Reflexes, instinctive actions and 'rational' actions may be regarded as reflected, i.e. as not independent.

The first, the second and the third come not from man himself but from the external world. A man is merely a transmitting or transforming station of forces; all his actions belonging to these three categories are produced by impressions coming from the external world. In these three kinds of actions man is actually an automaton, either unaware or aware of his actions. Nothing comes from himself.

Only the highest category of actions, i.e. conscious actions (which, generally speaking, we do not observe, since we confuse them with rational actions, mainly because we call 'rational' actions conscious) - only these actions depend not only on the impressions coming from the external world, but on something else besides. But the capacity for such actions is very rarely met with and only very few people have it. These people may be defined as the HIGHER TYPE OF MAN.

Having established the difference between actions, we must now return to the question: How does the mental apparatus of an animal differ from that of a man?

Of the four categories of actions only the two lower ones are accessible to animals. The category of 'rational' actions is not accessible to them. This is proved, first of all, by the fact that animals do not speak as we do.

It was shown earlier that the possession of speech is indissolubly connected with the possession of concepts. Consequently, we may say that animals do not possess concepts.

Is this true - and is the possession of instinctive reason possible without possessing concepts?

All that we know about instinctive reason tells us that it operates while possessing only representations and sensations, and on the lower levels possessing only sensations. The mental apparatus which thinks by means of representations must be identical with instinctive reason which enables it to make that selection from among the available representations which, from outside, produces the impression of reasoning and drawing conclusions. In reality, an animal does not think out its actions, but lives by emotions, obeying the emotion which is strongest at a given moment. Although it is true that in the life of an animal there may be very acute moments, when it is faced with the necessity of making a selection from a certain series of representations. In that case, at a given moment, its actions may appear to be reasoned out. For instance, an animal, faced with danger, often acts with surprising caution and intelligence.

But in reality the actions of an animal are governed not by thoughts but mostly by emotional memory and motor representations. It has been shown earlier that emotions are expedient and, in a normal being, obedience to them should also be expedient. In an animal, every representation, every remembered image is connected with some emotional sensation and emotional recollection; there are no unemotional cold thoughts or images in the nature of an animal. Or, if there are some, they are inactive, incapable of moving it to any action.

Thus, all the actions of animals, at times very complex, expedient and seemingly rational, can be explained without assuming the existence in them of concepts, reasoning and mental conclusions.

On the contrary, we must admit that animals have no concepts. The proof of this is that they have no speech.If we take two men of different nationalities, different races, each ignorant of the language of the other, and settle them to live together, they will immediately find means of communicating with each other. One would draw with his finger a circle, the other would draw another circle alongside the first. This is enough to establish that they can understand one another. If a thick stone wall were to separate people, again it would not deter them. One would knock three times; the other would also knock three times in reply- communication is established. The idea of communication with the inhabitants of another planet is based precisely on the system of light signals. On the earth it is proposed to make an enormous luminous circle or square. It should be noticed on Mars or somewhere over there and should be answered by a similar signal.

With animals we live side by side, yet we are unable to establish such communication with them. Evidently, the distance between us is greater, the difference deeper than between people separated by ignorance of language, stone walls and enormous distances.

Another proof of the absence of concepts in an animal is its incapacity of using a lever, i.e. its incapacity of arriving independently at an understanding of the significance and the action of a lever. The usual argument that an animal does not know how to use a lever simply because its organs - paws, etc.- are not adapted for such actions, does not bear criticism, because any animal can be taught to use a lever. This means that organs have nothing to do with it. The thing is simply that by itself an animal cannot arrive at the idea of a lever.The invention of a lever at once separated primitive man from the animals and it was inseparably connected with the appearance of concepts. The mental side of understanding the action of a lever lies in the construction of a correct syllogism. Without mentally constructing a syllogism it is impossible to understand the action of a lever. Without concepts it is impossible to construct a syllogism. In the mental sphere a syllogism is literally the same thing as a lever in the physical sphere.

The application of a lever distinguishes man from the animal as drastically as does speech. If some Martian scientists were to look at the earth and study it objectively through a telescope, not hearing speech from afar nor entering into the subjective world of the inhabitants of the earth and without any contact with it, they would divide the beings living on the earth into two categories: those familiar with the action of a lever and those unfamiliar with it.

On the whole the psychology of animals is very obscure to us. The infinite number of observations made of all animals, from elephants to spiders, and the infinite number of anecdotes about the intelligence, perspicacity and moral qualities of animals change nothing in this respect. We represent animals either as living automatons or as stupid human beings.We are too shut up in the circle of our own mentality. We have no idea of any other mentality and involuntarily we think that the only kind of mentality possible is the one we possess. But this is an illusion which prevents us from understanding life. If we were able to enter into the inner world of an animal and understand how it perceives, understands and acts, we would see many extremely interesting things.

For example, if we could represent to ourselves and re-create mentally the logic of the animal, it would greatly help us to understand our own logic and the laws of our thinking. Above all we would understand the conditional and relative character of our whole idea of the world.

An animal must have a very peculiar logic. Of course, it would not be logic in the true sense of the word, for logic presupposes the existence of logos, i.e. word or concept.Our usual logic, the one we live by, without which 'the cobbler will not be able to make shoes' can be brought down to the simple scheme formulated by Aristotle in those writings which were published by his pupils under the general title of Organon, i.e. the 'Instrument' (of thought). This scheme consists in the following:

A is A.

A is not not-A.

Everything is either A or not-A.

The logic contained in this scheme - Aristotle's logic - is quite sufficient for observation. But for experiment it is insufficient, for experiment, takes place in time, whereas Aristotle's formulae do not take time into account. This was observed at the very dawn of the establishment of our experimental knowledge; it was noted by Roger Bacon and, some centuries later, was formulated by his famous namesake, Francis Bacon, in the treatise Novum Organum - 'New Instrument' (of thought). Briefly Bacon's formulation may be reduced to the following: That which was A, will be A.

