ABSTRACT
The attainment of free ideas marks our escape from the mind of the animal. We have seen that the animal mind does break through at times into thought of the absent, but this achievement is so uncontrollable, rare, and wavering, as hardly to affect the rule. The animal lives in a world of perception; its thought on the whole is sense-bound; it expressly recalls no past and expressly anticipates no future. Its senses may be refined in the extreme, and its emotions strong and various; its confinement to the perceptive world is quite compatible, as we have seen, with a kind of judgement, desire, and inference. Yet its constant preoccupation is with what is given at the moment in sense, and these processes are only a fringe to that. Even when a dog pines away in his master's absence, it is apparently the present absence rather than the absent presence that affects him. It is not churlishness that makes us say this, but merely the requirement of a consistent view of him, since if his mind could really play upon the absent, he would be able to scheme and plan in a way that he never does. We are forced to believe that his world is of far smaller dimensions than ours. Our thought, with all its weaknesses, can at least range afield in space and time; his thought remains tethered to sense.
