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 that 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.
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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 mucked 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. […]
How then to explain the fact that, living in a two-dimensional world, or seeing themselves in a two-dimensional world, animals orientate perfectly well in our three-dimensional world? How to explain that a bird flies up and down, straight ahead and sideways, in all three directions; that a horse jumps fences and ditches; that a dog and a cat seem to understand the properties of depth and height together with length and breadth?
In order to explain this we must return once more to the fundamental principles of animal psychology. It has been pointed out earlier that many properties of objects, which we remember as the general properties of species and varieties, have to be remembered by animals as the individual properties of objects. In sorting out this enormous store of individual properties preserved in memory animals are helped by the emotional quality connected for them with each representation and each memory of a sensation.
An animal knows, say, two roads as two entirely separate phenomena having nothing in common; one phenomenon, i.e. one road consists of a series of definite representations coloured by definite emotional qualities; the other phenomenon, i.e. the other road, consists of a series of other definite representations, coloured by other qualities. We say that both the one and the other are roads, one leading to one place, the other to another. For the animal the two roads have nothing in common. But it remembers all the sequence of emotional qualities connected with the first road and the second road and so remembers both roads with their turnings, ditches, fences and so on.
Thus the memory of the definite properties of objects, which they have seen, helps animals to orientate in the world of phenomena. But, as a rule, when faced with new phenomena, animals are much more helpless than man.
