Here is a tale that sounds like fable, but is fact.
An old and time-eroded pine was felled, revealing in the hollow trunk an owl’s palatial citadel, wherein he had imprisoned many mice. These mice were legless, pale, and fat: for, to prevent them from escaping, he had bitten off their legs, and, to prevent their dying, he had fed them well on grain.
We can’t deny that this bird reasoned. When he’d hunted mice at first and brought them home, he’d noticed that they soon all ran away. From that day forth, the clever fellow maimed them. Now he could devour them at his leisure. Appetite, however, being limited, he found he couldn’t eat as many as he caught. And so, with foresight as acute as ours, he brought them wheat for their subsistence.
What’s reasoning, if this is not? He must have pondered thus: “As fast as I collect these vermin, they abscond. I’ll therefore munch them right away. There’s more than I can eat, though, in one sitting! Also, shouldn’t I preserve some for a rainy day? I’ll have to feed them, then, and keep them in good health, without their getting free, somehow. But how? Eureka! I’ll remove their limbs, and they’ll be paralyzed.”
Cartesians still persist in calling animals machines. But what mere cog could prompt such ingenuity as this? Could Aristotle’s school have taught a man to think as well as this beast thought?