ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE
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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
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ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE
EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES
BY
EDWARD L. THORNDIKE
TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1911
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1911,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published June, 1911.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
PREFACE
The main purpose of this volume is to make accessible to students of
psychology and biology the author’s experimental studies of animal
intellect and behavior.[1] These studies have, I am informed by teachers
of comparative psychology, a twofold interest. Since they represent the
first deliberate and extended application of the experimental method in
animal psychology, they are a useful introduction to the later literature
of that subject. They mark the change from books of general argumentation
on the basis of common experience interpreted in terms of the faculty
psychology, to monographs reporting detailed and often highly technical
experiments interpreted in terms of original and acquired connections
between situation and response. Since they represent the point of view
and the method of present animal psychology, but in the case of very
general and simple problems, they are useful also as readings for
students who need a general acquaintance with some sample of experimental
work in this field.
It has seemed best to leave the texts unaltered except for the correction
of typographical errors, renumbering of tables and figures, and redrawing
the latter. In a few places, where the original text has been found
likely to be misunderstood, brief notes have been added. It is hard
to resist the impulse to temper the style, especially of the ‘Animal
Intelligence,’ with a certain sobriety and restraint. What one writes
at the age of twenty-three is likely to irritate oneself a dozen years
later, as it doubtless irritated others at the time. The charitable
reader may allay his irritation by the thought that a degree of
exuberance, even of arrogance, is proper to youth.
To the reports of experimental studies are added two new essays dealing
with the general laws of human and animal learning.
JANUARY, 1911.
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE STUDY OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE STUDY OF BEHAVIOR 1
ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE 20
Introduction 20
Description of Apparatus 29
Experiments with Cats 35
Experiments with Dogs 56
Experiments with Chicks 61
Reasoning or Inference 67
Imitation 76
In Chicks 81
In Cats 85
In Dogs 92
The Mental Fact in Association 98
Association by Similarity and the Formation of Concepts 116
Criticism of Previous Theories 125
Delicacy of Association 128
Complexity of Associations 132
Number of Associations 135
Permanence of Associations 138
Inhibition of Instincts by Habit 142
Attention 144
The Social Consciousness of Animals 146
Interaction 147
Applications to Pedagogy, Anthropology, etc. 149
Conclusion 153
THE INSTINCTIVE REACTIONS OF YOUNG CHICKS 156
A NOTE ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF FISHES 169
THE MENTAL LIFE OF THE MONKEYS 172
Introduction 173
Apparatus 177
Learning without Tuition 182
Tests with Mechanisms 184
Tests with Signals 195
Experiments on the Influence of Tuition 209
Introduction 209
Imitation of Human Beings 211
Imitation of Other Monkeys 219
Learning apart from Motor Impulses 222
General Mental Development of the Monkeys 236
LAWS AND HYPOTHESES OF BEHAVIOR 241
THE EVOLUTION OF THE HUMAN INTELLECT 282
ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE
CHAPTER I
THE STUDY OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE STUDY OF BEHAVIOR
The statements about human nature made by psychologists are of two
sorts,—statements about _consciousness_, about the inner life of
thought and feeling, the ‘self as conscious,’ the ‘stream of thought’;
and statements about _behavior_, about the life of man that is left
unexplained by physics, chemistry, anatomy and physiology, and is roughly
compassed for common sense by the terms ‘intellect’ and ‘character.’
Animal psychology shows the same double content. Some statements concern
the conscious states of the animal, what he is to himself as an inner
life; others concern his original and acquired ways of response, his
behavior, what he is to an outside observer.
Of the psychological terms in common use, some refer only to conscious
states, and some refer to behavior regardless of the consciousness
accompanying it; but the majority are ambiguous, referring to the man or
animal in question, at times in his aspect of inner life, at times in his
aspect of reacting organism, and at times as an undefined total nature.
