If some iron filings be sprinkled on a table and a magnet brought near them, they will fly through the air for a certain distance and stick to its surface.A savage seeing the phenomenon explains it as the result of an attraction or love between the magnet and the filings.But let a card cover the poles of the magnet, and the filings will press forever against its surface without its ever occurring to them to pass around its sides and thus come into more direct contact with the object of their love.Blow bubbles through a tube into the bottom of a pail of water, they will rise to the surface and mingle with the air.
Their action may again be poetically interpreted as due to a longing to recombine with the mother-atmosphere above the surface.But if you invert a jar full of water over the pail, they will rise and remain lodged beneath its bottom, shut in from the outer air, although a slight deflection from their course at the outset, or a re-descent towards the rim of the jar, when they found their upward course impeded, could easily have set them free.
If now we pass from such actions as these to those of living things, we notice a striking difference.Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as they.But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with the card.Romeo soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling the wall or otherwise, of touching Juliet's lips directly.With the filings the path is fixed;
whether it reaches the end depends on accidents.With the lover it is the end which is fixed, the path may be modified indefinitely.
Suppose a living frog in the position in which we placed our bubbles of air, namely, at the bottom of a jar of water.The want of breath will soon make him also long to rejoin the mother-atmosphere, and he will take the shortest path to his end by swimming straight upwards.
But if a jar full of water be inverted over him, he will not, like the bubbles, perpetually press his nose against its unyielding roof, but will restlessly explore the neighborhood until by re-descending again he has discovered a path around its brim to the goal of his desires.Again the fixed end, the varying means!
Such contrasts between living and inanimate performances end by leading men to deny that in the physical world final purposes exist at all.Loves and desires are to-day no longer imputed to particles of iron or of air.No one supposes now that the end of any activity which they may display is an ideal purpose presiding over the activity from its outset and soliciting or drawing it into being by a sort of vis a fronte.The end , on the contrary, is deemed a mere passive result, pushed into being a tergo , having had, so to speak, no voice in its own production.Alter, the pre-existing conditions, and with inorganic materials you bring forth each time a different apparent end.But with intelligent agents, altering the conditions changes the activity displayed, but not the end reached; for here the idea of the yet unrealized end co-operates with the conditions to determine what the activities shall be.
The Pursuance of future ends and the choice of means for their attainment, are thus the mark and criterion of the presence of mentality in a phenomenon.We all use this test to discriminate between an intelligent and a mechanical performance.
We impute no mentality to sticks and stones, because they never seem to move for the sake of anything, but always when pushed, and then indifferently and with no sign of choice.So we unhesitatingly call them senseless.
Just so we form our decision upon the deepest of all philosophic problems: Is the Kosmos an expression of intelligence rational in its inward nature, or a brute external fact pure and simple? If we find ourselves, in contemplating it , unable to banish the impression that it is a realm of final purposes, that it exists for the sake of something, we place intelligence at tile heart of it and have a religion.If, on the contrary, in surveying its irremediable flux, we can think of the present only as so much mere mechanical sprouting from the past, occurring with no reference to the future, we are atheists and materialists.
In the lengthy discussions which psychologists have carried on about the amount of intelligence displayed by lower mammals, or the amount of consciousness involved in the functions of the nerve-centres of reptiles, the same test has always been applied:
