Dogs do know lots of things. Only a fool could not see the intelligence in their eyes. A dog’s mind is a very busy place. Dog’s believe the world exists, that water is wet, that a couch is comfortable, that a thrown ball rises before it falls, and so on. But the one thing a dog will never understand or believe in is a ghost. In the world of “man’s best friend,” things either are or are not, in motion or at rest. There is no room in the thinking of this animal for something that is neither dead or alive, that is in a liminal space between rest and motion, between being and not being. And with good reason. The dog’s form of sociality has not required the development of a bonding element that’s central to human sociality. We call this element the imagination.
There is, without a doubt, some imagination in a dog, but it is not as powerful as the human imagination, which hypertrophied for one reason. It is the human imagination that enables one human being to sympathize, profoundly, with another human being. Without imagination, there is no sympathy. Without sympathy, there is no way humans could live together in such large numbers. Dogs can form a pack; that is as far their imagination will take them. Humans can live in cities with millions of other humans. The imagination is the key to urban life. The imagination also explains one of the strange features of the human animal’s mode, namely spite. A human can hurt himself or herself for the purpose of harming another human. There is nothing like it in dogs or in any other animal world .The stuff of spite is the imagination. You imagine how someone will suffer from the hurt you inflict on yourself. But the pain you feel is not as great as the satisfaction from imagining the pain your pain has caused in another person.
But what about ghosts? Why don’t dogs believe in them?
The answer is found in the second chapter (“Of the Proper Objects of Gratitude and Resentment”) of Adam Smith’s first major work The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith, who is famous for writing what many consider to be the founding text of economics, The Wealth of Nations (a book published nearly 18 years after Theory of the Moral Sentiments) writes:
If the injured should perish in the quarrel, we not only sympathize with the real resentment of his friends and relations, but with the imaginary resentment which in fancy we lend to the dead, who is no longer capable of feeling that or any other human sentiment. But as we put ourselves in his situation, as we enter, as it were, into his body, and in our imaginations, in some measure, animate anew the deformed and mangled carcass of the slain, when we bring home in this manner his case to our own bosoms, we feel upon this, as upon many other occasions, an emotion which the person principally concerned is incapable of feeling, and which yet we feel by an illusive sympathy with him… We feel that resentment which we imagine he ought to feel, and which he would feel, if in his cold and lifeless body there remained any consciousness of what passes upon earth. His blood, we think, calls aloud for vengeance. The very ashes of the dead seem to be disturbed at the thought that his injuries are to pass unrevenged. The horrors which are supposed to haunt the bed of the murderer, the ghosts which superstition imagines rise from their graves to demand vengeance upon those who brought them to an untimely end, all take their origin from this natural sympathy with the imaginary resentment of the slain.
Fancy is where all ghosts come from. They are the projections of our powerful imaginations. A dead person feels nothing, knows nothing, will never say anything again. It is the living, instead, who feel for the dead. We imagine how they would feel about, say, a living person who murdered them. We fancy that a slain man wants justice, and will not rest until his death is met with justice. He haunts the world if the grave wrong is not settled. But the dead can only feel as much as a stone. They are totally cold to the world.
The dog is well aware of this fact. This animal knows only the living are quick. But in movie after movie, we are shown a dog that can sense the supernatural. The hound barks at the ghost a human has not yet seen. The hound knows something unnatural is outside of the cabin or roaming a hallway. But what an insult this movieland trope is to dogkind. What’s the use of barking at something that’s not there? A ghost has nothing to do with dog sociality, which is rational; it is instead a product of human surplus imagination. It is the overflow of the element that, as a theory of mind (“the ability to attribute mental states — beliefs, intents, desires, emotions, knowledge, etc. — to oneself and to others”), enables humans to relate with other humans. But some of these humans are no longer around. What evolution has not provided is an imagination that dies with the dead. If an animal develops a sociality comparable to that of humans, the population of its living will be doubled by the population of its dead.