That which was not-A, will be not-A.

Everything was and will be either A or not-A.

All our scientific experience is built on these formulae, whether they are taken or not taken into account by our mind. And these same formulae actually serve as a basis for making shoes, for if a cobbler could not be sure that the leather bought yesterday would be leather tomorrow, he would probably not venture to make shoes but would look for some other more secure profession.

Logical formulae, both those of Aristotle and Bacon, are simply deduced from observation of facts and embrace nothing but the contents of these facts - and can embrace nothing more. They are not laws of thinking but merely laws of the external world as it is perceived by us, or laws of our relationship to the external world.

If we were able to represent to ourselves the 'logic' of an animal, we would understand its relationship to the external world. Our chief mistake as regards the inner world of an animal lies in our ascribing to it our own logic. We think that there is only one logic, that our logic is something absolute, something existing outside us and apart from us. Yet, in actual fact, it is merely the laws of the relation of our inner life to the outside world or the laws which our mind finds in the outside world. A different mind will find different laws.

The first difference between our logic and that of an animal is that the latter is not general. It is a particular logic in every case, for every separate representation. For animals there exists no classification according to common properties, i.e. classes, varieties and species. Every single object exists by itself, all its properties are specific properties.

This house and that house are for an animal totally different objects, because the one is his house and the other an alien house. Generally speaking, we recognize objects by their similarity; an animal must recognize them by their differences. It remembers every object by the signs which have had for it the greatest emotional significance. In this form, i.e. with emotional qualities, representations are preserved in the memory of an animal. It is easy to see that it is much more difficult to preserve such representations in memory; consequently the memory of an animal is much more burdened than ours, although in the amount of knowledge and the number of things preserved in the memory an animal is far below us.

Having once seen an object, we refer it to a certain class, variety and species, attach it to one or another concept and connect it in our mind with one or another 'word', i.e. with an algebraic sign, then with another, defining it, and so on.

An animal has no concepts, it has no mental algebra with the help of which we think. It must know a given object and remember it with all its characteristics and peculiarities. Not a single forgotten characteristic will come back. But for us the main characteristics are implied in the concept with which we have connected the given object, and we can find it in our memory by any of its characteristic signs.

It is clear from this that an animal's memory is more burdened than ours and that this is precisely the main cause which hinders the mental evolution of an animal. Its mind is too occupied. It has no time to move forward. It is possible to arrest the mental development of a child by making it learn by heart series of words and series of figures. An animal is exactly in the same position. And this explains the strange fact that an animal is more intelligent when young.

In a man the peak of his intellectual power is reached at a mature age, very often even in old age; in the case of an animal it is just the reverse. It is receptive only while it is young. With maturity its development becomes arrested and in old age it undoubtedly becomes retrogressive.

The logic of an animal, if we attempt to express it in formulae similar to those of Aristotle and Bacon, would be as follows:

The animal will understand the formula A is A. It will say: I am I, and so on. But it will not understand the formula A is not not-A, for not-A is a concept. The animal will say: 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.

Later on I shall have to return to the logic of animals. For the moment it was only necessary to establish the fact that the psychology of animals is very distinctive and fundamentally different from ours. And it is not only distinctive but also very varied.

Among the animals known to us, even among domestic animals, psychological differences are so great as to put them on totally different levels. We do not notice this and put them all under one head - 'animals'.

A goose has put its foot on a piece of watermelon rind, pulls at it with its beak but cannot pull it out, and it never occurs to it to lift its foot off the rind. This means that its mental processes are so vague that it has a very imperfect knowledge of its own body and does not properly distinguish it from other objects. This could not happen either with a dog or a cat. They know their bodies perfectly well. But in their relations to outside objects a dog and a cat are very different.

I have observed a dog, a 'very intelligent' setter. When the little rug on which he slept got rucked up and became uncomfortable to lie on, he understood that the discomfort was outside him, that it was in the rug and, more precisely, in the position of the rug. So he kept on worrying the rug with his teeth, twisting it and dragging it here and there, all the while growling, sighing and groaning until someone came to his assistance. But he could never manage to straighten out the rug by himself.

With a cat such a question could never even arise. A cat knows its body perfectly well, but everything outside itself it takes for granted, as something given. To correct the outside world, to accommodate it to its own comfort, would never occur to a cat. Maybe this is so because a cat lives more in another world, the world of dreams and fantasies, than in this one. Therefore, if there were something wrong with its bed, a cat would itself turn and twist a hundred times until it could settle down comfortably; or it would go and settle down in another place.

A monkey would of course spread out the rug quite easily.

Here are four beings, all quite different. And this is only one example of which one could easily find hundreds. And yet for us all this is an animal. We mix together many things that are totally different; our divisions are very often wrong and this hinders us in our examination of ourselves.

Moreover it would be quite incorrect to assert that the differences mentioned determine 'evolutionary stages', that animals of one type are higher or lower than others. The dog and the monkey by their reason, their ability to imitate and (the dog) by his fidelity to man seem to be higher than the cat, but the cat is infinitely superior to them in its intuition, its aesthetic sense, its independence and willpower. The dog and the monkey manifest themselves in their entirety. All that there is in them can be seen. But it is not without cause that the cat is regarded as a magical and occult animal. There is much in it that is hidden, much that it does not itself know. If one is to speak in terms of evolution it would be much more correct to say that these are animals of different evolutions, just as, in all probability, not one but several evolutions go on in mankind.

-- SAR01 (rauch01@yahoo.com), April 18, 2001