"Oh," Dr. MacNare said, his eyes flashing. "So you know all about the results of an experiment in an untried field without performing the experiments!"

"According to Dr. Veerhof that field is not untried but rather well explored," the board member said. "Giving an animal the means to make vocal sounds would not enable it to form a symbol system."

"I disagree," Dr. MacNare said, seething. "My studies indicate clearly—"

"I think," the president said with a firmness that demanded the floor, "our position has been made very clear, Dr. MacNare. The matter is now closed. Permanently. I hope you will have the good sense, if I may use such a strong term, to forget the whole thing. For the good of your career and your very nice wife and son. That is all." He held the manuscript toward Dr. MacNare.

"I can't understand their attitude!" Dr. MacNare said to Alice when he told her about it.

"Possibly I can understand it a little better than you, Joe," Alice said thoughtfully. "I had a little of what I think they feel, when I first read your paper. A—a prejudice against the idea of it, is as closely as I can describe it. Like it would be violating the order of nature, giving an animal a soul, in a way."

"Then you feel as they do?" Dr. MacNare said.

"I didn't say that, Joe." Alice put her arms around her husband and kissed him fiercely. "Maybe I feel just the opposite, that if there is some way to give an animal a soul, we should do it."

Dr. MacNare chuckled. "It wouldn't be quite that cosmic. An animal can't be given something it doesn't have already. All that can be done is to give it the means to fully capitalize on what it has. Animals—man included—can only do by observing the results. When you move a finger, what you really do is send a neural impulse out from the brain along one particular nerve or one particular set of nerves, but you can never learn that, nor just what it is you do. All that you can know is that when you do a definite something your eyes and sense of touch bring you the information that your finger moved. But if that finger were attached to a voice element that made the sound ah, and you could never see your finger, all you could ever know is that when you did that particular something you made a certain vocal sound. Changing the resultant effect of mental commands to include things normally impossible to you may expand the potential of your mind, but it won't give 

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