Animals can thus receive and impart ideas on all that most
concerns them. As my great namesake said some two hundred years
ago, they know "what's what, and that's as high as metaphysic wit
can fly." And they not only know what's what themselves, but can
impart to one another any new what's-whatness that they may have
acquired, for they are notoriously able to instruct and correct one
another.
Against this Professor Max Muller contends that we can know nothing
of what goes on in the mind of any lower animal, inasmuch as we are
not lower animals ourselves. "We can imagine anything we like about
what passes in the mind of an animal," he writes, "we can know
absolutely nothing." {19} It is something to have it in evidence
that he conceives animals as having a mind at all, but it is not
easy to see how they can be supposed to have a mind, without being
able to acquire ideas, and having acquired, to read, mark, learn,
and inwardly digest them. Surely the mistake of requiring too much
evidence is hardly less great than that of being contented with too
little. We, too, are animals, and can no more refuse to infer
reason from certain visible actions in their case than we can in our
own. If Professor Max Muller's plea were allowed, we should have to
deny our right to infer confidently what passes in the mind of any
one not ourselves, inasmuch as we are not that person.
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