It
is momentous; but, when closely looked into, it is not
incomprehensible. Between the talking horses and my silent dog
there is an enormous distance, but not an abyss. I am saying this
not to detract from the nature or extent of the prodigy, but to
call attention to the fact that the theory of animal intelligence
is more justifiable and less fanciful than one is at first
inclined to think.
24
But the second and greater miracle is that man should have been
able to rouse the horse from his immemorial sleep, to fix and
direct his attention and to interest him in matters that are more
foreign and indifferent to him than the variations of temperature
in Sirius or Aldebaran are to us. It really seems, when we
consider our preconceived ideas, that there is not in the animal
an organic and insurmountable inability to do what man's brain
does, a total and irremediable absence of intellectual faculties,
but rather a profound lethargy and torpor of those faculties. It
lives in a sort of undisturbed stolidity, of nebulous slumber. As
Dr. Ochorowicz very justly remarks, "its waking state is very
near akin to the state of a man walking in his sleep." Having no
notion of space or time, it spends its life, one may say, in a
perpetual dream. It does what is strictly necessary to keep
itself alive; and all the rest passes over it and does not
penetrate at all into its hermetically closed imaginings.
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