REASONING.
=What Reasoning is.=--We talk of man being the rational animal; and the
traditional intellectualist philosophy has always made a great point of
treating the brutes as wholly irrational creatures. Nevertheless, it is
by no means easy to decide just what is meant by reason, or how the
peculiar thinking process called reasoning differs from other
thought-sequences which may lead to similar results.
Much of our thinking consists of trains of images suggested one by
another, of a sort of spontaneous revery of which it seems likely enough
that the higher brutes should be capable. This sort of thinking leads
nevertheless to rational conclusions, both practical and theoretical.
The links between the terms are either 'contiguity' or 'similarity,' and
with a mixture of both these things we can hardly be very incoherent. As
a rule, in this sort of irresponsible thinking, the terms which fall to
be coupled together are empirical concretes, not abstractions. A sunset
may call up the vessel's deck from which I saw one last summer, the
companions of my voyage, my arrival into port, etc.; or it may make me
think of solar myths, of Hercules' and Hector's funeral pyres, of Homer
and whether he could write, of the Greek alphabet, etc. If habitual
contiguities predominate, we have a prosaic mind; if rare contiguities,
or similarities, have free play, we call the person fanciful, poetic, or
witty. But the thought as a rule is of matters taken in their entirety.
Having been thinking of one, we find later that we are thinking of
another, to which we have been lifted along, we hardly know how. If an
abstract quality figures in the procession, it arrests our attention
but for a moment, and fades into something else; and is never very
abstract. Thus, in thinking of the sun-myths, we may have a gleam of
admiration at the gracefulness of the primitive human mind, or a moment
of disgust at the narrowness of modern interpreters. But, in the main,
we think less of qualities than of concrete things, real or possible,
just as we may experience them.
Our thought here may be rational, but it is not _reasoned_, is not
reasoning in the strict sense of the term. In reasoning, although our
results may be thought of as concrete things, they are _not suggested
immediately by other concrete things_, as in the trains of simply
associative thought. They are linked to the concretes which precede them
by intermediate steps, and these steps are formed by _abstract general
characters_ articulately denoted and expressly analyzed out. A thing
inferred by reasoning need neither have been an habitual associate of
the datum from which we infer it, nor need it be similar to it. It may
be a thing entirely unknown to our previous experience, something which
no simple association of concretes could ever have evoked. The great
difference, in fact, between that simpler kind of rational thinking
which consists in the concrete objects of past experience merely
suggesting each other, and reasoning distinctively so called, is this:
that whilst the empirical thinking is only reproductive, reasoning is
productive. An empirical, or 'rule-of-thumb,' thinker can deduce nothing
from data with whose behavior and associates in the concrete he is
unfamiliar. But put a reasoner amongst a set of concrete objects which
he has neither seen nor heard of before, and with a little time, if he
is a good reasoner, he will make such inferences from them as will quite
atone for his ignorance. Reasoning helps us out of unprecedented
situations--situations for which all our common associative wisdom, all
the 'education' which we share in common with the beasts, leaves us
without resource.
=Exact Definition of it.=--_Let us make this ability to deal with novel
data the technical differentia of reasoning._ This will sufficiently
mark it out from common associative thinking, and will immediately
enable us to say just what peculiarity it contains.
_It contains analysis and abstraction._ Whereas the merely empirical
thinker stares at a fact in its entirety, and remains helpless, or gets
'stuck,' if it suggests no concomitant or similar, the reasoner breaks
it up and notices some one of its separate attributes. This attribute he
takes to be the essential part of the whole fact before him. This
attribute has properties or consequences which the fact until then was
not known to have, but which, now that it is noticed to contain the
attribute, it must have.
Call the fact or concrete datum S;
the essential attribute M;
the attribute's property P.
Then the reasoned inference of P from S cannot be made without M's
intermediation. The 'essence' M is thus that third or middle term in the
reasoning which a moment ago was pronounced essential. _For his original
concrete S the reasoner substitutes its abstract property M._ What is
true of M, what is coupled with M, thereupon holds true of S, is coupled
with S. As M is properly one of the _parts_ of the entire S, _reasoning
may then be very well defined as the substitution of parts and their
implications or consequences for wholes_. And the art of the reasoner
will consist of two stages:
First, _sagacity_, or the ability to discover what part, M, lies
embedded in the whole S which is before him;
Second, _learning_, or the ability to recall promptly M's consequences,
concomitants, or implications.
