He listens
to your departing footsteps. But the fence is too high. Then he
turns his back upon the direction in which you are departing, and
runs around the yard. He is frantic with affection and desire. But
he is not blind. He is observant. He is looking for a hole under
the fence, or through the fence, or for a place where the fence is
not so high. He sees a dry-goods box standing against the fence.
Presto! He leaps upon it, goes over the barrier, and tears down the
street to overtake you. Is that instinct?
Here, in the household where I am writing this, is a little Tahitian
"feeding-child." He believes firmly that a tiny dwarf resides in the
box of my talking-machine and that it is the tiny dwarf who does the
singing and the talking. Not even Mr. Burroughs will affirm that the
child has reached this conclusion by an instinctive process. Of
course, the child reasons the existence of the dwarf in the box. How
else could the box talk and sing? In that child's limited experience
it has never encountered a single instance where speech and song were
produced otherwise than by direct human agency.
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