e made themselves
evident among his followers. Even the mild and pious Malebranche could
be brutal to a dog which fawned upon him, under the mistaken notion
that it did not really hurt a dog to kick it.

All this reasoning men have long ago set aside. For one thing, it has
come to be recognized that there may be consciousness, perhaps rather
dim, blind, and fugitive, but still consciousness, which does not get
itself recognized as do our clearly conscious purposes and volitions.
Many of the actions of man which Descartes was inclined to regard as
unaccompanied by consciousness may not, in fact, be really unconscious.
And, in the second place, it has come to be realized that we have no
right to class all the actions of the brutes with those reflex actions
in man which we are accustomed to regard as automatic.

The belief in animal automatism has passed away, it is to be hoped,
never to return. That lower animals have minds we must believe. But
what sort of minds have they?

It is hard enough to gain an accurate notion of what is going on in a
human mind. Men resemble each other more or less closely, but no two
are precisely alike, and no two have had exactly the same training. I
may misunderstand even the man who lives in the same house with me and
is nearly related to me. Does he really suffer and enjoy as acutely as
he seems to? or must his words and actions be accepted with a discount?
The greater the difference between us, the more danger that I shall
misjudge him. It is to be expected that men should misunderstand
women; that men and women should misunderstand children; that those who
differ in social station, in education, in traditions and habits of
life, should be in danger of reading each other as one reads a book in
a tongue imperfectly mastered. When these differences are very great,
the task is an extremely difficult one. What are the emotions, if he
has any, of the Chinaman in the laundry near by? His face seems as
difficult of interpretation as are the hieroglyphics that he has pasted
up on his window.

When we come to the brutes, the case is distinctly worse. We think
that we can attain to some notion of the minds to be attributed to such
animals as the ape, the dog, the cat, the horse, and it is not nonsense
to speak of an animal psychology. But who will undertake to tell us
anything definite of the mind of a fly, a grasshopper, a snail, or a
cuttlefish? That they have minds, or somethin