serve that this emotion becomes purer
and more refined, until, in some of the higher animals, such as the
monkey and the dog, it can hardly be distinguished from the parental
affection of certain savages, who leave their children to shift for
themselves as soon as they are "tall enough to look into the pot"; or,
until, as Reclus declares of Apache babies, "they can pluck certain
fruit by themselves, and have caught a rat by their own unaided efforts.
After this exploit they go and come as they list."[76]

[76] Reclus, _Primitive Folk_, p. 131.

We have seen in previous chapters that the lower animals possess one or
all of the five senses,--sight, smell, taste, hearing, and touch,--that
they evince conscious determination; that they possess memory and
clearly indicate that the emotions, in the majority of them at least,
are highly developed; that they likewise give evidence of aestheticism
both inherited and acquired; and, finally, that they show, unmistakably,
that they have acquired, to a certain extent, that most refined of all
acquired feeling--parental affection. Now, taking these facts into
consideration, it would be reasonable to suppose that creatures so
highly endowed psychically would present evidences of ratiocination.

That many of the lower animals do present such evidences is a fact
beyond dispute, as I will endeavor to show in the following chapter.

CHAPTER VII

REASON

The simplest and truest definition of reason is, I take it, the
intelligent correlation of ideation and action for definite purposes
not instinctive. The casual observer and a very large majority of the
creationists deny the presence of reason in the lower animals, and group
all psychical manifestations that are to be observed in animals lower
than man under the head of instinct, forgetting that almost every
instinctive habit must have been, in the beginning, necessarily the
result of conscious determination.

Instinct is, in a certain sense, a process of ratiocination, though its
immediate operations may not be due to reason. Instinct involves mental
operations; if it did not, it would be simply reflex action. It is
heredity under a special name; the father transmits his mental
peculiarities as well as his corporeal individualities to his offspring.
The experiences of thousands of years leave their imprint on the
succeeding generations, until deductions and conclusions drawn from these
experiences no longer require any s