Is it not experience
which renders a dog apprehensive of pain, when you menace him, or lift
up the whip to beat him? Is is 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.
84. 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 with the vulgar,
and are governed by the same maxims.
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