eason is not reason at all. This is your attitude
toward rudimentary reason. Such a process, in one of the other animals,
must be either abstract or it is not a reasoning process. Your
intelligence tells you that such a process is not abstract reasoning, and
your homocentric thesis compels you to conclude that it can be only a
mechanical, instinctive process.

Definitions must agree, not with egos, but with life. Mr. Burroughs goes
on the basis that a definition is something hard and fast, absolute and
eternal. He forgets that all the universe is in flux; that definitions
are arbitrary and ephemeral; that they fix, for a fleeting instant of
time, things that in the past were not, that in the future will be not,
that out of the past become, and that out of the present pass on to the
future and become other things. Definitions cannot rule life.
Definitions cannot be made to rule life. Life must rule definitions or
else the definitions perish.

Mr. Burroughs forgets the evolution of reason. He makes a definition of
reason without regard to its history, and that definition is of reason
purely abstract. Human reason, as we know it to-day, is not a creation,
but a growth. Its history goes back to the primordial slime that was
quick with muddy life; its history goes back to the first vitalized
inorganic. And here are the steps of its ascent from the mud to man:
simple reflex action, compound reflex action, memory, habit, rudimentary
reason, and abstract reason. In the course of the climb, thanks to
natural selection, instinct was evolved. Habit is a development in the
individual. Instinct is a race-habit. Instinct is blind, unreasoning,
mechanical. This was the dividing of the ways in the climb of aspiring
life. The perfect culmination of instinct we find in the ant-heap and
the beehive. Instinct proved a blind alley. But the other path, that of
reason, led on and on even to Mr. Burroughs and you and me.

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
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