There are no impassable gulfs, unless one chooses, as Mr. Burroughs does, to ignore the lower human types and the higher animal types, and to compare human mind with bird mind.  It was impossible for life to reason abstractly until speech was developed.  Equipped with swords, with tools of thought, in short, the slow development of the power to reason in the abstract went on.  The lowest human types do little or no reasoning in the abstract.  With every word, with every increase in the complexity of thought, with every ascertained fact so gained, went on action and reaction in the grey matter of the speech discoverer, and slowly, step by step, through hundreds of thousands of years, developed the power of reason.

Place a honey-bee in a glass bottle.  Turn the bottom of the bottle toward a lighted lamp so that the open mouth is away from the lamp.  Vainly, ceaselessly, a thousand times, undeterred by the bafflement and the pain, the bee will hurl himself against the bottom of the bottle as he strives to win to the light.  That is instinct.  Place your dog in a back yard and go away.  He is your dog.  He loves you.  He yearns toward you as the bee yearns toward the light.  He listens to your departing footsteps.  But the fence is too high.  Then he turns his back upon the direction in which you are departing, and runs around the yard.  He is frantic with affection and desire.  But he is not blind.  He is observant.  He is looking for a hole under the fence, or through the fence, or for a place where the fence is not so high.  He sees a dry-goods box standing against the fence.  Presto!  He leaps upon it, goes over the barrier, and tears down the street to overtake you.  Is that instinct?

Here, in the household where I am writing this, is a little Tahitian “feeding-child.”  He believes firmly that a tiny dwarf resides in the box of my talking-machine and that it is the tiny dwarf who does the singing and the talking.  Not even Mr. Burroughs will affirm that the child has reached this conclusion by an instinctive process.  Of course, the child reasons the existence of the dwarf in the box.  How else could the box talk and sing?  In that child’s limited experience it has never encountered a single instance where speech and song were produced otherwise than by direct human agency.  I doubt not that the dog is considerably surprised when he hears his master’s voice coming out of a box.

The adult savage, on his first introduction to a telephone, rushes around to the adjoining room to find the man who is talking through the partition.  Is this act instinctive?  No.  Out of his limited experience, out of his limited knowledge of physics, he reasons that the only explanation possible is that a man is in the other room talking through the partition.