If we glance at the ordinary syllogism--
M is P;
S is M;
⁂ S is P
--we see that the second or minor premise, the 'subsumption' as it is
sometimes called, is the one requiring the sagacity; the first or major
the one requiring the fertility, or fulness of learning. Usually the
learning is more apt to be ready than the sagacity, the ability to seize
fresh aspects in concrete things being rarer than the ability to learn
old rules; so that, in most actual cases of reasoning, the minor
premise, or the way of conceiving the subject, is the one that makes the
novel step in thought. This is, to be sure, not always the case; for the
fact that M carries P with it may also be unfamiliar and now formulated
for the first time.
The perception that S is M is a _mode of conceiving S_. The statement
that M is P is an _abstract or general proposition_. A word about both
is necessary.
=What is meant by a Mode of Conceiving.=--When we conceive of S merely as
M (of vermilion merely as a mercury-compound, for example), we neglect
all the other attributes which it may have, and attend exclusively to
this one. We mutilate the fulness of S's reality. Every reality has an
infinity of aspects or properties. Even so simple a fact as a line which
you trace in the air may be considered in respect to its form, its
length, its direction, and its location. When we reach more complex
facts, the number of ways in which we may regard them is literally
endless. Vermilion is not only a mercury-compound, it is vividly red,
heavy, and expensive, it comes from China, and so on, _ad infinitum_.
All objects are well-springs of properties, which are only little by
little developed to our knowledge, and it is truly said that to know one
thing thoroughly would be to know the whole universe. Mediately or
immediately, that one thing is related to everything else; and to know
_all_ about it, all its relations need be known. But each relation forms
one of its attributes, one angle by which some one may conceive it, and
while so conceiving it may ignore the rest of it. A man is such a
complex fact. But out of the complexity all that an army commissary
picks out as important for his purposes is his property of eating so
many pounds a day; the general, of marching so many miles; the
chair-maker, of having such a shape; the orator, of responding to such
and such feelings; the theatre-manager, of being willing to pay just
such a price, and no more, for an evening's amusement. Each of these
persons singles out the particular side of the entire man which has a
bearing on _his_ concerns, and not till this side is distinctly and
separately conceived can the proper practical conclusions _for that
reasoner_ be drawn; and when they are drawn the man's other attributes
may be ignored.
All ways of conceiving a concrete fact, if they are true ways at all,
are equally true ways. _There is no property_ ABSOLUTELY _essential to
any one thing_. The same property which figures as the essence of a
thing on one occasion becomes a very inessential feature upon another.
Now that I am writing, it is essential that I conceive my paper as a
surface for inscription. If I failed to do that, I should have to stop
my work. But if I wished to light a fire, and no other materials were
by, the essential way of conceiving the paper would be as combustible
material; and I need then have no thought of any of its other
destinations. It is really _all_ that it is: a combustible, a writing
surface, a thin thing, a hydrocarbonaceous thing, a thing eight inches
one way and ten another, a thing just one furlong east of a certain
stone in my neighbor's field, an American thing, etc., etc., _ad
infinitum_. Whichever one of these aspects of its being I temporarily
class it under makes me unjust to the other aspects. But as I always am
classing it under one aspect or another, I am always unjust, always
partial, always exclusive. My excuse is necessity--the necessity which
my finite and practical nature lays upon me. My thinking is first and
last and always for the sake of my doing, and I can only do one thing at
a time. A God who is supposed to drive the whole universe abreast may
also be supposed, without detriment to his activity, to see all parts
of it at once and without emphasis. But were our human attention so to
disperse itself, we should simply stare vacantly at things at large and
forfeit our opportunity of doing any particular act. Mr. Warner, in his
Adirondack story, shot a bear by aiming, not at his eye or heart, but
'at him generally.' But we cannot aim 'generally' at the universe; or if
we do, we miss our game. Our scope is narrow, and we must attack things
piecemeal, ignoring the solid fulness in which the elements of Nature
exist, and stringing one after another of them together in a serial way,
to suit our little interests as they change from hour to hour. In this,
the partiality of one moment is partly atoned for by the different sort
of partiality of the next. To me now, writing these words, emphasis and
selection seem to be the essence of the human mind. In other chapters
other qualities have seemed, and will again seem, more important parts
of psychology.
