DOG-CONSCIOUSNESS.
THE Germans are ahead of us in the scientific treatment of ' consciousness ' generally, but their learned men who understand ' consciousness ' are not usually out-of-doors men, men who keep dogs and cultivate their friendship. Hence we do not think that any of their great Reviews have yet taken up the sub- ject of the 'Consciousness of Dogs' with the thoroughness of one of our own great Conservative Reviews,—the Quarterly. At least, we have as yet come upon no article in any great German review devoted to the study of "das hundische Bewusstseyn," as is an elaborate article in the new number of the Quarterly. No doubt the editor feels the close connection between the Eilglish sympathy with the animal world, and English Conservatism. The Quarterly Review justly remarks that dogs are the most conservative of creatures, —clinging to fixed habits with the most ardent attachment, —and no doubt those who love dogs must borrow a little of Conser- vative feeling from their humble friends. But whatever the cause, the result is that the Quarterly reviewer has really anticipated the German metaphysicians in the attempt to get within the conscious- ness of the dog. And it is not only a very bold and careful, but, on the whole, a successful attempt, though on one point, on which we are now to speak, we cannot pretend to acquiesce in the Quarterly reviewer's inferences. The reviewer shows that the dog shares almost all the passions and emotions of man,—" anger, hatred, jealousy, envy, gluttony, love, fear, pride, vanity, mag- nanimity, chivalry, covetousness, avarice, shame, humour, grati- tude, regret, grief, maternal love, courage, fortitude, hope, and faith,"—not, by the way, a very scientific classification, as many of them overlap each other ; further, he lays it down that the dog is destitute of the passion for stimulants and intoxicating drugs, is incapable of the kind of shame of which ' modesty ' is the highest form, and is, further, excluded from the lofty range of emotions which have 'abstract ideas' for their objects (not a very good mode of describing Art and the higher Literature, which mostly have concrete objects). And then the reviewer passes judgment that the dog, having no moral freedom, has no morality beyond such a shadow of it as his love and reverence for his master may impose on him, but that his intellectual faculties are very like ours, so far as memory, reflection, combination, forethought, asso- ciation of ideas, and even a power of drawing simple inferences, go. But oddly enough, the reviewer goes on to say that the dog's inability for articulate speech must be considered as practically putting the question whether the dog can have any command of abstract ideas beyond argument,—all real use of abstract ideas needing the aid of language to make it of any effect. Whence the writer concludes that the dog has no self-consciousness, no distinct consciousness of the subject, as distinguished from that of the object, of his thoughts. He does not realise the dis- tinction between the Self and the Not-self.
Now when the reviewer speaks in this way, he seems to us to use both "abstract ideas" and " self-consciousness " in some very new and peculiar sense, and that his use of these terms in that sense is exceedingly likely to do injustice to the creature whom he so carefully and affectionately studies. All that we can fairly mean by an abstract idea is a notion which applies indifferently to any member of a class, which has had all that individualises it, all that attaches it to a single individual, discharged out of it. For instance, if I say to my dog, ' Will you go a little walk?' and he immediately begins to bark with excite- ment, does our reviewer mean to say that the word ' walk ' must suggest to him purely individual objects, that he thinks solely of individual roads, hedges, furze-bushes, hills,—that he has not a rush of vague conceptions which will cover equally any sort of walk ? Surely abstraction is a process quite as familiar to the dog as to the little child. When a child has heard the word ' horse ' once or twice applied to an actual horse, he probably in- fers that the name is applied without reference to its colour or its size, and the danger might be that he would think a calf or a donkey a horse. But his idea of a horse is already 'abstract,'—too abstract, as it would include creatures resembling it only in having four legs and a tail. A dog's idea might probably be less abstract. Certainly the dog distinguishes with the greatest acuteness between different species, as well as between different individuals ; he has unques- tionably an abstract idea of a horse, as of a walk,'—a vague idea that applies equally to all individual horses. Nok can we conceive
how a sheep-dog which did not know the species as well as the individuals could get on in his professional life at all. He would be in danger of mistaking every new or strange sheep for an enemy, if he recognised the sheep only by individual marks. But probably the reviewer would deny that he meant to question the dog's aptitude for taking in abstract ideas in this sense. So long as the ideas are not too abstract to be illustrated by external objects, be would perhaps say the dog is master of them. He knows what a stick or a whip means without any reference to the individual articles of that kind with which he has made ac- quaintance. He has vague conceptions of concrete things, but not conceptions of which you could produce no actual specimen at all, such as of 'truth,' justice,' beauty,' &c. Even in this more limited sense, we think the reviewer, necessarily and by his own admissions, wrong. Would a dog drown himself in his misery without a distinct notion of 'death,' of which he has never had or could have had anything but an abstract notion, yet the stories given by the Quarterly reviewer of canine suicides are very convincing and authentic. Nay, it is perfectly obvious that the dog has a complete mastery of that very abstract idea, padding,' i.e., of something to hide a real deficiency, as this amusing story shows :—
" The dog was a poodle puppy, called Baldi. One night, after we had all gone to the play, supper having been laid ready for our return, we found the pigeon-pie in this condition : one pigeon having been abstracted, and the hole cleverly filled up with a bit of damp inky sponge, which my father (the late Mr. North) always kept in a glass on his writing-table to wipe his pens on. Baldi looked terribly guilty, and there was no doubt where the pigeon was gone; but why he should have thought of concealing his guilt by filling up the hole I have not an idea."
