John Burroughs

“ I do not agree with those who urge that an animal, such as the beaver, for instance, gives proof of its gift of reason when it amputates its leg in order to escape from a trap. I dissent from it for several reasons. Animals apparently much lower in the scale of intelligence than the beaver, such as the musk-rat and the skunk, will do the same thing; and animals much higher, such as the dog, the fox, the wolf, will not do it. Indeed it has been found that an all but brainless animal, like the star-fish, will do it. ”

“ We are often glad in our sleep, but do we ever dream of laughing? Reason slumbers at such times, and we have no perception of incongruities.
Our anger, our joy, our sex-love, our selfishness, our cruelty, are of animal origin; but our sense of the ludicrous, which is the basis of our wit and humor, our hope, our faith, our feeling of reverence, of altruism, of worship, arc above the animal sphere, as is the faculty of reason. ”

“ Her delays, her failures, her trials, are like those of a blind man who seeks to reach a particular point in an unknown landscape; if his strength holds out, he will finally reach it. Nature's strength always holds out; she reaches her goal because she leaves no direction untried.
She felt her way to man through countless forms, through countless geological ages. If the development of man was possible at the outset, evolution was bound to fetch him in time ”

“ A certain regular, absolutely regular, routine must be kept up till the habit is formed of doing the trick. The animal does not learn the trick in a sense that implies the exercise of free intelligence: it is shaped to it as literally as the root of a tree shapes itself to a rock; or, we may say, it is trained as we train a tree against a wall.
Animal intelligence is like the figures and designs made in a casting; it is not acquired or much changed by experience, while human intelligence is slowly developed through man's educative capacity. ”

“ Nature endows him with reason, and then challenges it at every turn. She puts a weapon into his hand that she has given to no other animal, and then confronts him with foes such as no other animal knows. ”

“ Man is the only inventive and tool-using animal, because he alone has the faculty of reason, and can see the end of a thing before the beginning. With his mind's eye he sees a world hidden from the lower orders. ”

“ See the caged animal try to escape, or the tethered one try to break its tether,—how long the struggle continues! A rational being would quickly be convinced, and would desist. But instinct is automatic, and the reaction continues. When the animal ceases its struggles, it is not as the result of a process of ratiocination,—'this cage or this chain is stronger than I am, therefore I cannot escape,'—but because the force of instinct has spent itself. Man, too, is more or less the creature of habit, but the lower animals are almost entirely so. ”

“ The animal mind seems more like the mind we see manifested in the operations of outward nature, than like our own. The mind we see active in outward nature—if it is mind—is so unlike our own, that when we seek to describe it in terms of our own, ascribing to it design, plan, purpose, invention, rationality, etc., we are accused of anthropomorphism, and science will not listen to us. Yet all we know of laws and principles, of cause and effect, of mechanics and dynamics, of chemistry and evolution, etc., we learn from this outward nature. ”

“ Animal behavior, as I have said, is much more like the behavior of natural forces than is that of man: the animal goes along with nature, borne along by her currents, while the mind of man crosses and confronts nature, thwarts her, uses her, or turns her back upon herself. During the vast eons while the earth was peopled by the lower orders alone, nature went her way. But when this new animal, man, appeared, in due time nature began to go his way, to own him as master. ”

“ The animal is a creature of habits inherited and acquired, in a sense that man is not; certain things may be stamped into the animal's mind, and certain things may be stamped out; we can train it into the formation of new habits, but we cannot educate or develop its mind as we can that of a child, so that it will know the why and the wherefore. It does the trick or the task because we have shaped its mind to the particular pattern; we have stamped in this idea, which is not an idea to the animal but an involuntary impulse. ”

“ Hence, I infer that the beaver, caught in a trap, does not reason about it, and 'reach the conclusion that he must inflict upon himself the pain of amputating his foot.' He only shows the promptings of a very old and universal instinct, the instinct of self-preservation.
Every creature, little and big, that has powers of locomotion, struggles against that which would forcibly hold it, or which opposes it. A cricket or a grasshopper will leave a leg in your hand in order to escape. Try forcibly to retain the paw of your dog, or your cat, and see how it will struggle to be free. ”

“ The mechanism called instinct gave place slowly to the psychic principle of reason and free will. Trouble began with the new gift. This was the real fall of man, a fall from a state of animal innocence and non-self-consciousness to a state of error and struggle—thenceforth man knew good from evil, and was driven out of the paradise of animal innocency. Reason opened the door to error, and in the same moment it opened the door to progress. If failure became possible, success also became possible. The animal with his instincts was doomed to a ceaseless round of unprogressive life ”

“ The animals are so wise in their own way, such a success, without thought, yet so provocative of thought in us! They are rational without reason, and wise without understanding. They communicate without language, and subsist without forethought. ”

“ In the anthropoid apes, in the dog, in the elephant, and maybe occasionally in some others, there do seem to be at times the rudiments of free intelligence, something like mind emancipated from the bondage of organization or inherited habit.
When an animal acts in obedience to its purely physical needs and according to its anatomical structure, as when ducks take to the water, or hens scratch, or hogs root, or woodpeckers drill, etc., we do not credit it with powers of thought. ”

“ But I would no sooner think that such behavior on the part of the bear was the result of a reasoning process a knowledge of the force of gravity than I would attribute reason to a tree because it tries to assume the perpendicular, or to clouds because they soar aloft in order to let down the rain. The bear is doing his best to get his paw out of the jaws of the trap, and in his blind fury and desperation he climbs a tree and tries to detach the trap there, but only succeeds in getting it fast, when, as a matter of course, he drops down and pulls out. ”