Thus ‘intensity,’ ‘duration’ and ‘quality’ of sensations, ‘transitive’
and ‘substantive’ states and ‘imagery’ almost inevitably refer to states
of consciousness. ‘Imitation,’ ‘invention’ and ‘practice’ almost
inevitably refer to behavior observed from the outside. ‘Perception,’
‘attention,’ ‘memory,’ ‘abstraction,’ ‘reasoning’ and ‘will’ are samples
of the many terms which illustrate both ways of studying human and animal
minds. That an animal perceives an object, say, the sun, may mean either
that his mental stream includes an awareness of that object distinguished
from the rest of the visual field; or that he reacts to that object as a
unit. ‘Attention’ may mean a clearness, focalness, of the mental state;
or an exclusiveness and devotion of the total behavior. It may, that
is, be illustrated by the sharpness of objects illumined by a shaft of
light, or by the behavior of a cat toward the bird it stalks. ‘Memory’
may be consciousness of certain objects, events or facts; or may be
the permanence of certain tendencies in either thought or action. ‘To
recognize’ may be to feel a certain familiarity and surety of being able
to progress to certain judgments about the thing recognized; or may be to
respond to it in certain accustomed and appropriate ways. ‘Abstraction’
may refer to ideas of qualities apart from any consciousness of their
concrete accompaniments, and to the power of having such ideas; or to
responses to qualities irrespective of their concrete accompaniments,
and to the power of making such responses. ‘Reasoning’ may be said
to be present when certain sorts of consciousness, or when certain
sorts of behavior, are present. An account of ‘the will’ is an account
of consciousness as related to action or an account of the actions
themselves.
Not only in psychological judgments and psychological terms, but also
in the work of individual psychologists, this twofold content is seen.
Amongst writers in this country, for example, Titchener has busied
himself almost exclusively with consciousness ‘as such’; Stanley Hall,
with behavior; and James, with both. In England Stout, Galton and Lloyd
Morgan have represented the same division and union of interests.
On the whole, the psychological work of the last quarter of the
nineteenth century emphasized the study of consciousness to the
neglect of the total life of intellect and character. There was a
tendency to an unwise, if not bigoted, attempt to make the science
of human nature synonymous with the science of facts revealed by
introspection. It was, for example, pretended that the only value of all
the measurements of reaction-times was as a means to insight into the
reaction-consciousness,—that the measurements of the amount of objective
difference in the length, brightness or weight of two objects that men
could judge with an assigned degree of correctness were of value only so
far as they allowed one to infer something about the difference between
two corresponding consciousnesses. It was affirmed that experimental
methods were not to aid the experimenter to know what the subject did,
but to aid the subject to know what he experienced.
The restriction of studies of human intellect and character to studies
of conscious states was not without influence on scientific studies
of animal psychology. For one thing, it probably delayed them. So
long as introspection was lauded as the chief method of psychology, a
psychologist would tend to expect too little from mere studies, from the
outside, of creatures who could not report their inner experiences to
him in the manner to which he was accustomed. In the literature of the
time will be found many comments on the extreme difficulty of studying
the psychology of animals and children. But difficulty exists only in the
case of their _consciousness_. Their _behavior_, by its simpler nature
and causation, is often far easier to study than that of adults. Again,
much time was spent in argumentation about the criteria of consciousness,
that is, about what certain common facts of behavior meant in reference
to inner experience. The problems of inference about consciousness
from behavior distracted attention from the problems of learning more
about behavior itself. Finally, when psychologists began to observe
and experiment upon animal behavior, they tended to overestimate the
resulting insight into the stream of the animal’s thought and to neglect
the direct facts about what he did and how he did it.
Such observations and experiments are, however, themselves a means of
restoring a proper division of attention between consciousness and
behavior. A psychologist may think of himself as chiefly a stream of
consciousness. He may even think of other men as chiefly conscious
selves whose histories they report by word and deed. But it is only by
an extreme bigotry that he can think of a dog or cat as chiefly a stream
or chain or series of consciousness or consciousnesses. One of the lower
animals is so obviously a bundle of original and acquired connections
between situation and response that the student is led to attend to the
whole series,—situation, response and connection or bond,—rather than
to just the conscious state that may or may not be one of the features
of the bond. It is so useful, in understanding the animal, to see what
it does in different circumstances and what helps and what hinders its
learning, that one is led to an intrinsic interest in varieties of
behavior as well as in the kinds of consciousness of which they give
evidence.
