THE LOGIC OF ANIMALS

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mental evolution of an animal. Its mind is too busy. It has no time to develop. The mental development of a child may be arrested by making it memorize a series of words or a series of figures. The animal is in just such a position. Herein lies the explanation of the strange fact that an animal is wiser when it is young.

In man the flower of intellectual force blooms at a mature age, often even in senility; in the animal, quite the reverse is true. It is receptive only while it is young. At maturity its development stops, and in old age it undoubtedly degenerates.

The logic of animals, were we to attempt to express it by means of formulæ similar to those employed by Aristotle and Bacon would be as follows:

The formula A is A, the animal will understand. It will say (as it were) I am I, etc.; but the formula, A is not Not-A, it will be incapable of understanding. Not Not-A is indeed the concept. The animal will reason thus:

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.

I shall be obliged to return to the logic of animals later on; for the present it is only necessary to establish the fact that the psychology of animals is peculiar, and differs in a fundamental way from our own. And not only is it peculiar, but it is decidedly manifold.

Among the animals known to us, even among domestic animals, the psychological differences are so great as to differentiate them into entirely separate planes. We ignore this, and place them all under a single rubric "animals."

A goose, having entangled its foot in a piece of watermelon rind, drags it along by the web and thus cannot get it out, but it never thinks of raising its foot. This indicates that its mind is so vague

that it does not know its own body, scarcely distinguishing between it and other objects. This would happen neither with a dog nor with a cat. They know their bodies very well. But in relation to outside objects the dog and the cat differ widely. I have observed a dog, a "very intelligent" setter. When the little rug on which he slept got folded and was uncomfortable to sleep on, he understood that the nuisance was outside of him, that it was in the rug, and in a certain definite position of the rug. Therefore he caught the rug in his teeth, turned it and pushed it here and there, the while growling, sighing, and moaning until some one came to his aid, for he was never able to rectify the difficulty.

With the cat such a question could not even appear. The cat knows her body very well, but everything outside of herself she takes as her due, as given. To correct the outside world, to accommodate it to her own comfort, never comes into the cat's head. Perhaps this is because she lives more in another world, in the world of dreams and fantasies, than in this. Accordingly, if there were something wrong with her bed the cat would turn herself about repeatedly until she could lie down comfortably, or she would go and lie in another place.

The monkey would spread the rug very easily indeed.

Here we have four beings, all quite different; and this is only one example: it would be possible to collect others by the hundred. And meanwhile there is for us just one "animal." We mix together many things that are entirely different; our "divisions" are often incorrect, and this hinders us when it comes to the examination of ourselves. To declare that manifest differences determine the "evolutionary grade," that animals of one type are "higher" or "lower" than those of another, would be entirely false. The dog and the monkey by their intellect, their aptness to imitate, and by reason of the dog's fidelity to man, are as it were higher than the cat, but the cat is infinitely superior to them in intuition, esthetic sense, independence, and force of will. The dog and the monkey manifest themselves in toto: all that they have is seen. The cat, on the other hand, is not without reason regarded as a magical and occult animal. In her there is much hidden of which she herself does not know. If one speaks in terms of evolution, it is more correct to say that the cat and the dog are animals of different evolutions, just as in all

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NOT ONE BUT SEVERAL EVOLUTIONS probability, not one, but several evolutions are simultaneously going forward in humanity.

The recognition of several independent and from one standpoint equivalent evolutions, developing entirely different properties, would lead us out of a labyrinth of endless contradictions in our understanding of man and would show us the path to the only real and important evolution for us the evolution into superman.

CHAPTER IX

The receptivity of the world by a man and by an animal. Illusions of the animal and its lack of control of the receptive faculties. The world of moving planes. Angles and curves considered as motion. The third dimension as motion. The animal's two-dimensional view of our three-dimensional world. The animal as a real two-dimensional being. Lower animals as one-dimensional beings. The time and space of a snail. The time-sense as an imperfect space-sense. The time and space of a dog. The change in the world coincident with a change in the psychic apparatus. The proof of Kant's problem. The three-dimensional world—an illusionary perception.

W

E have established the enormous difference existing between the psychology of a man and of an animal. This difference undoubtedly profoundly affects the receptivity of the outer world by the animal. But how and in what? This is exactly what we do not know, and what we shall try to dis

cover.

To this end we shall return to our receptivity of the world, investigate in detail the nature of that receptivity, and then imagine how the animal, with its more limited psychic equipment, receives its impression of the world.

Let us note first of all that we receive the most incorrect impressions of the world as regards its outer form and aspect. We know that the world consists of solids, but we see and touch only surfaces. We never see and touch a solid. The solid—this is indeed a concept, composed of a series of perceptions, the result of reasoning and experience. For immediate sensation, surfaces alone exist. Sensations of gravity, mass, volume, which we mentally associate with the "solid," are in reality associated with the sensations of sur faces. We only know that the sensation comes from the solid, but the solid itself we never sense. Perhaps it would be possible to call the complex sensation of surfaces: weight, mass, density, resistance, "the sensation of a solid," but rather do we combine mentally all these sensations into one, and call that composite sensation a solid. We sense directly only surfaces; the weight and resistance of the solid, as such, we never separately sense.

SIGHT A COMPLEX FACULTY

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But we know that the world does not consist of surfaces: we know that we see the world incorrectly, and that we never see it as it is, not alone in the philosophical meaning of the expression, but in the most simple geometrical meaning. We have never seen a cube, a sphere, etc., but only their surfaces. Knowing this, we mentally correct that which we see. Behind the surfaces we think the solid. But we can never even represent the solid to ourselves. We cannot imagine the cube or the sphere seen, not in perspective, but simultaneously from all sides.

It is clear that the world does not exist in perspective; nevertheless we cannot see it otherwise. We see everything only in perspective; that is, in the very act of receptivity the world is distorted in our eye, and we know that it is distorted. We know that it is not such as it appears, and mentally we are continuously correcting that which the eye sees, substituting the real content for those symbols of things which sight reveals.

Our sight is a complex faculty. It consists of visual sensations plus the memory of sensations of touch. The child tries to feel with its finger-tips everything that it sees—the nose of its nurse, the moon, the reflection of sun rays from the mirror on the wall. Only gradually does it learn to discern the near and the distant by means of sight alone. But we know that even in mature age we are easily subject to optical illusions.

We see distant objects as flat, even more incorrectly, because relief is after all a symbol revealing a certain property of objects. A man at a long distance is pictured to us in silhouette. This hap: pens because we never feel anything at a long distance, and the eye has not been taught to discern the difference in surfaces which at short distances are felt by the finger-tips.*

*In this connection, there have been some interesting observations made upon the blind who are just beginning to see.

In the magazine Slepetz (The Blind, 1912) there is a description from direct observation of how those born blind learn to see after the operation which restored their sight.

This is how a seventeen-year-old youth, who recovered his sight after the removal of a cataract, describes his impressions. On the third day after the operation he was asked what he saw. He answered that he saw an enormous field of light and misty objects moving upon it. These objects he did not discern. Only after four days did he begin to discern them, and after an interval of two weeks, when his eyes were accustomed to the light, he started to use his sight practically, for the discernment of objects. He was shown all the colors of the spectrum and he learned to distinguish them very soon, except yellow and green, which he confused for 0 long time. The cube, sphere and pyr