Is it not experience
which renders a dog apprehensive of pain when you menace him, or
lift up the whip to beat him? Is it not even experience which makes
him answer to his name, and infer from such an arbitrary sound that
you mean him rather than any of his fellows, and intend to call
him, when you pronounce it in a certain manner and with a certain
tone and accent?
"In all these cases we may observe that the animal infers some fact
beyond what immediately strikes his senses; and that this inference
is altogether founded on past experience, while the creature
expects from the present object the same consequences which it has
always found in its observation to result from similar objects.
"_Secondly_, it is impossible that this inference of the animal can
be founded on any process of argument or reasoning, by which he
concludes that like events must follow like objects, and that the
course of nature will always be regular in its operations. For if
there be in reality any arguments of this nature they surely lie
too abstruse for the observation of such imperfect understandings;
since it may well employ the utmost care and attention of a
philosophic genius to discover and observe them. Animals therefore
are not guided in these inferences by reasoning; neither are
children; neither are the generality of mankind in their ordinary
actions and conclusions; neither are philosophers themselves, who,
in all the active parts of life, are in the main the same as the
vulgar, and are governed by the same maxims.
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