Mind or Instinct: An Inquiry Concerning the Manifestation of Mind by the Lower Orders of Animals
"Mind or Instinct: An Inquiry Concerning the Manifestation of Mind by the Lower Orders of Animals" is an 1843 essay by American anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan arguing that humans and other animals share the same intellectual principle, differing only in degree. Drawing on his rural upbringing, classical studies, and interest in natural history, Morgan published the essay under the pseudonym "Aquarius" in The Knickerbocker. It addresses issues in comparative psychology and the philosophy of mind, challenging the prevailing view that animal behaviour is guided by instinct alone. Morgan discusses animal memory, abstraction, imagination, and reasoning, using examples from natural history, anecdotal reports, and classical authorities, and concludes with reflections on the ethical treatment of animals.
Although it attracted little attention at the time, scholars have since described it as an early indication of Morgan's intellectual development and compared it with the early writings of Charles Darwin in the wider nineteenth-century debate about animal intelligence.
Background
was born in 1818 on a farm near Aurora, New York. He studied classics at Cayuga Academy and then at Union College before returning to Aurora to read law. Alongside his legal training he developed wide interests in classics, natural history, geology, and social reform, and delivered public lectures on subjects ranging from temperance to ancient Greece. He was admitted to the New York bar in 1842.At 25, Morgan wrote "Mind or Instinct", one of his earliest published works. Conceived as an effort to show that animals adjust to their environments through thought rather than mere instinct, the essay drew on Buffon's Natural History, farmers' almanacs, and neighbors' anecdotes to assemble examples of animals exhibiting memory, judgment, and deliberation.
Signed "Aquarius. October 1843", it was published in two parts in the November and December 1843 issues of The Knickerbocker, a New York literary magazine.
Content
Both parts of the essay open with the same lines from William Cowper's poem The Task, described by Gillian Feeley-Harnik as "verse in praise of animals":Feeley-Harnik notes that Anglo-American writers such as Morgan were influenced by Cowper's reflections on human–animal relations in much the same way that British readers engaged with the Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century.
Morgan then considers whether instinct and mind are distinct faculties or whether they reflect the same intellectual principle. He maintains that instinct is merely a descriptive label for animal intelligence, and that treating it as a separate force obscures inquiry. To investigate, he identifies four faculties—memory, abstraction, imagination, and reason—and argues that animals exhibit each to varying degrees, differing from humans in degree rather than in kind.
Memory
Morgan begins with animal memory, presenting cases such as bees returning to a food source after months, elephants recognizing former keepers after years, and pigeons navigating back to their lofts. From these he concludes that "instinct remembers", and that its operations are "identical, both in analysis and synthesis, with the phenomena of memory in the human mind."Abstraction
He next turns to abstraction, arguing that animals separate and compare different properties when choosing among alternatives. His chief example is the beaver's choice of a dam site, which he interprets as weighing depth, width, current, food, and materials. Foxes selecting burrows and birds choosing nesting sites are presented as further evidence of abstract consideration.Imagination
On imagination, Morgan suggests that animals "fabricate images of things that have no existence". He points to playful behaviour in young animals, apparent dreaming in dogs, and migratory restlessness in birds as signs of imaginative projection. He also notes that both humans and animals appear to respond imaginatively to scenery and climate.Reason
In his final section, devoted to animal reasoning, Morgan recounts anecdotes of dogs seeking medical help, foxes using deception, and cooperative labour among ants, marmots, and beavers. He interprets these as cases of "the adaptation of means to an end", showing planning, division of labour, and cause-and-effect reasoning. Training and domestication are further cited as evidence that animals learn through association and motivation, not through mechanical impulse.Ethical reflections
Morgan closes by drawing out the moral implications of this continuity. If animals and humans share the same intellectual principle, he argues, their happiness must be equally intended by God. He criticizes slaughter and sport hunting, and speculates that "an enlightened moral sense would teach us to abstain entirely from animal food, if we can live without it." He rejected the view that animals were created solely for human use, or that some animals existed merely to be preyed upon by others, writing that "we can no more say that animals were made for our convenience exclusively, than that the hare was made for the lion". More broadly, he insisted that "we are all alike creatures of God, and subjects of His will", and that divine protection extends "from man, the noblest of His creation, to the young ravens."Further writings on animal psychology
