Now what are thought and reason if the processes that were going
through this cat's mind were not both one and the other? It would
be childish to suppose that the cat thought in words of its own, or
in anything like words. Its thinking was probably conducted through
the instrumentality of a series of mental images. We so habitually
think in words ourselves that we find it difficult to realise
thought without words at all; our difficulty, however, in imagining
the particular manner in which the cat thinks has nothing to do with
the matter. We must answer the question whether she thinks or no,
not according to our own ease or difficulty in understanding the
particular manner of her thinking, but according as her action does
or does not appear to be of the same character as other action that
we commonly call thoughtful. To say that the cat is not
intelligent, merely on the ground that we cannot ourselves fathom
her intelligence--this, as I have elsewhere said, is to make
intelligence mean the power of being understood, rather than the
power of understanding. This nevertheless is what, for all our
boasted intelligence, we generally do. The more we can understand
an animal's ways, the more intelligent we call it, and the less we
can understand these, the more stupid do we declare it to be. As
for plants--whose punctuality and attention to all the details and
routine of their somewhat restricted lines of business is as obvious
as it is beyond all praise--we understand the working of their minds
so little that by common consent we declare them to have no
intelligence at all.
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