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As quoted in Gabriel Delanne - Materials for use in the study of Reincarnation

Miss Kindermann published a book [Lola ein Beitrag Zun don Ken und Sprechen der tiere. Contribution à l'étude de la pensée et du langage des animaux, par Henry KINDERMANN, avec une note de M. Ziegler. (Edité chez Richard Jordan, à Stutggart.)] in 1919 in which she tells how she taught her dog Lola how to read and write[Les personnes désireuses de savoir comment elle s'y prit pourront consulter le numéro du journal Psychica, de mars 1922, p. 10 et 12 ; l'article est signé par M. MAILLARD].

She is a daughter of Rolf and seems as intellectually developed as her father. She learned very quickly to do the four operations and solve small tasks. She is also able to express her thoughts using a conventional alphabet by knocking. It seems interesting to me to point out some of Lola's particularities which establish that, if sometimes she can become acquainted telepathically (which brings the animal even closer to man) with the thoughts of her mistress, in other cases she shows a personal will that demonstrates the autonomy of her intelligence. Curious and truly unexpected, Lola claims to be able to discover through her sense of smell the state of mind of her interlocutors. In fact, she easily reports anxiety, sadness, fatigue in the latter. Moreover, when questioned one day by Miss Kindermann about her impressions of the moment, she only gives meaningless answers and seems visibly embarrassed. Urged with questions, she replies rather indiscriminately "lying". Her interlocutor reassures her:

I will not get angry, she said to him, so you feel the lie? - Yes. - About what? About what? - Munich. I suddenly remembered that an hour earlier I had told the dog that I was going to Munich and that she might accompany me. But I thought apart from myself that it would not be, because of the inconvenience of the thing, and I actually wanted to leave Lola in Stuttgart.

The latter feature could suggest that this is not an exercise in smell, but rather a reading of thoughts. And of course this interpretation, which most critics hasten to apply a little hastily to all manifestations of animal intelligence, has been the subject of Miss Kindermann's careful research. I could not do better than to reproduce here her conclusions on this subject.

One day when the dog, questioned about the name of a person we heard coming but had not yet seen, had pointed not to the real arrival, but to another lady for which Miss Kindermann was waiting at that moment, she asked her "Why did you answer me incorrectly? Answer: You think. - What," I cried, "do you feel what I thought? - Yes. - Do you still feel it? - No. No. - Do you think about it yourself? - Yes".

This, the author of the book currently being analyzed continues, was completely new. But the thing seemed certain to me and my point of view confirmed by all the subsequent tests can be expressed as follows: The dog is sensitive to the transmission of thought; it is capable of being influenced when it is tired or lazy; it is also susceptible to it when asked something it does not know and when it can draw from my consciousness something about something already known to it previously. But, and this is the most important point, nothing can be transmitted to the dog of what is totally alien to his knowledge.

Thus it often happened that the dog, when asked about an arithmetic operation, gave a solution contrary to mine, whereas I was myself in error; therefore the idea that I could have in my consciousness did not impose itself on it. Later, on the contrary, when she was tired, she adopted a false solution, because she did not want to think for herself. I could see very clearly in her eyes when she was inactive and waiting to know what I was thinking. I have often tried to get some new notion into her head in this way; it has always been impossible.

These remarks are very important; the reading of thought, a convenient way of explaining certain embarrassing phenomena, cannot play a constant and universal role, and it is interesting to try to clarify their boundaries. It is clear, both from the example of the dog Lola and from the information we currently have on animal psychology, that the observed subjects provide undeniable evidence of spontaneity and autonomy, since they sometimes even find themselves in complete contradiction with their interrogators.

Here are some examples cited by Miss Kindermann on this point:

On July 27, 1916, she asked the dog: Do you want to say something? - Yes, me eat. - Lola, why always talk about eating? I keep hearing the same thing from valets and maidservants and also from you. Is there nothing else to do? Tell me about something else. - Me to eat, Lola repeats, then she adds: "Too little food".

On May 18, 1916, they tried to teach the dog the content of a message to send to Mrs. Kindermann's father. She explains that the letter should begin with the word dear, that it should contain thanks for the cake that Lola has just received and ends with these words: Hello to you, from Lola. But instead of complying with her instructions, the animal, without any hesitation, and quite the opposite, striking with great enthusiasm and speed, expresses itself in this way: "Dear one, come to us, disobedient me right now, often badly, I kiss".

What is remarkable is that this dictation was interrupted by an unintentional observation, because instead of the three letters one (beginning of the German word Unartig, disobedient), Miss Kindermann expected the word und (and) to be dictated. But it was in vain that she wanted to have the A replaced by a D. The dog refused with a well-struck "no" and continued to dictate [Le mot « désobéissante » faisait allusion à une correction que venait de recevoir la chienne pour être allée seule à la chasse, et l'expression «souvent mal» s'applique aux douleurs de la tête et à la fatigue dont elle se plaint à maintes reprises dans ses communications].

From these examples it can be concluded without hesitation that the animal is capable of thinking for itself and has no need to extract the elements of its ideas from others. Man is no longer the only thinking product of nature, and he differs from some beings that surround him, in fact, only quantitatively, but not by the very nature of his reasoning faculties.