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What occurs or does not occur within the animal mind is, as a matter of fact, wholly hidden from us. We have no way of determining this except by analogy with ourselves, and therefore our idea of it is necessarily anthropomorphic. And apologists are undoubtedly right when they maintain that this is far too much the case. To reach a more unprejudiced attitude towards the customary anthropomorphisation of animals, it is profitable to study Wundt’s lectures on “The Human and the Animal Mind” (see especially Lecture XX.). Perhaps it is true that, notwithstanding all the much-praised cleverness, intelligence and teachableness of elephants, dogs, and chimpanzees, they are incapable of forming “general ideas,” “rules,” and “laws,” of forming judgments in the strict sense, and constructive syllogisms, that they have only associations of ideas, and expectations of similar experience, but no thinking in conceptual terms, and cannot perceive anything general or necessary, that they recognise
And the doctrine of transmigration distinctly includes plants along with animals among the future existences into which the human soul may pass. As plants, like animals, manifest phenomena of life, though to a much less conspicuous degree, it is not incomprehensible that the savage should attribute souls to them. But the primitive process of anthropomorphisation does not end here.
The remainder of the process, resulting in that systematic and complete anthropomorphisation of nature which has given rise to mythology, may be more succinctly described.
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