ourse of their migrations. And, having told a few more instances
of like kidney, he triumphantly demands: "Where now is your much-vaunted
reasoning of the lower animals?"

No schoolboy in a class debate could be guilty of unfairer argument. It
is equivalent to replying to the assertion that 2+2=4, by saying: "No;
because 12/4=3; I have demonstrated my honourable opponent's error."
When a man attacks your ability as a foot-racer, promptly prove to him
that he was drunk the week before last, and the average man in the crowd
of gaping listeners will believe that you have convincingly refuted the
slander on your fleetness of foot. On my honour, it will work. Try it
some time. It is done every day. Mr. Burroughs has done it himself,
and, I doubt not, pulled the sophistical wool over a great many pairs of
eyes. No, no, Mr. Burroughs; you can't disprove that animals reason by
proving that they possess instincts. But the worst of it is that you
have at the same time pulled the wool over your own eyes. You have set
up a straw man and knocked the stuffing out of him in the complacent
belief that it was the reasoning of lower animals you were knocking out
of the minds of those who disagreed with you. When the highhole
perforated the icehouse and let out the sawdust, you called him a lunatic
. . .

But let us be charitable--and serious. What Mr. Burroughs instances as
acts of instinct certainly are acts of instincts. By the same method of
logic one could easily adduce a multitude of instinctive acts on the part
of man and thereby prove that man is an unreasoning animal. But man
performs actions of both sorts. Between man and the lower animals Mr.
Burroughs finds a vast gulf. This gulf divides man from the rest of his
kin by virtue of the power of reason that he alone possesses. Man is a
voluntary agent. Animals are automatons. The robin fights its
reflection in the window-pane because it is his instinct to fight and
because he cannot reason out the physical laws that make this reflection
appear real. An animal is a mechanism that operates according to
fore-ordained rules. Wrapped up in its heredity, and determined long
before it was born, is a certain limited capacity of ganglionic response
to eternal stimuli. These responses have been fixed in the species
through adaptation to environment. Natural selection has compelled the
animal automatically to respond in a fixed manner and a certain way to
all the usual