The foregoing is a trick of erroneous human reasoning that works very successfully in the United States these days.  It is certainly a trick of Mr. Burroughs, of which he is guilty with distressing frequency.  When a poor devil of a writer records what he has seen, and when what he has seen does not agree with Mr. Burroughs’s mediaeval theory, he calls said writer a nature-faker.  When a man like Mr. Hornaday comes along, Mr. Burroughs works a variation of the trick on him.  Mr. Hornaday has made a close study of the orang in captivity and of the orang in its native state.  Also, he has studied closely many other of the higher animal types.  Also, in the tropics, he has studied the lower types of man.  Mr. Hornaday is a man of experience and reputation.  When he was asked if animals reasoned, out of all his knowledge on the subject he replied that to ask him such a question was equivalent to asking him if fishes swim.  Now Mr. Burroughs has not had much experience in studying the lower human types and the higher animal types.  Living in a rural district in the state of New York, and studying principally birds in that limited habitat, he has been in contact neither with the higher animal types nor the lower human types.  But Mr. Hornaday’s reply is such a facer to him and his homocentric theory that he has to do something.  And he does it.  He retorts:  “I suspect that Mr. Hornaday is a better naturalist than he is a comparative psychologist.”  Exit Mr. Hornaday.  Who the devil is Mr. Hornaday, anyway?  The sage of Slabsides has spoken.  When Darwin concluded that animals were capable of reasoning in a rudimentary way, Mr. Burroughs laid him out in the same fashion by saying:  “But Darwin was also a much greater naturalist than psychologist”—­and this despite Darwin’s long life of laborious research that was not wholly confined to a rural district such as Mr. Burroughs inhabits in New York.  Mr. Burroughs’s method of argument is beautiful.  It reminds one of the man whose pronunciation was vile, but who said:  “Damn the dictionary; ain’t I here?”

And now we come to the mental processes of Mr. Burroughs—­to the psychology of the ego, if you please.  Mr. Burroughs has troubles of his own with the dictionary.  He violates language from the standpoint both of logic and science.  Language is a tool, and definitions embodied in language should agree with the facts and history of life.  But Mr. Burroughs’s definitions do not so agree.  This, in turn, is not the fault of his education, but of his ego.  To him, despite his well-exploited and patronizing devotion to them, the lower animals are disgustingly low.  To him, affinity and kinship with the other animals is a repugnant thing.  He will have none of it.  He is too glorious a personality not to have between him and the other animals a vast and impassable gulf.  The cause of Mr. Burroughs’s mediaeval view of the other animals is to be found, not in his knowledge of those other animals, but in the suggestion of his self-exalted ego.  In short, Mr. Burroughs’s homocentric theory has been developed out of his homocentric ego, and by the misuse of language he strives to make the facts of life agree with his theory.