Animal cognition

“[T]here is every reason to believe that we were gregarious animals before we became men... And a belief in the eject—some sort of recognition of a kindred consciousness in one's fellow beings—is clearly a condition of gregarious action among animals so highly developed as to be called conscious at all.”

“It may not be logical, but to my imagination, it is far more satisfactory to look at the young cuckoo ejecting its foster-brothers, ants making slaves, the larvæ of the Ichneumidæ feeding within the live bodies of their prey, cats playing with mice, otters and cormorants with living fish, not as instincts specially given by the Creator, but as very small parts of one general law leading to the advancement of all organic bodies —Multiply, Vary, let the strongest Live and the weakest Die.”

“Among animals, some learn to speak and sing; they remember tunes, and strike the notes as exactly as a musician. Others, for instance the ape, show more intelligence, and yet can not learn music. What is the reason for this... would it be absolutely impossible to teach the ape a language? I do not think so.”

“In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale.”

“[W]e must steadily bear in mind the sense in which the term "reasoning" is employed. If we apply this term to the process by which an animal, profiting by experience, adapts his actions to somewhat varying circumstances, there can be no hesitation whatever in giving an affirmative answer to the question. ...But there are no grounds for supposing that in the chicken or the horse there is any development of analysis.”

“The statements about human nature made by psychologists are of two sorts,—statements about consciousness, about the inner life of thought and feeling, the 'self as conscious,' the 'stream of thought'; and statements about behavior, about the life of man that is left unexplained by physics, chemistry, anatomy and physiology, and is roughly compassed for common sense by the terms 'intellect' and 'character.'Animal psychology shows the same double content.”