Men are so ingrainedly partial that, for common-sense and scholasticism
(which is only common-sense grown articulate), the notion that there is
no one quality genuinely, absolutely, and exclusively essential to
anything is almost unthinkable. "A thing's essence makes it _what_ it
is. Without an exclusive essence it would be nothing in particular,
would be quite nameless, we could not say it was this rather than that.
What you write on, for example,--why talk of its being combustible,
rectangular, and the like, when you know that these are mere accidents,
and that what it really is, and was made to be, is just _paper_ and
nothing else?" The reader is pretty sure to make some such comment as
this. But he is himself merely insisting on an aspect of the thing which
suits his own petty purpose, that of _naming_ the thing; or else on an
aspect which suits the manufacturer's purpose, that of _producing an
article for which there is a vulgar demand_. Meanwhile the reality
overflows these purposes at every pore. Our usual purpose with it, our
commonest title for it, and the properties which this title suggests,
have in reality nothing sacramental. They characterize _us_ more than
they characterize the thing. But we are so stuck in our prejudices, so
petrified intellectually, that to our vulgarest names, with their
suggestions, we ascribe an eternal and exclusive worth. The thing must
be, essentially, what the vulgarest name connotes; what less usual names
connote, it can be only in an 'accidental' and relatively unreal
sense.[46]
Locke undermined the fallacy. But none of his successors, so far as I
know, have radically escaped it, or seen that _the only meaning of
essence is teleological, and that classification and conception are
purely teleological weapons of the mind_. The essence of a thing is that
one of its properties which is so _important for my interests_ that in
comparison with it I may neglect the rest. Amongst those other things
which have this important property I class it, after this property I
name it, as a thing endowed with this property I conceive it; and whilst
so classing, naming, and conceiving it, all other truth about it becomes
to me as naught. The properties which are important vary from man to man
and from hour to hour. Hence divers appellations and conceptions for the
same thing. But many objects of daily use--as paper, ink, butter,
overcoat--have properties of such constant unwavering importance, and
have such stereotyped names, that we end by believing that to conceive
them in those ways is to conceive them in the only true way. Those are
no truer ways of conceiving them than any others; they are only more
frequently serviceable ways to us.
=Reasoning is always for a subjective interest.= To revert now to our
symbolic representation of the reasoning process:
M is P
S is M
------
S is P
M is discerned and picked out for the time being to be the essence of
the concrete fact, phenomenon, or reality, S. But M in this world of
ours is inevitably conjoined with P; so that P is the next thing that we
may expect to find conjoined with the fact S. We may conclude or infer
P, through the intermediation of the M which our sagacity began by
discerning, when S came before it, to be the essence of the case.
Now note that if P have any value or importance for us, M was a very
good character for our sagacity to pounce upon and abstract. If, on the
contrary, P were of no importance, some other character than M would
have been a better essence for us to conceive of S by. Psychologically,
as a rule, P overshadows the process from the start. We are _seeking_ P,
or something like P. But the bare totality of S does not yield it to our
gaze; and casting about for some point in S to take hold of which will
lead us to P, we hit, if we are sagacious, upon M, because M happens to
be just the character which is knit up with P. Had we wished Q instead
of P, and were N a property of S conjoined with Q, we ought to have
ignored M, noticed N, and conceived of S as a sort of N exclusively.
Reasoning is always to attain some particular conclusion, or to gratify
some special curiosity. It not only breaks up the datum placed before it
and conceives it abstractly; it must conceive it _rightly_ too; and
conceiving it rightly means conceiving it by that one particular
abstract character which leads to the one sort of conclusion which it is
the reasoner's temporary interest to attain.
