One of the most resourceful of animals and the "most playsomest crittur
on God's earth." It neither stores nor hibernates, but survives in
virtue of its wits and because of the careful education of the young.
The otter is a roving animal, often with more than one resting-place; it
has been known to travel fifteen miles in a night.]
Higher still are the records or memories of individual experience and
the registration of individual habits, while on the surface is the
instreaming multitude of messages from the outside world, like raindrops
and hailstones on the stream, some of them penetrating deeply, being, as
we say, full of meaning. The mind of the higher animal is in some
respects like a child's mind, in having little in the way of clear-cut
ideas, in showing no reason in the strict sense, and in its
extraordinary educability, but it differs from the child's mind entirely
in the sure effectiveness of a certain repertory of responses. It is
efficient to a degree.
"Until at last arose the Man."
Man's brain is more complicated than that of the higher apes--gorilla,
orang, and chimpanzee--and it is relatively larger. But the improvements
in structure do not seem in themselves sufficient to account for man's
great advance in intelligence. The rill of inner life has become a swift
stream, sometimes a rushing torrent. Besides perceptual inference or
_Intelligence_--a sort of picture-logic, which some animals likewise
have--there is conceptual inference--or _Reason_--an internal
experimenting with general ideas. Even the cleverest animals, it would
seem, do not get much beyond playing with "particulars"; man plays an
internal game of chess with "universals." Intelligent behaviour may go a
long way with mental images; rational conduct demands general ideas. It
may be, however, that "percepts" and "concepts" differ rather in degree
than in kind, and that the passage from one to the other meant a higher
power of forming associations. A clever dog has probably a generalised
percept of man, as distinguished from a memory-image of the particular
men it has known, but man alone has the concept Man, or Mankind, or
Humanity. Experimenting with concepts or general ideas is what we call
Reason.
Here, of course, we get into deep waters, and perhaps it is wisest not
to attempt too much. So we shall content ourselves here with pointing
out that Man's advance in intelligence and from intelligence to reason
is closely wrapped up with his power of speech. What animals began--a
small vocabulary--he has carried to high perfection. But what is
distinctive is not the vocabulary so much as the habit of making
sentences, of expressing judgments in a way which admitted of
communication between mind and mind. The multiplication of words meant
much, the use of words as symbols of general ideas meant even more, for
it meant the possibility of playing the internal game of thinking; but
perhaps the most important advance of all was the means of comparing
notes with neighbours, of corroborating individual experience by social
intercourse. With words, also, it became easier to enregister outside
himself the gains of the past. It is not without significance that the
Greek Logos, which may be translated "the word," may also be translated
Mind.
§ 9