| DOG 3 IMITATING DOG 1
--------------------------------+------+------+--------------+----------
| Times| Times|Times probably| Time
| 1 did| 3 saw| 3 saw | in alone
--------------------------------+------+------+--------------+----------
| 30 | 7 | 14 | 3.00 F
After 1 Hour | 35 | 9 | 14 | 3.00 F
After 1 Hour | 10 | 3 | 3 | 5.00 F
After 24 Hours | 20 | 6 | 8 |
| 30 | 8 | 13 | 6.00 F
After 48 Hours | 25 | 8 | 11 | 8.00 F
| 25 | 6 | 12 | 6.00 F
| 25 | 9 | 7 | 10.00 F
After 24 Hours | 30 | 10 | 11 | 40.00 F
| | | |
Total times surely and possibly seen,— 66 93 |
=============================================================+==========
A similar failure to imitate was observed in the case of another simple
act. No. 1, as may be seen on page 60, had learned to escape from a pen
about 8 by 5 feet by jumping up and biting a cord which ran from one end
of the pen to the other and at the front end was tied to the bolt which
held the door. Dogs 2 and 3 had failed in their accidental jumping and
pawing to hit this cord, and were then given a chance to learn by seeing
1 do so, escape, and, of course, be fed. 1 always jumped in the same way,
biting the cord at the same place, namely, where a loose end from a knot
in it hung down 4 or 5 inches. 2 and 3 would either be tied up in the pen
or left in a pen at one side. They had a perfect chance to see 1 perform
his successful act. After every twenty or thirty performances by 1, 2 and
3 would be put in alone. It should be remembered that here, as also in
the previous experiment and all others, the imitators certainly _wanted_
to get out when thus left in alone. They struggled and jumped and pawed
and bit, but they never jumped _at the cord_. Their records follow:—
TABLE 6 (b)
=======================================+==============================
| DOG 2 IMITATING DOG 1
--------------------------------+------+------+---------+-------------
| Times| Times| Times | Time 2 was
| 1 did| 2 saw| Doubtful| in alone
--------------------------------+------+------+---------+-------------
| 30 | 9 | 11 | 10.00 F
After 1 Hour | 30 | 10 | 9 | 10.00 F
After 48 Hours | 25 | 8 | 8 |
After 1 Hour | 10 | 3 | 4 | 9.00 F[11]
After 24 Hours | 30 | 8 | 12 | 15.00 F
After 1 Hour | 30 | 9 | 12 | 15.00 F
After 48 Hours | 20 | 7 | 6 | 10.00 F
| 20 | 8 | 7 |
After 48 Hours | 30 | 6 | 8 | 15.00 F
After 24 Hours | 15 | 2 | 4 | 10.00 F
Total times surely and possibly seen,— 70 81 |
========================================================+=============
TABLE 6 (c)
=======================================+==============================
| DOG 3 IMITATING DOG 1
--------------------------------+------+------+---------+-------------
| Times| Times| Times | Time 3 was
| 1 did| 3 saw| Doubtful| in alone
--------------------------------+------+------+---------+-------------
| 30 | 10 | 10 | 10.00 F
After 1 Hour | 30 | 9 | 10 | 10.00 F
After 1 Hour | 15 | 6 | 4 |
After 24 Hours | 30 | 9 | 11 | 15.00 F
After 24 Hours | 30 | 10 | 12 | 15.00 F
After 1 Hour | 30 | 8 | 9 | 10.00 F
After 48 Hours | 20 | 6 | 7 | 40.00 F
After 1 Hour | 20 | 6 | 5 |
After 48 Hours | 30 | 8 | 9 | 15.00 F
After 24 Hours | 15 | 3 | 4 | 20.00 F
Total times surely and possibly seen,— 75 81 |
========================================================+=============
Another corroborative, though not very valuable, experiment was the
following: Dog 3 had been taught for the purpose of another experiment
to jump up on a box and beg when I held a piece of meat above the box. I
then caused him to do this 110 times (within two days) in the presence of
1. Although 1 saw him at least 20 per cent of the times (3 was always fed
each time he jumped on the box), he never tried to imitate him.
