by boundaries much narrower than those that shut in our own; nor of something so akin with many of the nobler qualities on which we pride ourselves that their difference is evanescent and indefinable. And anything wearing even the semblance of intelligence necessarily implies the power to form general ideas. It is little short of absurdity to maintain, for instance, that the dog, and many another animal, does not fully apprehend the idea of a human being; does not, whenever it sees a new individual of the class, recognize it as such, as having like qualities, and able to do like things, with other individuals of the same class whom it has seen before. If the crow did not comprehend what a man is, why should it be afraid of a scarecrow? And how is any application of the results of past experience to the government of present action—such as the brutes are abundantly capable of—possible without the aid of general conceptions? To identify reason, then, with the single mental capacity of forming general ideas, and to trace the possession of speech directly to this faculty, is, in my view, wholly erroneous: it is part of that superficial and unsound philosophy which confounds and identifies speech, thought, and reason. Speech is one of the most conspicuous and valuable of the manifestations of reason; but, even without it, reason would be reason, and man would be man, though far below what he was meant to become, and is capable of becoming through the aid of speech: and there are many other things besides talking which man can do in virtue of his reason, and which are out of the power of any other creature. If we are pressed to say in what mode of