What each open-minded student of animal psychology at first hand comes
thus to feel vaguely, I propose in this essay to try to make definite
and clear. The studies reprinted in this volume produced in their
author an increased respect for psychology as the science of behavior, a
willingness to make psychology continuous with physiology, and a surety
that to study consciousness for the sake of inferring what a man can or
will do, is as proper as to study behavior for the sake of inferring what
conscious states he can or will have. This essay will attempt to defend
these positions and to show further that psychology may be, at least in
part, as independent of introspection as physics is.
A psychologist who wishes to broaden the content of the science to
include all that biology includes under the term ‘behavior,’ or all that
common sense means by the words ‘intellect’ and ‘character,’ has to meet
certain objections. The first is the indefiniteness of this content.
The indefiniteness is a fact, but is not in itself objectionable. It is
true that by an animal’s behavior one means the facts about the animal
that are left over after geometry, physics, chemistry, anatomy and
physiology have taken their toll, and that are not already well looked
after by sociology, economics, history, esthetics and other sciences
dealing with certain complex and specialized facts of behavior. It is
true that the boundaries of psychology, from physiology on the one hand,
and from sociology, economics and the like on the other, become dubious
and changeable. But this is in general a sign of a healthy condition
in a science. The pretense that there is an impassable cleft between
physiology and psychology should arouse suspicion that one or the other
science is studying words rather than realities.
The same holds against the objection that, if psychology is the science
of behavior, it will be swallowed up by biology. When a body of facts
treated subjectively, vaguely and without quantitative precision by one
science or group of scientists comes to be treated more objectively,
definitely and exactly by another, it is of course a gain, a symptom
of the general advance of science. That geology may become a part of
physics, or physiology a part of chemistry, is testimony to the advance
of geology and physiology. Light is no less worthy of study by being
found to be explainable by laws discovered in the study of electricity.
Meteorology had to reach a relatively high development to provoke the wit
to say that “All the science in meteorology is physics, the rest is wind.”
These objections to be significant should frankly assert that between
physical facts and mental facts, between bodies and minds, between any
and all of the animal’s movements and its states of consciousness,
there is an impassable gap, a real discontinuity, found nowhere else in
science; and that by making psychology responsible for territory on both
sides of the gap, one makes psychology include two totally disparate
groups of facts, things and thoughts, requiring totally different methods
of study. This is, of course, the traditional view of the scope of
psychology, reiterated in the introductions to the standard books and
often accepted in theory as axiomatic.
It has, however, already been noted that in practice psychologists do
study facts in disregard of this supposed gap, that the same term refers
to facts belonging some on one side of it and some on the other, and
that, in animal psychology, it seems very unprofitable to try to keep
on one side or the other. Moreover, the practice to which the study of
animal and child psychology leads is, if I understand their writings,
justified as a matter of theory by Dewey and Santayana. If then, as a
matter of scientific fact, human and animal behavior, with or without
consciousness, seems a suitable subject for a scientific student, we may
study it without a too uneasy sense of philosophic heresy and guilt.
The writer must confess not only to the absence of any special reverence
for the supposed axiom, but also to the presence of a conviction that it
is false, the truth being that whatever feature of any animal, say John
Smith, of _Homo sapiens_, is studied—its length, its color of hair, its
body temperature, its toothache, its anxiety, or its thinking of 9 ×
7—the attitude and methods of the student may properly be substantially
the same.
Of the six facts in the illustration just given, the last three would by
the traditional view be all much alike for study, and all much unlike any
of the first three. The same kind of science, physical science, would be
potent for the first three and impotent for the last three (save to give
facts about certain physical facts which ‘paralleled’ them). Conversely
one kind of science, psychology, would by the traditional view deal with
the last three, but have nothing to say about the first three.
But is there in actual fact any such radical dichotomy of these six facts
as objects of science? Take any task of science with respect to them, for
example, identification. A score of scientific men, including John Smith
himself, are asked to identify John’s stature at a given moment. Each
observes it carefully, getting, let us say, as measures: 72.10 inches,
72.11, 72.05, 72.08, 72.09, 72.11, etc.
In the case of color of hair each observes as before, the reports being
brown, light brown, brown, light brown, between light brown and brown,
and so forth.
In the case of body temperature, again, each observes as before, there
being the same variability in the reports; but John _may also observe
in a second way_, not by observing a thermometer with eyes, but by
observing the temperature of his body through other sense-organs so
situated that they lead to knowledge of only his own body’s temperature.
