Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/191

Rh no emotional or intellectual life of their own, but that a higher power performs all these operations through them as cunning pieces of mechanism. The bird sings, according to this theory, without any personal pleasure or participation in its song; it sings at a certain time and can not help it, nor is it able to sing at any other time. The living cuckoo is as automatic as the wooden cuckoo of a Black Forest clock, and under the same mechanical compulsion to sing its song when the appointed hour arrives. Altum, in his book on bird-life (Der Vogel und sein Leben Münster, 1868), infers from the fact that a bird sings more in the pairing season than at other seasons of the year, that its song is a "natural necessity," in which it takes no individual pleasure. But this conclusion by no means follows from the premises. The song is a means to an end, and has for its final object sexual attraction and selection. One would surely not be justified in inferring that a woman who dresses well, chiefly in order to gratify her husband or her lover, finds no individual æsthetic satisfaction in a fine gown; or that a man goes a-wooing from "natural necessity," and gets no entertainment out of courtship.

Prof. Schutz's doctrine that animals are mere puppets, whose movements are determined by the direct intervention of higher powers, seems to have been derived from what is recorded of the relations of these creatures to holy men in the legends of the saints, rather than from a scientific study of the book of Nature; his point of view is not that of the zoöpsychologist, but that of the hagiologist.

The chief difficulty attending the investigation of mental processes in animals is that they can not express themselves in human language and explain to us their thoughts and feelings and the motives underlying their conduct. We are thus liable to misinterpret their actions and deny them many endowments which they really possess, just as the first explorers of new countries fail to discover in savages ideas and conceptions which are afterward found to characterize them in a remarkable degree.

We have happily rid ourselves somewhat of the ethnocentric prepossessions which led the Greeks, and still lead the Chinese, to regard all other peoples as outside barbarians; but our perceptions are still obscured by anthropocentric prejudice which prevents us from fully appreciating the intelligence of the lower animals and recognizing any psychical analogy between these humble kinsmen and our exalted selves.