ANIMAL MIND.
MR. ST. LOE STRACHEY has made a capital selection of the dog-stories in the Spectator *—though we wish he had left out two in which the narrators, though perfectly honest, have obviously been deceived by nndesigned coinci- dences—and Mr. Fisher TInwin has printed and bound them very prettily ; but we should like to say a word about them for ourselves. It did not enter into Mr. Strachey's plan to explain the whole intention of his colleagues in admitting so many animal-stories into their limited letter space,—space on which the weekly demand is quite extraordinary. We have the idea, for instance—a point he has not mentioned at all—that a collection of animal-stories, as it grows large, may per- ceptibly increase the public feeling of consideration for the animal kingdom. There is, we are convinced, in many men otherwise kindly and merciful, and especially in men devoid of imagination, a disposition to regard animals as if they were machines incapable of true suffering, particularly mental suffering, to look upon them, in fact, as we are all more or less compelled by the limitation of our perceptive power, to look upon insects. The cure for that callousness is to realise that the beasts also have minds, inchoate minds no doubt, or imperfect minds, like those of children or of the afflicted, but still minds. That notion, though in no way confined to the Spectator, is in a degree new. The merciful of a hundred years ago pleaded for the beasts almost entirely on the ground of their harmlessness, or of their usefulness, or of their affec- tion for mankind, the latter being described with pathetic reiteration. The Gellert idea was, in fact, the central idea with the humane of the relation between animals and men. That is an excellent reason for mercy, but we doubt if that is so influential as the one on which, in accepting or rejecting dog-stories, we lay a principal stress. We fancy that animal- tenders would be far more merciful if they fully realised that they were dealing with creatures possessed of mind, that, for instance, the roughest carter would hesitate to kick a dog which he honestly believed to possess the powers attributed by Sir John Lubbock to his dog Van.' He could not do it any more than be could kick a baby. Of course 'Van' is exceptional, the difference between one dog and another in intelligence, being as great as the difference between the Caucasian and the Australian aborigine—or possibly greater, for the common origin of all dogs is by no means finally • Dog-Szoriss from the " Spectator.'' With I atz oduction by J. St. Los Strachey. 'Comical F sher established—but the sense of what a dog potentially is would, in the carter's mind, be wholly modified. Very rough men indeed shrink from killing, and still more from cooking, monkeys, and a definite similarity of mind once established, as it is in Sir John Lubbock's two stories, imparts to all dogs, as the monkey's shape imparts to him, something of the character of humanity. The operation of that feeling 18 quite curiously strong. "He cried like a Christian," says the repentant brute, who has just injured a cat for life. There are Asiatics callous almost as machines, who would not for the world hurt a beast, because in it a sinning human soul may be imprisoned in expiation; and an impression of true mind, living, though dumb in the animal, has just the same effect. Vivisectors, however eager in their curiosity, would not like to cut up children ; and the difference between ' Van' and a child is difficult to define with sufficient harshness.
Then we think that next to the chances of spiritual life extending beyond the duration of the body, the problem of most interest for mankind, and the one which may hereafter yield the largest results, is the precise nature of what we call mind. We are all greatly interested in " history " and "develop. ment," and the differences among "races" and the range of "natural instincts," and the "results of education," and so on; but what, before we have defined to ourselves the nature of mind, do we precisely mean by any of them P Are all minds, for example, progressive, or are all as absolutely, and so to speak as arbitrarily, limited as bodies are ? Is there a point of strength, size, energy, which no mind will ever reach in this world, any more than anybody will be 10 ft. high, or five times as strong as Henry Topham—the miraculous "strong man" of our grandfathers—or capable of walking for six months ivithout repose? It is quite probable that on a problem like that, and we give only the simplest, a study of animal mind, when we can get at any large body of facts, may throw new and very considerable light. We get, indeed, some small light already, though, owing either to defective observation or defective record, we know next to nothing about any beasts except dogs, elephants, and, in a less degree, perhaps horses. There must be men who know a great deal about the minds of sheep, goats, and llamas, and there may be men who understand something of the mind of monkeys and beavers ; but they are silent men, and we derive little knowledge from their experiences. All we really know is about dogs—cats are savages ; tameable, no doubt, but still savages—but that knowledge suggests strange thoughts,—that minds may have, for instance, the most absolute limitations. There is positive brilliance up to the curtain, but not an inch beyond. Sir John Lubbock's dog could almost write what he wanted,—that is, he could choose a writing which expressed his want, but he could no more have expressed an abstract or generalised idea, probably could no more have entertained one, than a tree or a baby could. May