It is important to note that for efficient knowledge of his own
body-temperature, John does not use the sense approach peculiar to him,
but that available for all observers. He identifies and measures his
‘feverishness’ by studying himself as he would study any other animal, by
thermometer and eye.
In the case of the toothache the students proceed as before, except
that they use John’s gestures, facial expression, cries and verbal
reports, as well as his mere bodily structure and condition. They not
only observe the cavities in his teeth, the signs of ulcer and the like,
but they also ask him, tapping a tooth, “Does it hurt?” “How long has
it hurt?” “Does it hurt very much?” and the like. John, if their equal
in knowledge of dentistry, would use the same methods, testing himself,
asking himself questions and using the replies made by himself to himself
in inner speech. But, as with temperature, he would get data, for his
identification of the toothache, from a source unavailable for the
others, the sense-organs in his teeth.
It is worth while to consider how they and he would proceed to an exact
identification or measure of the intensity of his toothache such as was
made of his stature or body-temperature. First, they would need a scale
of toothaches of varying intensities. Next, they would need means of
comparing the intensity of his toothache with those of this scale to see
which it was most like. Given this scale and means of comparison, they
would turn John’s attention from the original toothache to one of given
intensity, and compare the two, both by his facial expression, gestures
and the like, and by the verbal reports made. John would do likewise,
reporting to himself instead of to them. The similarity of the procedure
to that in studying a so-called physical fact is still clearer if we
suppose a primitive condition of the scales of length and temperature.
Suppose for example that for the length of a man we had only ‘short’ or
‘tall as a deer,’ ‘medium’ or ‘tall as a moose,’ and ‘tall’ or ‘tall
as a horse’; and for the intensity of the toothache of a man ‘little’
or ‘intense as a pin-prick,’ ‘medium’ or ‘intense as a knife-cut,’
and ‘great’ or ‘intense as a spear-thrust.’ Then obviously the only
difference between the identification of the length of a man’s body and
the identification of the intensity of his toothache would be that the
latter was made by all on the basis of behavior as well as anatomy, and
made by the individual having it on the basis of data from an additional
sense-organ.
In actual present practice, if observers were asked to identify the
intensity of John’s toothache on a scale running from zero intensity
up, the variability of the reports would be very great in comparison
with those of stature or body-temperature. Supposing the most intense
toothache to be called _K_, we might well have reports of from say .300
_K_ to .450 _K_, some observers identifying the fact with a condition
one and a half times as intense as that chosen by others. But such a
variability might also occur in primitive men’s judgments of length or
temperature.
It is important to note that the accuracy of John’s own identification
of it depends in any case on his knowledge of the scale and his power of
comparing his toothache therewith. Well-trained outside observers might
identify the intensity of John’s toothache more accurately than he could.
In the case of John’s anxiety, the most striking fact is the low degree
of accuracy in identification. The quality of the anxiety and its
intensity would both be so crudely measured by present means that even if
the observers were from the score of most competent psychologists, their
reports would probably be not much better than, say, the descriptions
now found in masterpieces of fiction and drama. Science could not
tell at all closely how much John’s anxiety at this particular time
resembled either his anxiety on some other occasion or anything else.
This inferiority is due in part to the fact that the manifestations
of anxiety in behavior, including verbal reports, are so complicated
by facts other than the anxiety itself, by, for example, the animal’s
health, temperament, concomitant ideas and emotions, knowledge of
language, clearness in expression and the like. It is due in part to
the very low status of our classification of kinds of anxieties and
of our units and scales for measuring the amount of each kind. Hence
the variation amongst observers would be even greater than in the case
of the toothache, and the confidence of all in their judgments would
be less, and far, far less than their confidence in their judgment of
John’s stature. The best possible present knowledge of John’s anxiety,
though scientific in comparison with ordinary opinion about it, would
seem grossly unscientific in comparison with knowledge of his stature or
weight. Knowledge of the anxiety would improve with better knowledge of
its manifestations, including verbal reports by John, and with better
means of classification and measurement.