It seems sure from these experiments that the animals were unable
to form an association leading to an act from having seen the other
animal, or animals, perform the act in a certain situation. Thus we
have further restricted the association process. Not only do animals
not have associations accompanied, more or less permeated and altered,
by inference and judgment; they do not have associations of the sort
which may be acquired from other animals by imitation. What this implies
concerning the actual mental content accompanying their acts will be
seen later on. It also seems sure that we should give up imitation as an
_a priori_ explanation of any novel intelligent performance. To say that
a dog who opens a gate, for instance, need not have reasoned it out _if
he had seen another dog do the same thing_, is to offer, instead of one
false explanation, another equally false. Imitation in any form is too
doubtful a factor to be presupposed without evidence. And if a general
imitative faculty is not sufficiently developed to succeed with such
simple acts as those of the experiments quoted, it must be confessed that
the faculty is in these higher mammals still rudimentary and capable
of influencing to only the most simple and habitual acts, or else that
for some reason its sphere of influence is limited to a certain class
of acts, possessed of some _qualitative difference_ other than mere
simplicity, which renders them imitable. The latter view seems a hard
one to reconcile with a sound psychology of imitation or association at
present, without resorting to instinct. Unless a certain class of acts
are by the innate mental make-up especially tender to the influence of
imitation, the theory fails to find good psychological ground to stand
on. The former view may very well be true. But in any case the burden
of proof would now seem to rest upon the adherents to imitation; the
promising attitude would seem to be one which went without imitation
as long as it could, and that is, of course, until it surely found it
present.
Returning to imitation considered in its human aspect, to imitation
as a transferred association in particular, we find that here our
analytical study of the animal mind promises important contributions to
general comparative psychology. If it is true, and there has been no
disagreement about it, that the primates do imitate acts of such novelty
and complexity that only this out-and-out kind of imitation can explain
the fact, we have located one great advance in mental development. Till
the primates we get practically nothing but instincts and individual
acquirement through impulsive trial and error. Among the primates we
get also acquisition by imitation, one form of the increase of mental
equipment by tradition. The child may learn from the parent quickly
without the tiresome process of seeing for himself. The less active and
less curious may share the progress of their superiors. The brain whose
impulses hitherto could only be dislodged by specific sense-impressions
may now have any impulse set agoing by the sight of the movement to which
it corresponds.
All this on the common supposition that the primates _do_ imitate, that
a monkey in the place of these cats and dogs _would_ have pulled the
string. My apology for leaving the matter in this way without experiments
of my own is that the monkey which I procured for just this purpose
failed in two months to become tame enough to be thus experimented on.
Accurate information about the nature and extent of imitation among
the primates should be the first aim of further work in comparative
psychology, and will be sought by the present writer as soon as he can
get subjects fit for experiments.
In a questionnaire which was sent to fifteen animal trainers,
the following questions were asked:—
1. “If one dog was in the habit of ‘begging’ to get food and
another dog saw him do it ten or twenty times, would the second
dog then beg himself?”
2. “In general is it easier for you to teach a cat or dog a
trick if he has seen another do it?”
3. “In general do cats imitate each other? Do dogs? Do
monkeys?”
4. “Give reasons for your opinion, and please write all the
reasons you have.”
Five gentlemen (Messrs. R. C. Carlisle, C. L. Edwards, V. P. Wormwood, H.
S. Maguire and W. E. Burke) courteously responded to my questionnaire.
All are trainers of acknowledged reputation. To these questions on
imitation four replied.
To the first question we find the following answers: (_a_) “Most dogs
would.” (_b_) “Yes; he will very likely do it. He will try and imitate
the other dog _generally_.” (_c_) “If a young dog with the mother, it
would be very apt to.... With older dogs, it would depend very much upon
circumstances.” (_d_) “He would not.”
To 2 the answers were: (_a_) “Very much easier.” (_b_) “It is always
easier if they see another one do it often.” (_c_) “This would also
depend on certain conditions. In teaching to jump out of a box and
in again, seeing another might help, but in teaching something very
difficult, I do not think it would be the case.” (_d_) “It is not.”
