It is indeed still not infrequently the custom to deny absolutely to the
lower animals reason and religion. An unprejudiced comparison, however,
convinces us that this is wrong. The slow and gradual process towards
completeness which, in the course of thousands of years, civilised life
has been working in the soul of man, has not passed away without leaving
some trace on the soul of our highest domestic animals also (above all,
of dogs and horses). Constant association with man, and the steady
influence of his training, have gradually, and by heredity, developed in
their brain higher associations of ideas and a more perfect judgment.
Drill has become instinct, an undeniable example of "the transmission of
acquired characters."[4]

Comparative psychology teaches us to recognise a very long series of
successive steps in the development of soul in the animal kingdom. But it
is only in the most highly developed vertebrates-birds and mammals--that
we discern the first beginnings of reason, the first traces of religious
and ethical conduct. In them we find not only the social virtues common
to all the higher socially-living animals,--neighbourly love, friendship,
fidelity, self-sacrifice, etc.,--but also consciousness, sense of duty,
and conscience; in relation to man their lord, the same obedience, the
same submissiveness, and the same craving for protection, which primitive
man in his turn shows towards his "gods." But in him, as in them, there
is yet wanting that higher degree of consciousness and of reason, which
strives after a _knowledge_ of the surrounding world, and which marks the
first beginning of philosophy or "wisdom." This last is the much later
attainment of civilised races; slowly and gradually has it been built up
from lower religious conceptions.

At all stages of primitive religion and early philosophy, man is as yet