William J Long 1881-1946

There is this difference between a man and a rabbit; the rabbit lives in a brier patch, and his philosophy makes his little world a good place; the man lives in an excellent world, and by his philosophy generally makes it over into the worst kind of brier patch, either for himself or for his neighbours


To begin at the beginning of our peculiar differences - since your philosophers tell us that the only thing we are sure about is our own thought - there is the question, now vexing all your scientists and psychologists, as to whether or not animals think. Now rabbits find only a pleasant cud of contemplation in such a question; but with men the case is altogether different. Instead of chewing the cud of contemplation and finding some pleasant nourishment therein, they take irritably to the process which your street urchins describe as "chewing the rag" of discontent. Psychologistsl who experiment with caged monkeys contemptuously declare that there is nothing whatever between a rabbit's ears except reflex action; naturalists who can see only instinct at work in the woods and fields intimate that those who can see more are deficient either in soul or body; whereupon lovers of dogs and pets rise up indignantly to assert they know their particular animals think, because they have seen them do many things which it would be quite impossible for men to do without thinking. So, instead of philosophy which considers all things and holds fast what is good, there is a veritable bullbrier thicket growing up wild among you.

Whimsically enough, while you are asking the question, Do animals think? The French biologists are repeating the same question concerning yourselves. They hold, with some show of reasonableness, that what you call thinking is only a matter of cell changes, and that all your boasted psychology will presently be a small department of physiological chemistry. You do not think; you are simply the victim of reactions; therefore why should you ask such an absurd question concerning other animals? So the Rabbit finds a grain of humour, as well as philosophy, in the situation.

Now while the rabbit's knowledge of animals leads him to the opinion that, in a twilight kind of way, they do think and reason, the object of the present meditation is not to establish the proposition. First, like Descartes and Hume and other animals, the Rabbit knows surely only what goes on in his own head, and all knowledge of what goes on in other creatures' heads is purely an inference from their actions. The Rabbit has seen your men at a political ratification-meeting, and your women wildly enthusiastic over a queer genius making awful sounds on a piano; and mercifully he suspends his judgment. If he were to judge you, en masse, as you judge animals, by the political meeting, or the concert, or a baby show, or a panic, or a crowd in the subway, he would declare instantly with the French biologists that men do not think, that they are victims of somewhat hysterical reactions. So, since we must infer the mental processes of animals from their individual actions, we must first watch them without prejudice, to see what they do, before reaching our conclusion. We must read the numerous records of those naturalists who study, not cages monkeys, but the wild animals that earn their own living, whose wits are sharpened by daily experience amid dangers; and it might be well also to sift the enormous number of observations which have not yet found their way into the books, and which point steadily to a kind of elementary reasoning among the lower orders.