The _results_ of reasoning may be hit upon by accident. The stereoscope
was actually a result of reasoning; it is conceivable, however that a
man playing with pictures and mirrors might accidentally have hit upon
it. Cats have been known to open doors by pulling latches, etc. But no
cat, if the latch got out of order, could open the door again, unless
some new accident of random fumbling taught her to associate some new
total movement with the total phenomenon of the closed door. A reasoning
man, however, would open the door by first analyzing the hindrance. He
would ascertain what particular feature of the door was wrong. The
lever, e.g., does not raise the latch sufficiently from its slot--case
of insufficient elevation: raise door bodily on hinges! Or door sticks
at bottom by friction against sill: raise it bodily up! How it is
obvious that a child or an idiot might without this reasoning learn the
_rule_ for opening that particular door. I remember a clock which the
maid-servant had discovered would not go unless it were supported so as
to tilt slightly forwards. She had stumbled on this method after many
weeks of groping. The reason of the stoppage was the friction of the
pendulum-bob against the back of the clock-case, a reason which an
educated man would have analyzed out in five minutes. I have a student's
lamp of which the flame vibrates most unpleasantly unless the chimney be
raised about a sixteenth of an inch. I learned the remedy after much
torment by accident, and now always keep the chimney up with a small
wedge. But my procedure is a mere association of two totals, diseased
object and remedy. One learned in pneumatics could have abstracted the
_cause_ of the disease, and thence inferred the remedy immediately. By
many measurements of triangles one might find their area always equal to
their height multiplied by half their base, and one might formulate an
empirical law to that effect. But a reasoner saves himself all this
trouble by seeing that it is the essence (_pro hac vice_) of a triangle
to be the half of a parallelogram whose area is the height into the
entire base. To see this he must invent additional lines; and the
geometer must often draw such to get at the essential property he may
require in a figure. The essence consists in some _relation of the
figure to the new lines_, a relation not obvious at all until they are
put in. The geometer's genius lies in the imagining of the new lines,
and his sagacity in the perceiving of the relation.
=Thus, there are two great points in reasoning.= _First, an extracted
character is taken as equivalent to the entire datum from which it
comes; and_,
_Second, the character thus taken suggests a certain consequence more
obviously than it was suggested by the total datum as it originally
came._ Take these points again, successively.
1) Suppose I say, when offered a piece of cloth, "I won't buy that; it
looks as if it would fade," meaning merely that something about it
suggests the idea of fading to my mind,--my judgment, though possibly
correct, is not reasoned, but purely empirical; but if I can say that
into the color there enters a certain dye which I know to be chemically
unstable, and that _therefore_ the color will fade, my judgment is
reasoned. The notion of the dye, which is one of the parts of the cloth,
is the connecting link between the latter and the notion of fading. So,
again, an uneducated man will expect from past experience to see a piece
of ice melt if placed near the fire, and the tip of his finger look
coarse if he view it through a convex glass. In neither of these cases
could the result be anticipated without full previous acquaintance with
the entire phenomenon. It is not a result of reasoning.
But a man who should conceive heat as a mode of motion, and liquefaction
as identical with increased motion of molecules; who should know that
curved surfaces bend light-rays in special ways, and that the apparent
size of anything is connected with the amount of the 'bend' of its
light-rays as they enter the eye,--such a man would make the right
inferences for all these objects, even though he had never in his life
had any concrete experience of them: and he would do this because the
ideas which we have above supposed him to possess would mediate in his
mind between the phenomena he starts with and the conclusions he draws.
But these ideas are all mere extracted portions or circumstances. The
motions which form heat, the bending of the light-waves, are, it is
true, excessively recondite ingredients; the hidden pendulum I spoke of
above is less so; and the sticking of a door on its sill in the earlier
example would hardly be so at all. But each and all agree in this, that
they bear a _more evident relation_ to the conclusion than did the facts
in their immediate totality.
* * * * *
2) And now to prove the second point: Why are the couplings,
consequences, and implications of extracts more evident and obvious than
those of entire phenomena? For two reasons.
First, the extracted characters are more general than the concretes, and
the connections they may have are, therefore, more familiar to us,
having been more often met in our experience. Think of heat as motion,
and whatever is true of motion will be true of heat; but we have had a
hundred experiences of motion for every one of heat. Think of the rays
passing through this lens as bending towards the perpendicular, and you
substitute for the comparatively unfamiliar lens the very familiar
notion of a particular change in direction of a line, of which notion
every day brings us countless examples.