there not exist a human tribe with the same inability ? The missionaries, who know most of savages, say there are tribes of which this is true, and are gravely, even painfully, puzzled to decide what the extent of their responsibility is when their Christianity stops so sud- denly and unintelligibly short. Take the question of lan- guage. No one who has ever petted dogs doubts for a moment that up to a certain point they understand the relation between words and actions, or in other words, that they can learn a spoken language. Most of the Spectator's story- tellers, as collected by Mr. Strachey, believe, we see, that the dog-faculty is for understanding meaning but not words, but that is absolutely incorrect. The writer knows a dog who, past all question, can up to a point un- derstand words that he only overhears, just as well as any Christian,—who, for instance, will go and hide himself if there is any talk while he lies under the table, of the neces- sity of washing him, and who will exhibit, if there is discussion of travel or packing, all the signs of dejected melancholy. Indeed, up to a point, anybody can test the matter by men- tioning in a casual way the name by which the dog is called, and watching his ears, how they prick up, or if he is fast asleep, how his eyes open and flash with understanding. If he knows one word, as he certainly does, why not one hundred ? Yet it is as certain as anything of the kind can be, that a dog does not understand anything approaching to an idea, or anything like argument, or anything of any kind which has no direct reference to himself and his own habitudes. His nearest approach to what we call thinking is
revealed when he occasionally "makes shots" at something he is required to do or learn, a habit which, as a well-known naturalist writes to us, cannot be clearly detected in any other mammal, though it is undoubtedly traceable in the pro- ceedings of ants. The limitation is absolute, and the question whether it may not extend to human beings, whether there are not whole ranges of thought which would be incompre- hensible to us, or, so to speak, inaudible to us, even if they were revealed, is one of in.tensest interest. We may be shut out by an invisible and irremovable veil from vast ranges of knowledge which yet, if we were but aware of it, are as close as is our conversation to the dog's ears. There may even be knowledgewhich the dogs have and we have not, just as there are things imperceptible to our senses, like the way to get across unknown country to a definite point, which are quite sufficiently clear to the dumb beast. We fancy he knows by the direction of the wind' is it blew on his sensitive tongue in the journey outwards, or he may possibly see the stars as the miner does when he looks up the shaft ; but those are, of course, mere guesses.
Will the veil between man and the animal creation ever be lifted at all? But little ; but, possibly, still a little. It is nearly certain—or we should ourselves say quite certain— that if, after a few ages of experience, the domestic beasts, in other words, the beasts which have not to hunt for food—the carnivora owe their ferocity to ages of hunger and fierce exertion to assuage hunger—acquired a serene confidence in man, they would reveal to him something, however little, more of themselves. They do it now under favour- able conditions. Cowper's hare ranging the house like a cat, and Waterton's bull allowing him to seat himself upon his flanks as he lay stretched out on the grass, are instances that what we all believe to be animal "nature," is often misinterpreted. The Chinese govern their flocks with- out dogs, and a Chinese shepherd, we have been told, can call a particular sheep out of his flock,—a story an English shepherd would have difficulty in believing. The excessively curious movements of petted dogs when any one is sick in the house are entirely unexplained, and certainly seem to indicate that the abstract idea of sickness is not beyond animal range, the brute exhibiting all the signs of grief and anxiety before it has seen its sick friend, or known, except from talk and the household perturbation, that he was sick. A little knowledge may come in that way, and a little more from attention to beast language. The creatures un- doubtedly do talk in a way, and to a certain degree do respond to each others' cries, do give each other orders, and do communicate by sound certain items of information, as, for instance, that something is going on which surprises and distresses them. It is not likely that this "language," if we are to call it so, alters much—though Indian dogs, to be sure, whine to each other where European dogs bark — and it is conceivable, though improbable, that its meaning might be acquired by men. Some of the servitors of Euro- pean zoological gardens think they know something of it, and so, we fancy, do the old shikaries of Indian villages— they say they do, anyhow—and the knowledge may ultimately be gathered up. Substantially, however, the only hope is in studying an immense body of facto as to the operation of mind in animals, and it is that body of fact which the stories in the Spectator slowly swell. Of course some of the stories are false, as some of the stories of human adventure or human repartee are false; but we do our best to discriminate, and sometimes could produce evidence from the character of wit- nesses, which would bewilder Mr. Newton. No Judge on the Bench would dare to impugn the evidence which supports one of the two impossible stories in this collection, which nevertheless is impossible all the same.
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