It is astonishing what a clever workman will do with very modest tools, or again how far a thrifty housewife will make a very small sum of money go, or again in like manner how many ideas an intelligent brute can receive and convey with its very limited vocabulary; but no one will pretend that a dog’s intelligence can ever reach the level of a man’s.  What we do maintain is that, within its own limited range, it is of the same essential character as our own, and that though a dog’s ideas in respect of human affairs are both vague and narrow, yet in respect of canine affairs they are precise enough and extensive enough to deserve no other name than thought or reason.  We hold moreover that they communicate their ideas in essentially the same manner as we do—­that is to say, by the instrumentality of a code of symbols attached to certain states of mind and material objects, in the first instance arbitrarily, but so persistently, that the presentation of the symbol immediately carries with it the idea which it is intended to convey.  Animals can thus receive and impart ideas on all that most concerns them.  As my great namesake said some two hundred years ago, they know “what’s what, and that’s as high as metaphysic wit can fly.”  And they not only know what’s what themselves, but can impart to one another any new what’s-whatness that they may have acquired, for they are notoriously able to instruct and correct one another.

Against this Professor Max Muller contends that we can know nothing of what goes on in the mind of any lower animal, inasmuch as we are not lower animals ourselves.  “We can imagine anything we like about what passes in the mind of an animal,” he writes, “we can know absolutely nothing.” {234} It is something to have it in evidence that he conceives animals as having a mind at all, but it is not easy to see how they can be supposed to have a mind, without being able to acquire ideas, and having acquired, to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them.  Surely the mistake of requiring too much evidence is hardly less great than that of being contented with too little.  We, too, are animals, and can no more refuse to infer reason from certain visible actions in their case than we can in our own.  If Professor Max Muller’s plea were allowed, we should have to deny our right to infer confidently what passes in the mind of anyone not ourselves, inasmuch as we are not that person.  We never, indeed, can obtain irrefragable certainty about this or any other matter, but we can be sure enough in many cases to warrant our staking all that is most precious to us on the soundness of our opinion.  Moreover, if the Professor denies our right to infer that animals reason, on the ground that we are not animals enough ourselves to be able to form an opinion, with what right does he infer so confidently himself that they do not reason?  And how, if they present every one of those appearances which we are accustomed to connect with the communication of an idea from one mind to another, can we deny that they have a language of their own, though it is one which in most cases we can neither speak nor understand?  How can we say that a sentinel rook, when it sees a man with a gun and warns the other rooks by a concerted note which they all show that they understand by immediately taking flight, should not be credited both with reason and the germs of language?