The other reason why the relations of the extracted characters are so
evident is that their properties are so _few_, compared with the
properties of the whole, from which we derived them. In every concrete
fact the characters and their consequences are so inexhaustibly numerous
that we may lose our way among them before noticing the particular
consequence it behooves us to draw. But, if we are lucky enough to
single out the proper character, we take in, as it were, by a single
glance all its possible consequences. Thus the character of scraping
the sill has very few suggestions, prominent among which is the
suggestion that the scraping will cease if we raise the door; whilst the
entire refractory door suggests an enormous number of notions to the
mind. Such examples may seem trivial, but they contain the essence of
the most refined and transcendental theorizing. The reason why physics
grows more deductive the more the fundamental properties it assumes are
of a mathematical sort, such as molecular mass or wave-length, is that
the immediate consequences of these notions are so few that we can
survey them all at once, and promptly pick out those which concern us.
=Sagacity.=--To reason, then, we must be able to extract characters,--not
_any_ characters, but the right characters for our conclusion. If we
extract the wrong character, it will not lead to that conclusion. Here,
then, is the difficulty: _How are characters extracted, and why does it
require the advent of a genius in many cases before the fitting
character is brought to light?_ Why cannot anybody reason as well as
anybody else? Why does it need a Newton to notice the law of the
squares, a Darwin to notice the survival of the fittest? To answer these
questions we must begin a new research, and see how our insight into
facts naturally grows.
All our knowledge at first is vague. When we say that a thing is vague,
we mean that it has no subdivisions _ab intra_, nor precise limitations
_ab extra_; but still all the forms of thought may apply to it. It may
have unity, reality, externality, extent, and what not--_thinghood_, in
a word, but thinghood only as a whole. In this vague way, probably, does
the room appear to the babe who first begins to be conscious of it as
something other than his moving nurse. It has no subdivisions in his
mind, unless, perhaps, the window is able to attract his separate
notice. In this vague way, certainly, does every entirely new experience
appear to the adult. A library, a museum, a machine-shop, are mere
confused wholes to the uninstructed, but the machinist, the antiquary,
and the bookworm perhaps hardly notice the whole at all, so eager are
they to pounce upon the details. Familiarity has in them bred
discrimination. Such vague terms as 'grass,' 'mould,' and 'meat' do not
exist for the botanist or the anatomist. They know too much about
grasses, moulds, and muscles. A certain person said to Charles Kingsley,
who was showing him the dissection of a caterpillar, with its exquisite
viscera, "Why, I thought it was nothing but skin and squash!" A layman
present at a shipwreck, a battle, or a fire is helpless. Discrimination
has been so little awakened in him by experience that his consciousness
leaves no single point of the complex situation accented and standing
out for him to begin to act upon. But the sailor, the fireman, and the
general know directly at what corner to take up the business. They 'see
into the situation'--that is, they analyze it--with their first glance.
It is full of delicately differenced ingredients which their education
has little by little brought to their consciousness, but of which the
novice gains no clear idea.
How this power of analysis was brought about we saw in our chapters on
Discrimination and Attention. We dissociate the elements of originally
vague totals by attending to them or noticing them alternately, of
course. But what determines which element we shall attend to first?
There are two immediate and obvious answers: first, our practical or
instinctive interests; and second, our æsthetic interests. The dog
singles out of any situation its smells, and the horse its sounds,
because they may reveal facts of practical moment, and are instinctively
exciting to these several creatures. The infant notices the candle-flame
or the window, and ignores the rest of the room, because those objects
give him a vivid pleasure. So, the country boy dissociates the
blackberry, the chestnut, and the wintergreen, from the vague mass of
other shrubs and trees, for their practical uses, and the savage is
delighted with the beads, the bits of looking-glass, brought by an
exploring vessel, and gives no heed to the features of the vessel
itself, which is too much beyond his sphere. These æsthetic and
practical interests, then, are the weightiest factors in making
particular ingredients stand out in high relief. What they lay their
accent on, that we notice; but what they are in themselves we cannot
say. We must content ourselves here with simply accepting them as
irreducible ultimate factors in determining the way our knowledge grows.
