Chapter VIII (part 9)

This was observed at the very dawn of the establishment of our experimental science—observed by Roger Bacon, and formulated several centuries later by his famous namesake, Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, in the treatise Novum Organum —the "New Instrument" (of thought). Briefly, the formulation of Bacon may be reduced to the following: That which was A, will be A . That which was Not-A, will be Not-A . Everything was and will be, either A or Not-A . Upon these formula, acknowledged or unacknowledged, all our scientific experience is built, and upon them, too, is shoe-making founded, because if a shoemaker could not be sure that the leather bought yesterday would be leather tomorrow, in all probability he would not venture to make a pair of shoes, but would find some other more profitable employment. The formulæ of logic, such as those both of Aristotle and of Bacon, are themselves deduced from the observation of facts, and do not and cannot include anything except the contents of these facts. They are not the laws of reasoning , but the laws of the outer world as it is perceived by us, or the laws of our relation to the outer world. Could we represent to ourselves the "logic" of an animal we should understand its relation to the outer world. Our cardinal error concerning the psychology of animals consists in the fact that p. 94 we ascribe to them our own logic. We assume that logic is one , that our logic is something absolute, existing outside and independent of us, while as a matter of fact, logic but formulates the laws of the relations of our psyche to the outside world, or the laws which our psyche discovers in the outside world. Another psyche will discover other laws. ______ The logic of animals will differ from ours, first of all, from the fact that it will not be general . It will exist separately for each case, for each perception. Common properties, class properties, and the generic and specific signs of categories will not exist for animals. Each object will exist in and by itself, and all its properties will be the specific properties of it alone. This house and that house are entirely different objects for an animal, because one is its house and the other is a strange house. Generally speaking, we recognize objects by the signs of their similarity; the animal must recognize them by the signs of their difference. It remembers each object by that sign which had for it the greatest emotional meaning. In such a manner, i.e., by their emotional tones, perceptions are stored in the memory of an animal. It is clear that such perceptions are much more difficult to store up in the memory, and therefore the memory of an animal is more burdened than ours, although in the amount of knowledge and in the quantity of that which is preserved in the memory, it stands far below us. After seeing an object once, we refer it to a certain class, genus and species, place it under this or that concept, and fix it in the mind by means of some "word," i.e., algebraical symbol; then by another, defining it, and so on. The animal has no concepts: it has not that mental algebra by the help of which we think. It must know always a given object , and must remember it with all its signs and peculiarities. No forgotten sign will return. For us, on the other hand, the principal signs are contained in the concept with which we have correlated that object, and we can find it in our memory by means of the sign for it. From this it is clear that the memory of an animal is more burdened than ours, and this is the principal hindering cause to the p. 95 mental evolution of an animal. Its mind is too busy . It has no time to develop.