To 3 the answers were: (_a_) “Yes. Some. More than either dogs or cats.”
(_b_) “Yes. Yes. Yes.” (_c_) “In certain things, yes; mostly in those
things which are in compliance to the laws of their own nature.” (_d_)
“No. No. Yes, they are born imitators.”
The only definite answer to question 4 was: “Take a dog or cat and close
them up in a room and go in and out several times, and you will find that
they will go to the door and stand up on their hind legs with front paws
on the door knob and try to open the door to get out. I could also give
you a hundred more such reasons.” This was given by (_b_).
The replies to a test question, however, go to show that these opinions
regarding imitation may be mistaken. Question 8 was: “If you wanted to
teach a cat to get out of a cage by opening an ordinary thumb latch and
then pushing the door, would you take the cat’s paw and push down the
thumb piece with it and then push the door open with the paw, or would
you just leave the cat inside until it learned the trick itself?” The
second is certainly the better way, as will be seen in a later part of
this paper, and pushing the latch with the cat’s paw has absolutely no
beneficial influence on the formation of the association, yet (_a_) and
(_b_) both chose the first way, and (_c_) answered ambiguously. Further,
the only reason given is, of course, no reason at all. It proves too
much, for if there were such imitation as that, my cats and dogs would
surely have done the far simpler things required of them. I cannot find
that trainers make any practical use of imitation in teaching animals
tricks, and on the whole I think these replies leave the matter just
where it was before. They are mere opinions—not records of observed
facts. It seems arrogant and may seem to some unjustifiable thus to
discard testimony, to stick to a theory based on one’s own experiments in
the face of these opinions. If I had wished to gain applause and avoid
adverse criticism, I would have abstained from upholding the radical
view of the preceding pages. At times it seems incredible to me that the
results of my experiments should embody the truth of the matter, that
there should be no imitation. The theory based on them seems, even to me,
too radical, too novel. It seems highly improbable that I should be right
and all the others wrong. But I cannot avoid the responsibility of giving
what seems to my judgment the most probable explanation of the results of
the experiments; and that is the radical explanation already given.
THE MENTAL FACT IN ASSOCIATION
It is now time to put the question as to just what is in an animal’s
mind when, having profited by numerous experiences, he has formed the
association and does the proper act when put in a certain box. The
commonly accepted view of the mental fact then present is that the sight
of the inside of the box reminds the animal of his _previous pleasant
experience after escape_ and _of the movements_ which he made which were
immediately followed by and so associated with that escape. It has been
taken for granted that _if the animal remembered the pleasant experience
and remembered the movement, he would make the movement_. It has been
assumed that the association was _an association of ideas_; that when
one of the ideas was of a movement the animal was capable of making
the movement. So, for example, Morgan says, in the ‘Introduction to
Comparative Psychology’: “If a chick takes a ladybird in its beak forty
times and each time finds it nasty, this is of no practical value to the
bird unless the sight of the insect suggests _the nasty taste_” (p. 90).
Again, on page 92, Morgan says, “_A race after the ball_ had been
suggested through the channel of olfactory sensations.” Also, on page
86 “... the visual impression suggested the idea or representation of
unpleasant gustatory experience.” The attitude is brought out more
completely in a longer passage on page 118: “On one of our first ascents
one of them put up a young coney, and they both gave chase. Subsequently
they always hurried on to this spot, and, though they never saw another
coney there, reiterated disappointment did not efface _the memory of
that first chase_, or so it seemed.” That is, according to Morgan, the
dogs thought of the chase and its pleasure, on nearing the spot where it
had occurred, and so hurried on. On page 148 of ‘Habit and Instinct,’ we
read, “Ducklings so thoroughly associated water with the sight of their
tin that they tried to drink from it and wash in it when it was empty,
nor did they desist for some minutes,” and this with other similar
phenomena is attributed to the ‘association by contiguity’ of human
psychology.
From these quotations it seems fairly sure that if we should ask Mr.
Morgan, who is our best comparative psychologist, what took place in the
mind of one of these cats of our experiments during the performance of
one of the ‘tricks’ he would reply: “The cat performs the act because
of the association of ideas. He is reminded by the sight of the box and
loop of his experience of pulling that loop and of eating fish outside.