Now, a creature which has few instinctive impulses, or interests
practical or æsthetic, will dissociate few characters, and will, at
best, have limited reasoning powers; whilst one whose interests are very
varied will reason much better. Man, by his immensely varied instincts,
practical wants, and æsthetic feelings, to which every sense
contributes, would, by dint of these alone, be sure to dissociate vastly
more characters than any other animal; and accordingly we find that the
lowest savages reason incomparably better than the highest brutes. The
diverse interests lead, too, to a diversification of experiences, whose
accumulation becomes a condition for the play of that _law of
dissociation by varying concomitants_ of which I treated on p. 251.
=The Help given by Association by Similarity.=--It is probable, also, that
man's _superior association by similarity_ has much to do with those
discriminations of character on which his higher flights of reasoning
are based. As this latter is an important matter, and as little or
nothing was said of it in the chapter on Discrimination, it behooves me
to dwell a little upon it here.
What does the reader do when he wishes to see in what the precise
likeness or difference of two objects lies? He transfers his attention
as rapidly as possible, backwards and forwards, from one to the other.
The rapid alteration in consciousness shakes out, as it were, the points
of difference or agreement, which would have slumbered forever unnoticed
if the consciousness of the objects compared had occurred at widely
distant periods of time. What does the scientific man do who searches
for the reason or law embedded in a phenomenon? He deliberately
accumulates all the instances he can find which have any analogy to that
phenomenon; and, by simultaneously filling his mind with them all, he
frequently succeeds in detaching from the collection the peculiarity
which he was unable to formulate in one alone; even though that one had
been preceded in his former experience by all of those with which he now
at once confronts it. These examples show that the mere general fact of
having occurred at some time in one's experience, with varying
concomitants, is not by itself a sufficient reason for a character to be
dissociated now. We need something more; we need that the varying
concomitants should in all their variety be brought into consciousness
_at once_. Not till then will the character in question escape from its
adhesion to each and all of them and stand alone. This will immediately
be recognized by those who have read Mill's Logic as the ground of
Utility in his famous 'four methods of experimental inquiry,' the
methods of agreement, of difference, of residues, and of concomitant
variations. Each of these gives a list of analogous instances out of the
midst of which a sought-for character may roll and strike the mind.
Now it is obvious that any mind in which association by similarity is
highly developed is a mind which will spontaneously form lists of
instances like this. Take a present fact _A_, with a character _m_ in
it. The mind may fail at first to notice this character _m_ at all. But
if _A_ calls up _C_, _D_, _E_, and _F_,--these being phenomena which
resemble _A_ in possessing _m_, but which may not have entered for
months into the experience of the animal who now experiences _A_, why,
plainly, such association performs the part of the reader's deliberately
rapid comparison referred to above, and of the systematic consideration
of like cases by the scientific investigator, and may lead to the
noticing of _m_ in an abstract way. Certainly this is obvious; and no
conclusion is left to us but to assert that, after the few most
powerful practical and æsthetic interests, our chief help towards
noticing those special characters of phenomena which, when once
possessed and named, are used as reasons, class names, essences, or
middle terms, _is this association by similarity_. Without it, indeed,
the deliberate procedure of the scientific man would be impossible: he
could never collect his analogous instances. But it operates of itself
in highly-gifted minds without any deliberation, spontaneously
collecting analogous instances, uniting in a moment what in nature the
whole breadth of space and time keeps separate, and so permitting a
perception of identical points in the midst of different circumstances,
which minds governed wholly by the law of contiguity could never begin
to attain.
[Illustration: FIG. 66.]
Figure 66 shows this. If _m_, in the present representation _A_, calls
up _B_, _C_, _D_, and _E_, which are similar to _A_ in possessing it,
and calls them up in rapid succession, then _m_, being associated almost
simultaneously with such varying concomitants, will 'roll out' and
attract our separate notice.
If so much is clear to the reader, he will be willing to admit that the
mind _in which this mode of association most prevails_ will, from its
better opportunity of extricating characters, be the one most prone to
reasoned thinking; whilst, on the other hand, a mind in which we do not
detect reasoned thinking will probably be one in which association by
contiguity holds almost exclusive sway.
Geniuses are, by common consent, considered to differ from ordinary
minds by an unusual development of association by similarity. One of
Professor Bain's best strokes of work is the exhibition of this truth.
