Birds and animals probably think without knowing that they think; that is, they have not self-consciousness. Only man seems to be endowed with this faculty; he alone develops disinterested intelligence, intelligence that is not primarily concerned with his own safety and well-being but that looks abroad upon things.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the unique ability of humans to think abstractly and with disinterest compared to animals.
In this quote, John Burroughs reflects on the human capacity for self-conscious thought and disinterested intelligence, which distinguishes us from other living beings. He suggests that while animals may think, they lack the awareness of their thinking, and their thoughts are primarily focused on survival. In contrast, humans possess a level of intelligence that allows us to contemplate broader concepts beyond mere self-preservation, enabling us to engage with the world in a more profound and insightful manner.
In practice
In a philosophical discussion about consciousness, this quote can illustrate the differences in thinking between humans and animals.
The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song.
Naturalists, like poets, are born and then made only by years of painstaking observation.
Every walk to the woods is a religious rite, every bath in the stream is a saving ordinance. Communion service is at all hours, and the bread and wine are from the heart and marrow of Mother Earth.
Next to the laborer in the fields, the walker holds the closest relation to the soil; and he holds a closer and more vital relation to nature because he is freer and his mind more at leisure.
Some of the animals outsee man, outsmell him, outhear him, outrun him, outswim him, because their lives depend more upon these special powers than his does; but he can outwit them all because he has the resourcefulness of reason and is at home in many different fields.
Unadulterated, unsweetened observations are what the real nature-lover craves. No man can invent incidents and traits as interesting as the reality.
The young are heated by Nature as drunken men by wine.
The only people who live in a post-black world are four people who live in a little white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. The idea that America is post-racial or post-black because a man I admire, Barack Obama, is president of the United States, is a joke. And I hope no one will even wonder about this crazy fiction again.
Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil.
We believe what we see.’...What do you do when you’re in the dark?
One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.
Modern romance, like Greek tragedy, celebrates the mystery of dismemberment, which is life in time. The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.
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