So he goes and pulls it again.” This view has stood unchallenged, but its
implication is false. It implies that an animal, whenever it thinks of
an act, can supply an _impulse to do_ the act. It takes for granted that
the performance of a cat who gets out of a box is mentally like that of
a man who thinks of going down street or of writing a letter and then
does it. The mental process is not alike in the two cases, for animals
can _not_ provide the impulse to _do_ whatever act they think of. _No cat
can form an association leading to an act unless there is included in
the association an impulse of its own which leads to the act._ There is
no general storehouse from which the impulse may be supplied after the
association is formed.
Before describing the experiments which justify these statements, it will
be worth while to recall the somewhat obvious facts about the composition
of one of these associations. There might be in an association, such as
is formed after experience with one of our boxes, the following elements:—
1. Sense-impression of the interior of the box, etc.
2. (_a_) Discomfort and (_b_) desire to get out.
3. Representation of oneself pulling the loop.
4. Fiat comparable to the human “I’ll do it.”
5. The impulse which actually does it.
6. Sense-impression of oneself pulling the loop, seeing one’s paw in a
certain place, feeling one’s body in a certain way, etc.
7. Sense-impression of going outside.
8. Sense-impression of eating, and the included pleasure.
Also between 1 and 4 we may have 9, representations of one’s experience
in going out, 10, of the taste of the food, etc. 6, 7 and 8 come after
the act and do not influence it, of course, except in so far as they
are the basis of the future 3’s, 9’s and 10’s. About 2 we are not at
present disputing. Our question is as to whether 3 or 5 is the essential
thing. In human associations 3 certainly often is, and the animals
have been credited with the same kind. Whatever he _thinks_, Professor
Morgan surely _talks_ as if 1 aroused 9 and 10 and 3 and leaves 5 to be
supplied at will. We have affirmed that 5 is the essential thing, that no
association without a specific 5 belonging to it and acquired by it can
lead to an act. Let us look at the reasons.
A cat has been made to go into a box through the door, which is then
closed. She pulls a loop and comes out and gets fish. She is made to go
in by the door again, and again lets herself out. After this has happened
enough times, the cat will of her own accord go into the box after eating
the fish. It will be hard to keep her out. The old explanation of this
would be that the cat associated the memory of being in the box with the
subsequent pleasure, and therefore performed the equivalent of saying
to herself, “Go to! I will go in.” The thought of _being in_, they say,
makes her _go in_. _The thought of being in will not make her go in._
For if, instead of pushing the cat toward the doorway or holding it
there, and thus allowing it to itself give the impulse, to innervate the
muscles, to walk in, you shut the door first and drop the cat in through
a hole in the top of the box, she will, after escaping as many times
as in the previous case, _not_ go into the box of her own accord. She
has had exactly the same opportunity of connecting the idea of being in
the box with the subsequent pleasure. Either a cat cannot connect ideas,
representations, at all, or she has not the power of progressing from the
thought of being in to the act of going in. The only difference between
the first cat and the second cat is that the first cat, in the course of
the experience, has the impulse to crawl through that door, while the
second has not the impulse to crawl through the door or to drop through
that hole. So, though you put the second cat on the box beside the hole,
she doesn’t try to get into the box through it. The impulse is the _sine
qua non_ of the association. The second cat has everything else, but
cannot supply that. These phenomena were observed in six cats, three of
which were tried by the first method, three by the second. Of the first
three, one went in himself on the 26th time and frequently thereafter,
one on the 18th and the other on the 37th; the two last as well as the
first did that frequently in later trials. The other three all failed to
go in themselves after 50, 60 and 75 trials, respectively.
The case of No. 7 was especially instructive, though not among these six.
No. 7 had had some trials in which it was put in through the door, but
ordinarily in this particular experiment was dropped in. After about 80
trials it would frequently exhibit the following phenomena: It would,
after eating the fish, go up to the doorway and, rushing from it, search
for fish. The kitten was very small and would go up into the doorway,
whirl round and dash out, all in one quick movement. The best description
of its behavior is the paradoxical one that it went out without going
in. The association evidently concerned what it had _done_, what it had
an impulse for, namely, _coming out through that door_ to get fish, not
what it remembered, had a representation of.
