even know what was meant,
and even if he did it would take several millions of sixpences to
buy one.

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