that we
were the culprits. The question whether anything outside the window
could do her good or harm had long since been settled by her in the
negative, and she was not going to reopen it; she simply cut us dead, and
though her annoyance was so great that she was manifestly ready to lay
the blame on anybody or anything with or without reason, and though she
must have perfectly well known that we were watching the whole affair
with amusement, she never either asked us if we had happened to see such
a thing as a fly go down our way lately, or accused us of having taken it
from her--both of which ideas she would, I am confident, have been very
well able to convey to us if she had been so minded.

Now what are thought and reason if the processes that were going through
this cat's mind were not both one and the other? It would be childish to
suppose that the cat thought in words of its own, or in anything like
words. Its thinking was probably conducted through the instrumentality
of a series of mental images. We so habitually think in words ourselves
that we find it difficult to realise thought without words at all; our
difficulty, however, in imagining the particular manner in which the cat
thinks has nothing to do with the matter. We must answer the question
whether she thinks or no, not according to our own ease or difficulty in
understanding the particular manner of her thinking, but according as her
action does or does not appear to be of the same character as other
action that we commonly call thoughtful. To say that the cat is not
intelligent, merely on the ground that we cannot ourselves fathom her
intelligence--this, as I have elsewhere said, is to make intelligence
mean the power of being understood, rather than the power of
understanding. This nevertheless is what, for all our boasted
intelligence, we generally do. The more we can understand an animal's
ways, the more intelligent we call it, and the less we can understand
these, the more stupid do we declare it to be. As for plants--whose
punctuality and attention to all the details and routine of their
somewhat restricted lines of business is as obvious as it is beyond all
praise--we understand the working of their minds so little that by common
consent we declare them to have no intelligence at all.

Before concluding I should wish to deal a little more fully with
Professor Max Muller's contention that there can be no reason without
language, and no