Morgan returned to the themes of "Mind or Instinct" in several later works. In an unpublished 1857 essay titled "Animal Psychology", he again rejected instinct as a distinct faculty, describing it as a "supernatural installation" that hindered inquiry, and argued instead that a common "thinking principle" extended across species. He continued this line of argument in The American Beaver and His Works, which used field observations in Michigan to demonstrate that beaver societies exhibited adaptation, memory, imagination, and gradual improvement, qualities he had earlier attributed to animals in "Mind or Instinct" essay. These continuities extended into his later anthropological works such as Ancient Society, where the idea of a "scale of mind" linking animals and humans underpinned his broader comparative method.Legacy
Although it attracted little contemporary attention, the essay was included in two nineteenth-century bibliographies of works on immortality and the soul: in the appendix to William Rounseville Alger's A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life, and in Ezra Abbot's The Literature of the Doctrine of a Future Life, an expanded catalogue derived from the same appendix. In a 1909 survey of early American psychology, J. Franklin Jameson notes Morgan's essay but judges it more literary than scientific.Timothy D. Johnston argues that "Mind or Instinct" deserves recognition as an early contribution to comparative psychology. He observes that Morgan advances a strong continuity thesis between human and animal intelligence, rejecting "instinct" as a separate faculty and treating animal constructions as evidence of reasoning rather than divine design. Although framed within a theistic worldview rather than evolutionary theory, Morgan's position anticipates later criticisms of the instinct concept in twentieth-century psychology. Johnston also draws attention to Morgan's ethical reflections, which link animal intelligence to considerations of moral status and even vegetarianism, and concludes that his work foreshadows later developments in American psychology but is largely overlooked by its practitioners.
A 1989 review in Science and Nature, by Gordon Welty, likewise notes Morgan's rejection of the instinct–mind distinction and his insistence on a graded continuity of intelligence across species. It notes his innovative claim that human superiority derives largely from cultural development rather than innate endowment, setting him apart from contemporaries such as Louis Agassiz, who stressed immutable species differences to justify human hierarchies.
Carl Resek argues that the significance of "Mind or Instinct" lies less in its immediate impact than in what it reveals about Morgan's intellectual development. He identifies it as Morgan's first attempt to outline a rational history of animals, foreshadowing his later anthropological theories of human progress. By attributing a "thinking principle" to animals and rejecting a strict divide between instinct and reason, Resek maintains that Morgan shows an early concern with continuity between human and non-human intelligence. Against metaphysical claims that animals lacked such a faculty, Morgan contends that humans themselves had advanced from similar mental beginnings. His conclusions echo contemporary ideas, including Charles Darwin's youthful notes on animals, but he expresses them in his own way, presenting animals as capable of reasoned adaptation rather than driven solely by instinct. Resek interprets the work as youthful but revealing, a formative attempt to grapple with ideas that would shape Morgan's later scholarship.
Thomas Trautmann likewise describes the essay as Morgan's first statement of the "scale of mind" that links animals and humans in a single gradation. He notes that it already contains elements of Morgan's later anthropology: a comparative method, the idea of stages of savagery and civilization, and a unified scale of intelligence across species. Trautmann writes that Morgan's views on animal psychology remain largely unchanged throughout his career, even after the appearance of Darwin's works.
Gillian Feeley-Harnik, in her chapter on Morgan in America's Darwin: Darwinian Theory and U.S. Literary Culture, situates "Mind or Instinct" within the wider nineteenth-century debate about animal intelligence. She argues that Morgan rejects instinct as an explanatory category and instead proposes a single scale of intelligence uniting humans with other animals. Feeley-Harnik compares Morgan's conclusions with Darwin's contemporary notebook entries on animal memory, emotion, and suffering, noting that while Darwin approached these questions through descent and common ancestry, Morgan focused on gradual moral and intellectual improvement through reason. She adds that although Darwin's writings become central to comparative psychology, Morgan's early contribution is largely overlooked by later figures such as George Romanes and William James.