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THE MEMOIRS OF A CAT
frankly, cannot live as truthfully, cannot behave as normally, cannot think as honestly, cannot act as spontancously as niyself.
The subject of my obscrvation having been the daily life of average human beings, not given to high intellectual occupations, and what I am going to record having been my reactions to stimuli and reflections resulting therefroin, I should be fairly able to tackle the task undertaken with the intelligence concelled to me by modern science. In any case, this attempted collaboration and co-ordination of the human faculty of articulated speech and experiments in animal psycho logy may amount to some modest contribution to critical literature. The story may have a speculative flavour ; but it does not suffer from any animistic prejudice. My collaborator has simply tried to imagine what I would say under the given conditions, if I were endowed with the power of specch. How far le has succeeded, I cannot judge, because I understand the import of human language only very fragmentarily. But I have a more reliable standard of judgment: My experience that he made patient and persistent efforts to understand my fçelings, to meet my desires and closely observe my behaviour with the purpose of making a general inference about my emotions and responses to stimuli. Having donc this, he is not liable to write something much different from what I felt and thought. So, I can
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