John’s knowledge of his own anxiety would be in part the same as that of
the other observers. He too would judge his condition by its external
manifestations, would name its sort and rate its amount on the basis of
his own behavior, as he saw his own face, heard his own groans, and read
the notes he wrote describing his condition. But he would also, as with
the toothache, have data from internal sense-organs and perhaps from
centrally initiated neural actions. In so far as he could report these
data to himself for use in scientific thought more efficiently than he
could report them to the other observers, he would have, as with the
toothache, an advantage comparable to the advantage of a criminologist
who happened also to be or to have been a thief, or of a literary critic
who happened to have written what he judged. It is important to note that
only in so far as he who has ‘immediate experience’ of or participates
in or is ‘directly conscious’ of the anxiety, reports it to himself as
thinker or scientific student, in common with the other nineteen, that
this advantage accrues. To really _be_ or _have_ the anxiety is not to
correctly _know_ it. An insane man must become sane in order to know
his insane condition. Bigotry, stupidity and false reasoning can be
understood only by one who never was them or has ceased to be them.
In our last illustration, John’s thinking of ‘9 × 7 equals 63,’ the
effect on John’s behavior may be so complicated by other conditions
in John, and is so subject to the particular conditions which we name
John’s ‘will,’ that the observers would often be at loss except for
John’s verbal report. Not that the observer is restricted to that. If
John does the example 217 × 69 in the usual way, it is a very safe
inference that he thought 9 × 7 equals 63, regardless of the absence of a
verbal report from him. But often there is little else to go by. To John
himself, on the contrary, it is easier to be sure that he is thinking
of 9 × 7 equals 63, than that he has a particular sort and strength of
toothache. Consequently if we suppose John to be thinking of that fact
while under observation, and the twenty observers to be required to
identify the fact he is thinking of, it is sure that there might be an
enormous variability in their guesses as to what the fact was and that
his testimony might be worth far more than that of all the other nineteen
without his testimony. His observation is influenced by the action of
the neurones in his central nervous system as theirs is not, and, in the
case of the thought ‘9 × 7 equals 63,’ the action of these neurones is of
special importance.
Our examination of the way science treats these six facts shows no
impassable cleft between knowledge of a man’s body and knowledge of his
mind. Scientific statements about the toothache, anxiety and numerical
judgment are in general more variable than statements about length,
hair-color and body-temperature, but there is here no difference save of
degree. Some physical facts, such as hair-color, eye-color or health,
are, in fact, judged more variably than some mental facts, such as rate
of adding, accuracy of perception of a certain sort and the like. So
far as the lack of agreement amongst impartial observers goes, there is
continuity from the identification of a length to that of an ideal.
Scientific judgments about the facts of John’s mind also depend, in
general, more upon his verbal reports than do judgments about his body.
But here also the difference is only of degree. The physician studying
wounds, ulcers, tumors, infections and other facts of a man’s body
may depend more upon his verbal reports than does the moralist who is
studying the man’s character. Verbal reports too are themselves a gradual
and continuous extension of coarser forms of behavior. They signify
consciousness no more truly than do signs, gestures, facial expression
and the general bodily motions of pursuit, retreat, avoidance or seizure.
Nor is it true that physical facts are known to many observers and mental
facts to but one, who _is_ or _has_ or _directly experiences_ them. If it
were true, sociology, economics, history, anthropology and the like would
either be physical sciences or represent no knowledge at all. The kind of
knowledge of which these sciences and the common judgments of our fellow
men are made up is knowledge possessed by many observers in common, the
individual of whom the facts is known, knowing the fact in part in just
the same way that the others know it.
The real difference between a man’s scientific judgments about himself
and the judgment of others about him is that he has _added sources of
knowledge_. Much of what goes on in him influences him in ways other
than those in which it influences other men. But this difference is not
coterminous with that between judgments about his ‘mind’ and about his
‘body.’ As was pointed out in the case of body-temperature, a man knows
certain facts about his own body in such additional ways.
Furthermore, there is no more truth in the statement that a man’s
pain or anxiety or opinions are matters of direct consciousness, pure
experience, than in the statement that his length, weight and temperature
are, or that the sun, moon and stars are. If by the pain we must mean
the pain as felt by some one, then by the sun we can mean only the sun
as seen by some one. Pain and sun are equally subjects for a science of
‘consciousness as such.’ But if by the sun is meant the sun of common
sense, physics and astronomy, the sun as known by any one, then by the
pain we can mean the pain of medicine, economics and sociology, the pain
as known by any one, and by the sufferer long after he _was_ or _had_ it.