Still more noteworthy evidence is found in the behavior of cats and
dogs who were put in these boxes, left one or two minutes, and then
put through the proper movement. For example, a cat would be put in B
(O at back) and left two minutes. I would then put my hand in through
the top of the box, take the cat’s paw and with it pull down the loop.
The cat would then go out and eat the fish. This would be done over and
over again, and after every ten or fifteen such trials the cat would be
left in alone. If in ten or twenty minutes he did not escape, he would
be taken out through the top and not fed. In one series of experiments
animals were taken and thus treated in boxes from which their own
impulsive activity had failed to liberate them. The results, given in
the table below, show that no animal who fails to perform an act in the
course of his own impulsive activity will learn it by being put through
it.
In these experiments some of the cats and all of the dogs but No. 1
showed no agitation or displeasure at my handling from the very start.
Nor was there any in Dog 1 or the other cats after a few trials. It may
also be remarked that in the trials alone which took place during and
at the end of the experiment the animals without exception showed that
they did not fail to perform the act from lack of a desire to get out.
They all tried hard enough to get out and would surely have used the
association if they had formed it.
TABLE 7
===========+===============================+==============+============+
Individual | Apparatus |Time in which |Number of |
| |impulsive |times the |
| |activity |animal was |
| |failed to lead|put through |
| |to the act |the movement|
-----------+-------------------------------+--------------+------------+
Cat 1 | F (String outside unfastened) | 55.00 | 77 |
Cat 5 | G (Thumb latch) | 57.00 | 59 |
Cat 7 | G (Thumb latch) | 50.00 | 30 |
Cat 2 | G (Thumb latch) | 54.00 | 141 |
Dog 2 | BB1 (O at back, high) | 48.00 | 30 |
Dog 3 | BB1 (O at back, high) | 20.00 | 85 |
Dog 2 | M (Lever outside) | 15.00 | 95 |
Dog 1 | FF[12] | 30.00 | 110 |
Chick 89 | X (see page 53) | 20.00 | 30 |
Cat 13 | KKK,[13][14] | 40.00 | 65 |
===========+===============================+==============+============+
===========+===============================+===============+========
Individual | Apparatus |Time in which |Time of
| |this experience|final
| |failed to lead |trial
| |to the act |
-----------+-------------------------------+---------------+--------
Cat 1 | F (String outside unfastened) | 120.00 | 20.00
Cat 5 | G (Thumb latch) | 55.00 | 10.00
Cat 7 | G (Thumb latch) | 35.00 | 10.00
Cat 2 | G (Thumb latch) | 110.00 | 20.00
Dog 2 | BB1 (O at back, high) | 80.00 | 60.00
Dog 3 | BB1 (O at back, high) | 55.00 | 10.00
Dog 2 | M (Lever outside) | 140.00 | 30.00
Dog 1 | FF[12] | 135.00 | 60.00
Chick 89 | X (see page 53) | 60.00 | 30.00
Cat 13 | KKK,[13][14] | 60.00 | 10.00
============+===============================+===============+========
Now, the only difference between the experiences of the animals in these
experiments and their experiences in those where they let themselves
out, is that here they only saw and felt themselves making the movement,
whereas in the other case they also felt the impulse, gave the
innervation. That, then, is the essential. It may be objected that the
animals failed because they did not _attend_ to the process of being put
through the movement, that, had they attended to it, they would later
themselves have made the movement. It is, however, improbable that out
of fifty times an animal should not have attended to what was going on
at least two or three times. But if seeing himself do it was on a par
with feeling an impulse to and so doing it, even two or three times
would suffice to start the habit. And it is even more improbable that an
experience should be followed by keen pleasure fifty times and not be
attended to with might and main, unless animals attend _only_ to their
own impulses and the excitements thereof. But if the latter be true, it
simply affirms our view from a more fundamental standpoint.
