o omniscient,
all-powerful Instinct! When one of the lower animals evinces unusual
intelligence, or gives unmistakable evidences of reason, they account
for it by saying that "it is only instinct highly specialized, or, at
least, a so-called 'intelligent' accident."

So far from being "intelligent accidents" are the ratiocinative acts of
some of the lower animals (that is, lower than man), that I think that
it can be demonstrated analogically that some of these acts are incited
by one of the highest qualities of the mind--abstraction.

I do not mean that abstraction which renders the civilized human being
so immeasurably superior to all other animals, but rather that primal,
fundamental abstraction from which the highly specialized function of
man has been developed. The faculty of computing in animals is one
evidence of the presence of this psychical trait in its crude and
undeveloped state. The quality of abstraction in such ideation is not
very high, it is true, yet it _is_ abstraction, nevertheless.

Man possesses two kinds of consciousness--an active, vigilant,
cooerdinating consciousness (the seat of which is, probably, in the
cortical portion of the brain) and the passive, pseudo-dormant, and, to
a certain extent, incoherent and non-cooerdinating consciousness (the
so-called sub-liminal consciousness) whose seat is in the great ganglia
at the base of the brain (_optic thalami_ and _corpora striata_), and in
other ganglia situated in the spinal cord and elsewhere in the body. My
fox terrier has a brain which, in all essential details, does not differ
from that of man, and my observations teach me that his mind is the same
in kind as that of man as far as memory, emotions, and reason are
concerned; then why deny him the possession of abstraction in some
degree? I do not mean that abstraction which enables a man to soar into
realms of thought infinitely above any effort of ideation to be attained
by any of the lower animals, but abstraction in its embryonic state. I
am convinced, by actual experimentation, that this dog falls into "brown
studies" just as man does; may he not then claim one kind of
abstraction, if not another?

The elephant, unquestionably, is able to formulate abstract ideas, the
quality of which is very high, indeed. Jenkins wrote to Romanes as
follows:--

"What I particularly wish to observe is that there are good reasons for
supposing that elephants possess abstract ideas; for instance, I th