(Vol. v., p. 535.)
Your correspondent C. MANSFIELD INGLEBY will pardon me if I deny the
discrepancy in Coleridge's statements on the difference between these
faculties. Coleridge refuses to brutes the possession of reason as a
contemplative faculty; he allows them, that which in kind differs from
reason, the understanding _in a certain degree_, and asserts that they do
possess, in a very marked and characteristic manner, instinct, which, in
degree only, falls below understanding. Instinct is distinguishable in
_degree_ from understanding. Reason is distinguishable from it in _kind_.
Some kinds of brutes, as dogs and elephants, possess more intelligence than
others, as tigers and swine; and some individual dogs possess more of this
intelligence than others. This intelligence arises from the superior
activity of the "faculty judging according to sense;" and, when Coleridge
says that it is not clear to him "that the dog may not possess an analogon
to words," he might have gone, I think, further, and have said, with much
probability of truth on his side, that the dog _has_ this analogon of
words. I am sure I have often known a dog's thoughts by his own way of
expressing them, far more distinctly than I am sometimes able to gather a
fellow man's meaning from his words. Nay, much as I love and venerate
Coleridge--his goodness, his genius, his writings, his memory--I find a dog
sometimes far more intelligible. Language is a property of the
understanding, but it cannot be developed in words unless there be in the
creature an adequate degree of the faculty. This degree of the faculty,
dogs have not. If they had it, they might fairly be expected to speak,
read, and write. What we want is the man, or the observation and
experiment, which shall show us where the line is to be drawn, if in the
nature of such gradations lines can be drawn at all, which shall
distinguish the degree at which instinct overlaps understanding. The case
is perhaps too hopelessly complicated. Coleridge has carefully guarded his
expressions, that they should not seem to assert for brutes more than he
can _prove_ that they possess, by the use of the words "analogous or fully
equivalent." That brutes can and do reflect, abstract, and generalise, it
needs but an understanding of the terms, and some observation of their
habits, to feel assured.