In another set of experiments animals were put in boxes with whose
mechanisms they had had no experience, and from which they might or
might not be able to escape by their own impulsive acts. The object was
to see whether the time taken to form the association could be altered
by my instruction. The results turned out to give a better proof of the
inability to form an association by being put through the act than any
failure to change the time-curve. For it happened in all but one of
the cases that the movement which the animal made to open the door was
different from the movement which I had put him through. Thus, several
cats were put through (in Box C [button]) the following movement: I took
the right paw and, putting it against the lower right-hand side of the
button, pushed it round to a horizontal position. The cats’ ways were
as follows: No. 1 turned it by clawing vigorously at its top; No. 6, by
pushing it round with his nose; No. 7, in the course of an indiscriminate
scramble at first, in later trials either by pushing with his nose or
clawing at the top, settling down finally to the last method. Nos. 2 and
5 did it as No. 1 did. Cat 2 was tried in B (O at back). I took his paw
and pressed the loop with it, but he formed the habit of clawing and
biting the string at the top of the box near the front. No. 1 was tried
in A. I pressed the loop with his paw, but he formed the habit of biting
at it.
In every case I kept on putting the animal through the act every time,
if at the end of two minutes (one in several cases) it had not done it,
even after it had shown, by using a different way, that my instruction
had no influence. I never succeeded in getting the animal to change its
way for mine. Moreover, if any one should fancy that the animal really
profited by my instruction so as to learn what result to attain, namely,
the turning of a certain button, but chose a way of his own to turn
it, he would be deluding himself. The time taken to learn the act with
instruction was no shorter than without.
If, then, an animal happens to learn an act by being put through it, it
is just happening, nothing more. Of course, you may _direct_ the animal’s
efforts so that he will perform the act himself the sooner. For instance,
you may hold him so that his accidental pawing will be sure to hit the
vital point of the contrivance. But the animal cannot form an association
leading to an act unless the particular impulse to that act is present as
an element of the association; he cannot supply it from a general stock.
The groundwork of animal associations is not the association of _ideas_,
but the association of idea or sense-impression with _impulse_.
In the questionnaire mentioned elsewhere, some questions were asked with
a view to obtaining corroboration or refutation of this theory that an
impulse or innervation is a necessary element in every association formed
if that association leads to an act. The questions and answers were:—
_Question 1_: “If you wanted to teach a horse to tap seven times with his
hoof when you asked him, ‘How many days are there in a week?,’ would you
teach him by taking his leg and making him go through the motions?”
_A_ answered, “Yes! at first.”
_B_ answered, “No! I would not.”
_C_ answered, “At first, yes!”
_D_ answered, “No!”
_Question 2_: “Do you think you _could_ teach him that way, even if
naturally you would take some other way?”
_A_ answered, “In time, yes!”
_B_ answered, “I think it would be a very hard way.”
_C_ answered, “Certainly I do.”
_D_ answered, “I do not think I could.”
_E_ answered, “Yes.”
_Question 3_: “How would you teach him?”
_A_ answered, “I should tap his foot with a whip, so that he would raise
it, and reward him each time.”
_B_ answered, “I should teach him by the motion of the whip.”
_C_ answered, “First teach him by pricking his leg the number of times
you wanted his foot lifted.”
_D_ answered, “You put figure 2 on blackboard and touch him on leg twice
with cane, and so on.”
_E_ answered ambiguously.
It is noteworthy that even those who think they _could_ teach an animal
by putting him through the trick do not use that method, except at first.
And what they really do then is probably to stimulate the animal to the
reflex act of raising his hoof. The hand simply replaces the cane or
whip as the means of stimulus. The answers are especially instructive,
because the numerous counting tricks done by trained horses seem, at
first, to be incomprehensible, unless the trainer can teach the horse by
putting it through the movement the proper number of times. The counting
tricks performed by Mascot, Professor Maguire’s horse, were quoted to me
by a friend as incomprehensible on my theory. The answers given above
show how simple the thing really is. All the counting-tricks of all the
intelligent horses depend on the fact that a horse raises his hoof when
a certain stimulus is given. One simple reaction gives the basis for a
multitude of tricks. In the same way other tricks, which at first sight
seem to require that the animal should learn by being put through the
movement, may depend on some simple reflex or natural impulse.