All facts emerge from the matrix of pure experience; but they become
facts for science only after they have emerged therefrom. A man’s anxiety
may be the anxiety as directly felt by the man, or as thought of by him,
or as thought of by the general consensus of scientific observers. But
so also may be his body-temperature or weight or the composition of the
blood in his veins. There can be no valid reason other than a pragmatic
one for studying a man’s anxiety solely as _felt_ by him while studying
his body-temperature as _thought of_ by him and others. And the practical
reasons are all in favor of studying all facts as they exist for any
impartial observer. A man’s mind as it is to thinking men is all that
thinking men can deal with and all that they have any interest in dealing
with.
Finally, the subject-matter of psychology is not sharply marked off from
the subject-matter of physiology by being absolutely non-spatial. On the
contrary, the toothache, anxiety and judgment are referred unequivocally,
by every sane man who thinks of them, to the space occupied by the body
of the individual in question. That is the surest fact about them.
It is true that we do not measure the length, height, thickness and
weight of an animal’s pain or anxiety, but neither do we those of his
pulse, temperature, health, digestion, metabolism, patellar reflex or
heliotropism.
Two noteworthy advantages are secured by the study of behavior. First,
the evidence about intellect and character offered by action and the
influence of intellect and character upon action are given due attention.
Second, the connections of conscious states are studied as well as their
composition.
The mind or soul of the older psychology was the cause not only of
consciousness, but also of modifiability in thought and action. It was
the substance or force in man whereby he was sensitive to certain
events, was able to make certain movements, and not only had ideas but
connected them one with another and with various impressions and acts.
It was supposed to account for actual bodily action as well as for the
action-consciousness. It explained the connections between ideas as well
as their internal composition. If a modern psychologist defines mind
as the sum total of consciousness, and lives up to that definition, he
omits the larger portion of the task of his predecessors. To define our
subject-matter as the nature and behavior of men, beginning where anatomy
and physiology leave off, is, on the contrary, to deliberately assume
responsibility for the entire heritage. Behavior includes consciousness
_and_ action, states of mind _and_ their connections.
Even students devoted to ‘consciousness as such’ must admit that the
movements of an animal and their connections with other features of
his life deserve study, by even their kind of psychologist. For the
fundamental means of knowing that an animal has a certain conscious
state are knowledge that it makes certain movements and knowledge of
what conscious states are connected with those movements. Knowledge of
the action-system of an animal and its connections is a prerequisite to
knowledge of its stream of consciousness.
There are better reasons for including the action-system of an animal in
the psychologist’s subject-matter. An animal’s conscious stream is of
no account to the rest of the world except in so far as it prophesies
or modifies his action.[2] There can be no moral warrant for studying
man’s nature unless the study will enable us to control his acts. If
a psychologist is to study man’s consciousness without relation to
movement, he might as well fabricate imaginary consciousnesses to
describe and analyze. The lovers of consciousness for its own sake often
do this unwittingly, but would scarcely take pride therein!
The truth of the matter is, of course, that an animal’s mind is, by any
definition, something intimately associated with his connection-system
or means of binding various physical activities to various physical
impressions. The whole series—external situations and motor responses as
well as their bonds—must be studied to some extent in order to understand
whatever we define as mind. The student of behavior, by frankly accepting
the task of supplying any needed information not furnished by physiology,
and of studying the animal in action as well as in thought, is surer of
getting an adequate knowledge of whatever features of an animal’s life
may be finally awarded the title of mind.
The second advantage in studying total behavior rather than consciousness
as such is that thereby the connections of mental facts one with another
and with non-mental facts receive due attention.
The original tendencies to connect certain thoughts, feelings and acts
with certain situations—tendencies which we call reflexes, instincts
and capacities—are not themselves states of consciousness; nor are
the acquired connections which we call habits, associations of ideas,
tendencies to attend, select and the like. No state of consciousness
bears within itself an account of when and how it will appear, or of
what bodily act will be its sequel. What any given person will think in
any given situation is unpredictable by mere descriptions and analyses
of his previous thoughts each by itself. To understand the _when_, _how_
and _why_ of states of consciousness one must study other facts than
states of consciousness. These non-conscious relations or connections,
knowledge of which informs us of the result to come from the action of a
given situation on a given animal, may be expected to be fully half of
the subject-matter of mental science.
