Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 37, Number 8, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 January 1905 — Do Animals Think? [ARTICLE]

Do Animals Think?

John Burroughs effectually disposes of the idea that any of the lower animals is capable of thought. After recounting many interesting tests he says: “Animals have keen perceptions—keener in many respects than our own —but they form no conceptions, have no powers of comparing one thing With anpther. They live entirely in and through their senses, To all that inner world of reflection imagination, comparison, reason they are strangers. They never return upon themselves in thought. They have sense memory, sense intelligence. and they profit in taany ways by experience; but they have no soul memory or rational intelligence. All the fundamental emotions and appetites men and the lower animals share in common, such as fear, anger, love, hunger, jealousy, cunning, pride, curiosity, play; but the world of thought and thought experience, and the emotions that go with it, belongs to man alone. “It is as if the psychic world were divided into two planes, one above the other —the plane of sense and the plane of spirit In the plane of sense live the lower animals, only now anu then just breaking for a moment Into the higher plane.. In the world of sense man is immersed also; this is' his start and foundation; but he rises into the plane of spirit, and there lives his proper life. He is emancipated from sense in a way that beats are not.” —Harper’s Magazine.