Now, Baldi evidently felt uneasy at the emptiness of the pigeon- pie after he had eaten one pigeon, and having apparently but an indifferent estimate of his master's taste, thought that possibly the substitution of a bit of damp inky sponge might conceal the defi- ciency. Therein he certainly showed a very imperfect knowledge of human tastes, but it is perfectly clear that something like the following process must have gone on in his head. After con- suming the pigeon, he must have had the conception of his master's displeasure ; we won't insist on that as an abstract idea, as the reviewer might say he would only have had the concrete picture of an angry master ; but further, the notion of his master's dis- pleasure must have suggested the possibility of filling up the de- plorable hiatus in the pigeon-pie so as to deceive his master,—and how could be have had this inspiration without a clear notion both of relative magnitude and of the nature of a trick ? He must have sought about for something of like colour, and decided that the inky sponge was the best approach to imitative art he could on the spur of the moment insert, and have inserted it, in the hope that by so doing he could prevent his master from perceiving the loss of the pigeon. How is all that conceivable without the distinct abstract notion of imposing upon his master? You can't even suggest the mental process in a concrete form beyond its first stage. You can imagine the dog dismayed at the thought of an angry face gazing first at the pigeon-pie and then at the vision of his master. But beyond that, how is the intellectual process to be continued with- out the use of an abstract idea ? The inky sponge might have suggested itself from some vague perception of resemblance, but the notion of substituting it in the place of the pigeon could not have suggested itself without the notion of the possibility of pro- ducing a false impression in his master's mind. And what is such a false impression except in the strictest sense an abstract idea? How could a dog hope to deceive his master as to what had hap- pened without distinguishing in his own mind between the event and what he wanted the event to appear ; and how could he so distinguish without apprehending more or less the relation between evidence and belief ? It is not like the case of a dog's hiding a bone, the, possession of which he associates with a beating ; it is quite conceivable that he might do that from the mere force of unpleasant memories, aroused jointly by the sound of his master's step and the association with previous acts of plunder. But the dog could not have substituted anything else in the place of the pigeon he had robbed through the force of such associations ; for that involved a clear intellectual apprehension that suspicion would be aroused by the emptiness of the pie, and that if the pie could be filled by something of somewhat similar size and colour, that suspicion might be averted. Now preparing a train of circumstances to avert suspicion must imply a distinct abstract conception of what suspicion is. Nor is this the only well-authenticated dog story demanding such an inference. There is a story of a dog (told by Mr. Williams in his amusing book on "Dogs and Their Ways ") who accumulated a store of bones by saving up half his dinner daily, till he had capital enough to pay a troop of dogs of the neighbourhood to revenge him on a dog of great size and strength which had worried him. Here was a genuine economist, with a clear knowledge of the nature of capital and wages, as well as a clear intellectual conception of the sweetness of revenge. You cannot possibly explain so elaborate a plan as this without supposing that the dog distinguished between means and ends, understood the prin- ciple of mercenary troops, and conceived the possibility of organising them at the cost of some small self-denials. He must have had in some form the notion "I won't eat the bone, for I want it to buy aid for the punishment of my rival." Put that conception into the most concrete form you can, and it will yet be found to involve more than one abstract idea, and, moreover, the knowledge of the influence which abstract ideas may have upon future actions. Again, it is difficult to imagine that the Quarterly reviewer's story of the poodle which kept a gold coin, dropped by its master in a hotel, in its month the whole day till his return, refusing to eat for fear of putting the piece down, had not a pretty clear idea of the exchangeable value of gold.
Hence we do not believe that the difference between 'dogs and men as regards the mastery of abstract ideas is at all more than one of degree. And we say the same of the dog's self- consciousness. No doubt he does not think in our artificial way of the difference between the ' self ' and the 'not-self.' But to argue as the reviewer does from the simplicity of his demeanour that he has no distinct self-consciousness, seems to us pure exag- geration. The reviewer, like anyone who knows dogs, concedes to the dog both vanity and jealousy,—pride in its own beauty, and an eager grudge against those who are preferred to it. How can this be without some measure of conscious comparison between his own claims,—the love felt for him,—and the claims of another ? But if you want a more clearly intellectual test of canine self-consciousness, observe a dog—as the present writer has the opportunity of doing every day—suffering under the imitative skill of a parrot that mocks all his tones of delight, complaint, entreaty, impatience, with perfect skill. It drives the dog nearly mad,—not of course from the noise, but from the same sort of horror which a man is said to feel at seeing his ' fetch ' or the exact image of himself. It puzzles the dog's sense of personality, confounds his discrimination between the self and the not-self, and altogether makes "the burden of the mystery of all this unintelligible world" too much for the dog. We will not assert free-will,—in any at least but the faintest germs,—f or the dog. But we will assert that in spite of his inability to use abstract language of any kind, he has plenty of abstract ideas of a kind of which you could find no physical illustration or expression at all, and has especially, whether you call it abstract or concrete,—we should be disposed to call it the latter, —a very clear idea of himself as distinguished from all that is outside the sphere of his canine personality.
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