As was noted in the early pages of this chapter, the psychologist
commonly does adopt the attitude of treating mind as a system of
connections long enough to give some account of the facts of instinct,
habit, memory, and the like. But the dogma that psychology deals
exclusively with the inner stream of mind-stuff has made these accounts
needlessly scanty and vague.
One may appreciate fully the importance of finding out whether the
attention-consciousness is clearness or is something else, and whether
it exists in two or three discrete degrees or in a continuous series of
gradations, and still insist upon the equal importance of finding out
to what facts and for what reasons human beings do attend. There would
appear, for example, to be an unfortunate limitation to the study of
human nature by the examination of its consciousnesses, when two eminent
psychologists, writing elaborate accounts of attention from that point of
view, tell us almost nothing whereby we can predict what any given animal
will attend to in any given situation, or can cause in any given animal a
state of attention to any given fact.
One may enjoy the effort to define the kind of mind-stuff in which one
thinks of classes of facts, relations between facts and judgments about
facts, and still protest that a proper balance in the study of intellect
demands equal or greater attention to the problems of why any given
animal thinks of any given fact, class or relation in any given situation
and why he makes this or that judgment about it.
In the case of the so-called action-consciousness the neglect of
the connections becomes preposterous. The adventitious scraps of
consciousness called ‘willing’ which may intervene between a situation
productive of a given act and the act itself are hopelessly uninstructive
in comparison with the bonds of instinct and habit which cause the
situation to produce the act. In conduct, at least, that kind of
psychology which Santayana calls ‘the perception of character’ seems an
inevitable part of a well-balanced science of human nature. I quote from
his fine description of the contrast between the external observation
of a mind’s connections and the introspective recapitulation of its
conscious content, though it is perhaps too pronounced and too severe.
“_Perception of Character._—There is, however, a wholly different and
far more positive method of reading the mind, or what in a metaphorical
sense is called by that name. This method is to read character. Any
object with which we are familiar teaches us to divine its habits; slight
indications, which we should be at a loss to enumerate separately,
betray what changes are going on and what promptings are simmering in
the organism.... The gift of reading character ... is directed not upon
consciousness but upon past or eventual action. Habits and passions,
however, have metaphorical psychic names, names indicating dispositions
rather than particular acts (a disposition being mythically represented
as a sort of wakeful and haunting genius waiting to whisper suggestions
in a man’s ear). We may accordingly delude ourselves into imagining that
a pose or a manner which really indicates habit indicates feeling instead.
“_Conduct Divined, Consciousness Ignored._... As the weather prophet
reads the heavens, so the man of experience reads other men. Nothing
concerns him less than their consciousness; he can allow that to run
itself off when he is sure of their temper and habits. A great master of
affairs is usually unsympathetic. His observation is not in the least
dramatic or dreamful, he does not yield himself to animal contagion
or reënact other people’s inward experience. He is too busy for that,
and too intent on his own purposes. His observation, on the contrary,
is straight calculation and inference, and it sometimes reaches truths
about people’s character and destiny which they themselves are very far
from divining. Such apprehension is masterful and odious to weaklings,
who think they know themselves because they indulge in copious soliloquy
(which is the discourse of brutes and madmen), but who really know
nothing of their own capacity, situation, or fate.”[3]
Mr. Santayana elsewhere hints that both psychology and history will
become studies of human behavior considered from without,—a part, that
is, of what he calls physics,—if they are to amount to much.
Such a prediction may come true. But for the present there is no need
to decide which is better—to study an animal’s self as conscious, its
stream of direct experience, or to study the intellectual and moral
nature that causes its behavior in thought and action and is known to
many observers. Since worthy men have studied both, both are probably
worthy of study. All that I wish to claim is the right of a man of
science to study an animal’s intellectual and moral behavior, following
wherever the facts lead—to “the sum total of human experience considered
as dependent upon the experiencing person,” to the self as conscious, or
to a connection-system known to many observers and born and bred in the
animal’s body.