not think about the great lights upon the coast that blaze out
with a fatal fascination in their midnight paths. If they had
independent powers of thought, they would avoid them. But the
lighthouse is comparatively a new thing in the life of birds, and
instinct has not yet taught them to avoid it. To adapt means to an end
is an act of intelligence, but that intelligence may be inborn and
instinctive as in the animals, or it may be acquired and therefore
rational as in man.

"Surely," said a woman to me, "when a cat sits watching at a
mouse-hole, she has some image in her mind of the mouse in its hole?"
Not in any such sense as we have when we think of the same subject.
The cat has either seen the mouse go into the hole, or else she smells
him; she knows he is there through her senses, and she reacts to that
impression. Her instinct prompts her to hunt and to catch mice; she
doesn't need to think about them as we do about the game we hunt;
Nature has done that for her in the shape of an inborn impulse that is
awakened by the sight or smell of mice. We have no ready way to
describe her act as she sits intently by the hole but to say, "The cat
thinks there is a mouse there," while she is not thinking at all, but
simply watching, prompted to it by her inborn instinct for mice.

The cow's mouth will water at the sight of her food when she is
hungry. Is she thinking about it? No more than you are when your mouth
waters as your full dinner-plate is set down before you. Certain
desires and appetites are aroused through sight and smell without any
mental cognition. The sexual relations of the animals also illustrate
this fact.

We know that the animals do not think in any proper sense as we do, or
have concepts and ideas, because they have no language. To be sure, a
deaf mute thinks without language because a human being has the
intelligence which language implies, or which was begotten in his
ancestors by its use through long ages. Not so with the lower animals.
They are like very young children in this respect; they have
impressions, perceptions, emotions, but not ideas. The child
perceives things, discriminates things, knows its mother from a
stranger, is angry, or glad, or afraid, long before it has any
language or any proper concepts. Animals know only through their
senses, and this "knowledge is restricted to things present in time
and space." Reflection, or a return upon themselves in thought, of
this they are not ca