SOME BOOKS OF THE WEEK.
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Have animals got minds P This is the deeply interesting question discussed by Miss B. M. Smith in her book upon The Investigation of Mind in Animals (Cambridge University Press, 3s. net). It is not so easily answered as might appear at first sight: and Miss Smith, beginning with the protozoa and ending with the Elberfeld "thinking" horses, shows by means of a searching process of psychological analysis the difficulty of accepting the ordinary view of animal intelligence. Unfortunately, however, she omits to discuss some of the more fundamental difficulties which underlie the whole question, and her arguments are for this reason a little inconclusive. What does she mean exactly by "mind" p Sometimes she seems to mean something as narrow as "reasoning power " or " intelli- gence genes"; sometimes she seems to mean something as wide as " consciousness." And in any ease, the narrower question whether animals reason can only be ansvrered after the wider question whether they are conscious at all. And this in turn turn raises the whole problem of our belief in the existence of other minds besides our own. It would be absurd, of course, to expect a small volume like this to deal adequately with such fundamental philosophical ideas; but an explicit statement of the author's opinions upon them is ass almost essential preliminary to such an investigation, if confusion is to be avoided.
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