It applies to geniuses in the line of reasoning as well as in other
lines.
=The Reasoning Powers of Brutes.=--As the genius is to the vulgarian, so
the vulgar human mind is to the intelligence of a brute. Compared with
men, it is probable that brutes neither attend to abstract characters,
nor have associations by similarity. Their thoughts probably pass from
one concrete object to its habitual concrete successor far more
uniformly than is the case with us. In other words, their associations
of ideas are almost exclusively by contiguity. So far, however, as any
brute might think by abstract characters instead of by the association
of concretes, he would have to be admitted to be a reasoner in the true
human sense. How far this may take place is quite uncertain. Certain it
is that the more intelligent brutes _obey_ abstract characters, whether
they mentally single them out as such or not. They act upon things
according to their _class_. This involves some sort of emphasizing, if
not abstracting, of the class-essence by the animal's mind. A concrete
individual with none of his characters emphasized is one thing; a
sharply conceived attribute marked off from everything else by a name is
another. But between no analysis of a concrete, and complete analysis;
no abstraction of an embedded character, and complete abstraction, every
possible intermediary grade must lie. And some of these grades ought to
have names, for they are certainly represented in the mind. Dr. Romanes
has proposed the name _recept_, and Prof. Lloyd Morgan the name
_construct_, for the idea of a vaguely abstracted and generalized
object-class. A definite abstraction is called an _isolate_ by the
latter author. Neither _construct_ nor _recept_ seems to me a felicitous
word; but poor as both are, they form a distinct addition to psychology,
so I give them here. Would such a word as _influent_ sound better than
_recept_ in the following passage from Romanes?
"Water-fowl adopt a somewhat different mode of alighting upon land, or
even upon ice, from that which they adopt when alighting upon water; and
those kinds which dive from a height (such as terns and gannets) never
do so upon land or upon ice. These facts prove that the animals have one
recept answering to a solid surface, and another answering to a fluid.
Similarly a man will not dive from a height over hard ground or over
ice, nor will he jump into water in the same way as he jumps upon dry
land. In other words, like the water-fowl he has two distinct recepts,
one of which answers to solid ground, and the other to an unresisting
fluid. But unlike the water-fowl he is able to bestow upon each of these
recepts a name, and thus to raise them both to the level of concepts. So
far as the practical purposes of locomotion are concerned, it is of
course immaterial whether or not he thus raises his recepts into
concepts; but ... for many other purposes it is of the highest
importance that he is able to do this."[47]
A certain well-bred retriever of whom I know never bit his birds. But
one day having to bring two birds at once, which, though unable to fly,
were 'alive and kicking,' he deliberately gave one a bite which killed
it, took the other one still alive to his master, and then returned for
the first. It is impossible not to believe that some such abstract
thoughts as 'alive--get away--must kill,' ... etc., passed in rapid
succession through this dog's mind, whatever the sensible imagery may
have been with which they were blended. Such practical obedience to the
special aspects of things which may be important involves the essence of
reasoning. But the characters whose presence impress brutes are very
few, being only those which are directly connected with their most
instinctive interests. They never extract characters for the mere fun of
the thing, as men do. One is tempted to explain this as the result in
them of an almost entire absence of such association by similarity as
characterizes the human mind. A thing may remind a brute of its full
similars, but not of things to which it is but slightly similar; and all
that dissociation by varying concomitants, which in man is based so
largely on association by similarity, hardly seems to take place at all
in the infra-human mind. One total object suggests another total object,
and the lower mammals find themselves acting with propriety, they know
not why. The great, the fundamental, defect of their minds seems to be
the inability of their groups of ideas to break across in unaccustomed
places. They are enslaved to routine, to cut-and-dried thinking; and if
the most prosaic of human beings could be transported into his dog's
soul, he would be appalled at the utter absence of fancy which there
reigns. Thoughts would not be found to call up their similars, but only
their habitual successors. Sunsets would not suggest heroes' deaths, but
supper-time. This is why man is the only metaphysical animal. To wonder
why the universe should be as it is presupposes the notion of its being
different, and a brute, who never reduces the actual to fluidity by
breaking up its literal sequences in his imagination, can never form
such a notion. He takes the world simply for granted, and never wonders
at it at all.