can find it in our memory by any of its characteristic signs.
It is clear from this that an animal's memory is more burdened than ours and that
this
is precisely
the main cause which hinders the mental evolution of an animal. Its mind is
too
occupied. It has
no time
to move forward. It is possible
to arrest the mental
development of a child by making it learn by heart series of words and series of figures.
An animal is exactly in the same position. And this explains the strange fact that an
animal is
more intelligent when young.
In a man the peak of his intellectual power is reached at a mature age, very often
even in old age; in the case of an animal it is just the reverse. It is
receptive
only while
it is young. With maturity its development becomes arrested and in old age it
undoubtedly becomes retrogressive.
The logic of an animal, if we attempt to express it in formulae similar to those of
Aristotle and Bacon, would be as follows.
The animal will understand
the formula
A is A.
It will say: I am I, and so on. But it
will not understand the formula A
is not not-A,
for
not-A
is a
concept.
The animal will
say:
This is this. That is that.
This is not that.
or
This man is this man. That man is
that man. This man is not that man.
Later on I shall have to return to the logic of animals.
For the moment it was only
necessary to establish the fact that the psychology of animals is very distinctive and
fundamentally different from ours. And it is not only distinctive but also very
varied.
Among the animals known to us, even among domestic animals, psychological
differences are so great as to put them on totally different levels. We do
not notice this
and put them all under one head - '
animals'.
A goose has put its foot on a piece of watermelon rind, pulls at it with its beak but
cannot pull it out, and it never occurs to it to lift its foot off the rind. This
means that its
mental processes are so vague that it has a very imperfect knowledge of its own body
and does not properly distinguish it from other objects. This could not happen either
with a dog or a cat. They know their bodies perfectly well. But in their relations to
outside objects a dog and a cat are very different.
I have
observed a dog, a 'very intelligent' setter. When the little rug on which he
slept got rucked up and became uncomfortable to lie on, he understood that the
discomfort was
outside him,
that it
was in the rug and, more precisely, in the position
of the rug. So he kept on worrying the rug with his teeth, twisting it and dragging it
here and there, all the while growling, sighing and groaning until someone came to his
assistance. But he could never manage to straighten out the rug by himself.
With a cat such a question could never even arise. A cat knows its body perfectly
well, but everything
outside itself
it takes for granted, as something given. To
correct
the outside world, to accommodate it to
its own comfort, would never occur to a cat.
Maybe this is so because a cat lives more in another world, the world of dreams and
fantasies, than in this one. Therefore, if there were something wrong with its bed, a cat
would itself turn and twist a hundred times until it could settle down comfortably; or it
would go and settle down in another place.
A monkey would of course spread out the rug quite easily.
Here are
four
beings, all quite different. And this is only one example of which one
could easily find hundreds. And yet for us all this is
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