“ The price the lower animals pay for unerring instinct is the loss of progress; the price man pays for his erring reason is the chance of failure.
Man's mastery over nature has made him the victim of scores of diseases not known to the animals below him. ”

“ I am not aware that any animal in the least degree confronts nature in this way—cuts its paths through her, and arbitrarily shapes her. Probably the nearest approach to it is among the insects, such as the balloon-spiders, the agricultural ants, etc. In some parts of the country one might think that the cow was a landscape gardener, from the pretty cone-shaped forms that she carves out of the wild-apple and thorn trees, but she does this quite unwittingly through her taste for the young shoots of these trees. ”

“ The incongruous only strikes them as something strange, and excites their suspicion or their fears. When one day I suddenly appeared before my dog in a suit of khaki, a garb in which he had never before seen me, did it excite his mirth, as it did that of some of my neighbors? ”

“ What they seem to acquire is not free intelligence that they can apply to other problems. We have not enlarged their minds, but have shaped their impulses to a new pattern. They are no wiser, but they are more apt. They do a human stunt, but they do not think human thoughts. ”

“ Through our gift of reason we draw out and formulate, or translate into our mental concepts, nature's method of procedure. Shall we say, then, that nature is rational without reason? wise without counsel? that she builds without rule, and dispenses without plan? ”

“ There are hints of this gift in the lower orders, hints of reason, of language, of tool-using, and the like, but hints only.
The cries and calls of animals must have preceded human speech, but who can measure the gulf between them? Man must have had animal emotions—fear, hunger, joy, love, hate—long before he had ideas. ”

“ We ourselves are often happy without thought, scared without reason, angry without volition, and act from spontaneous impulse. I suppose that if man were not a reasonable being he would never laugh, because it is the perception of some sort of incongruity that makes us laugh, though we may not be conscious of it.
Animals never laugh, and probably never experience in any degree the emotion that makes us laugh, because their minds do not perceive incongruities. Such perception is an intellectual act that is beyond them. ”

“ That which exists in the mind of man as mental concepts, free ideas, exists in the mind of the animal as innate tendency to do certain things. The bird has an impulse to build its nest, not any free or abstract ideas about nest-building; probably the building is not preceded or attended by any mental processes whatever, but by an awakening instinct, an inherited impulse.
A man can be reached and moved or influenced through his mind, an animal can be reached and moved only through its senses. ”

“ Nature exacts her fee, but the service is more than worth it. Otherwise man would not be here. Unless man had been driven out of Paradise, what would he have come to? The lower orders are still in the Garden of Eden; they know not good from evil; but man's evolution has brought him out of the state of innocence and dependence, and he is supreme in the world. ”

“ It is evident that nature knows not our wisdom or economics, our prudence, our benevolence, our methods, our science. These things are the result of our reaction to the stimulus she affords, just as the sensation we call light is our reaction to certain vibrations, the sensation we call sound is the reaction to other kinds of vibrations, and the sensation we call heat, the reaction to still other. The mind, the reason, is in us ”

“ An animal's use of signals—warning signals and recognition signals, if this is the true significance of some of their markings is as unwitting as the flower's use of its perfume or its colors to attract insects. The deer flashes its shield to its foe as well as to its fellow. ”

“ If her arch falls, a stronger arch may be formed by its ruins; if her worlds collide, other worlds may be born of the collision; if one species perishes, other species may take its place; always if her 'bark sinks, 't is to another sea.' She is all in all, and all the parts are hers. ”

“ When the lower animals laugh I shall believe they have the faculty of reason also. Think how long man must have lived before he became a laughing animal—before he was sufficiently developed mentally to take note of incongruities, or for this or that object or incident to excite his mirth instead of his fear! ”

“ We can train animals to do wonderful things, but we cannot develop in them, or graft upon them, this capacity for intellectual improvement, to grasp and wield and store up ideas. Man's effect on trained animals is like the effect of a magnet on a piece of steel: for the moment he imparts some of his own powers to them, and holds them up to the ideal plane, but they are not permanently intellectualized ”

“ His blind animal intelligence became conscious human intelligence. It was a metamorphosis, as strictly so as anything in nature. In man, for the first time, an animal turned around and looked upon itself and considered its relations to the forces outside of self. ”

“ One of the best illustrations I ever had of the difference between animal and human behavior under like conditions, was afforded me one May day in the woods, when I unwittingly pulled down the stub of a small tree in which a pair of bluebirds had a nest and young. Now, if a man were to come home and find his house gone, and only empty space where it had stood, he would not go up to the place where the door had been and try repeatedly to find the entrance. ”

“ When the wood-mice got into my cabin the other day and opened two small glass jars of butter that had loose tin tops, I did not credit them with anything like human intelligence, because to use their paws deftly—digging, climbing, manipulating—is natural to mice. ”

“ He gives caress for caress. Then he is that light-hearted, irresponsible vagabond that so many of us half-consciously long to be if we could and dared. To a dog, a walk is the best of good fortunes; he sniff's adventure at every turn, is sure something thrilling will happen around the next bend in the path. ”

“ The reason of man, no matter how slow it may have been in finding itself, was a new thing in the world, apparently not contemplated by nature's plan, as, in a sense, it is at war with that plan, and a reversal of it. ”

“ The trees ripen their fruits and their nuts whether there is any creature to feed upon them, or any room to plant them or not. Nature's purpose (more anthropomorphism) embraces them all, she covers the full circle, she does not need to discriminate and husband her resources as we do. ”