tomorrow, he would probably not venture to make shoes but would look for
some other more secure profession.
Logical formulae, both those of Aristotle and Bacon,
are simply deduced
from observation of facts and embrace nothing but the contents of these facts
- and can embrace nothing more. They are not laws of
thinking
but merely
laws of the external world as it is perceived by us, or laws of our relationship
to the external world.
If we were able to represent to ourselves the 'logic' of an animal, we would
understand its relationship to the external world. Our
chief mistake as regards
the inner world of an animal lies in our ascribing to it our own logic. We
think that
there is only one logic,
that our logic is something absolute,
something existing outside us and apart from us. Yet, in actual fact, it is
merely the laws of the relation of our inner life to the outside world or the
laws which our mind finds in the outside world. A different mind will find
different laws.
The first difference between our logic and that of an animal is that the latter is
not
general.
It is a
particular logic in every case, for every separate
representation. For animals there exists no classification according to
common properties, i.e. classes, varieties and species. Every single object
exists by itself, all its properties are specific properties.
This
house and
that
house are for an animal totally different objects,
because the one is
his
house and the other an
alien
house. Generally speaking,
we recognize objects
by their similarity; an animal must recognize them by
their differences. It remembers every object by the signs which have had for it
the greatest emotional significance. In this form, i.e. with emotional qualities,
representations are preserved in the memory of an animal. It is easy to see
that it is much more difficult to preserve
such representations in memory;
consequently the memory of an animal is much more burdened than ours,
although in the amount of knowledge and the number of things preserved in
the memory an animal is far below us.
Having once seen an object, we refer it to a certain class, variety and
species, attach it to one or another concept and connect it in our mind with
one or another 'word', i.e. with an algebraic sign, then with another, defining
it, and so on.
An animal has
no concepts, it has no mental algebra with the help of which
we think. It must know
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