Another question was, “How would you teach a cat to get out of a box, the
door of which was closed with a thumb latch?”
_A_ answered, “I should use a puffball as a plaything for the cat to claw
at.” This means, I suppose, that he would get the cat to claw at the
puffball and thus direct its clawings to the vicinity of the thumb piece.
_B_ answered, “I would put the cat in and get it good and hungry and then
open the door by lifting the latch with my finger. Then put some food
that the cat likes outside, and she will soon try to imitate you and so
learn the trick.”
_C_ answered, “I would first adjust all things in connection with the
surroundings of the cat so they would be applicable to the laws of its
nature, and then proceed to teach the trick.”
I suppose this last means that he would fix the box so that some of the
cat’s instinctive acts would lead it to perform the trick. The answer
given by _B_ means apparently that he would simply leave the thing to
accident, for any such imitation as he supposes is out of the question.
At all events, none of these would naturally start to teach the trick by
putting the animal through the motions, which, were it a possible way,
would probably be a traditional one among trainers. On the whole, I see
in these data no reason for modifying our dogma that animals cannot learn
acts without the impulse.
Presumably the reader has already seen budding out of this dogma a new
possibility, a further simplification of our theories about animal
consciousness. The possibility is that animals may have _no images or
memories at all, no ideas to associate_. Perhaps the entire fact of
association in animals is the presence of sense-impressions with which
are associated, by resultant pleasure, certain impulses, and that,
therefore, and therefore only, a certain situation brings forth a certain
act. Returning to our analysis of the association, this theory would say
that there was no (9) or (10) or (3) or (4), that the sense-impression
gave rise, when accompanied by the feeling of discomfort, to the impulse
(5) directly, without the intervention of any representations of the
taste of the food, or the experience of being outside, or the sight of
oneself doing the act. This theory might be modified so as to allow
that the representations could be there, but to deny that they were
necessary, were inevitably present, that the impulse was connected to the
sense-impression through them. It would then claim that the effective
part of the association was a direct bond between the situation and the
impulse, but would not cut off the possibility of there being an aura
of memories along with the process. It then becomes a minor question of
interpretation which will doubtless sooner or later demand an answer. I
shall not try to answer it now. The more radical question, the question
of the utter exclusion of representative trains of thought, of any
genuine association of _ideas_ from the mental life of animals, is
worth serious consideration. I confess that, although certain authentic
anecdotes and certain experiments, to be described soon, lead me to
reject this exclusion, there are many qualities in animals’ behavior
which seem to back it up. If one takes his stand by a rigid application
of the law of parsimony, he will find justification for this view which
no experiments of mine can overthrow.
Of one thing I am sure, and that is that it is worth while to state the
question and how to solve it, for although the point of view involved is
far removed from that of our leading psychologists to-day, it cannot long
remain so. I am sorry that I cannot pretend to give a final decision.
The view seems preposterous because, if an animal has sense-impressions
when his brain is excited by currents starting in the end-organs,
it seems incredible that he should not be conscious in imagination
and memory by having similar excitations caused from within. We are
accustomed to think of memory as the companion of sensation. But,
after all, it is a question of fact whether the connections in the
cat brain include connections between present sensation-neuroses and
past sensation-neuroses. The only connections may be those between the
former and impulse-neuroses, and there is no authoritative reason why
we should suppose any others unless they are demonstrated by the cat’s
behavior. This is just the point at issue. Such evidence as the phenomena
of animals’ dreams does not at all prove the presence of memory or
imagination. A dog may very well growl in his sleep without any idea of
a hostile dog. The impulse to growl _may_ be caused by chance excitement
of its own neurosis without any sensation-neurosis being concerned.
_Acts_ of recognition may have no _feelings_ of recognition going with or
causing them. A sense-impression of me gets associated in my dog’s mind
with the impulses to jump on me, lick my hand, wag his tail, etc. If,
after a year, the connection between the two has lasted, he will surely
jump on me, lick my hand and wag his tail, though he has not and never
had any representation of me.
The only logical way to go at this question and settle it is, I think,
to find some associations the formation of which requires the presence
of images, of ideas. You have to give an animal a chance to associate
sense-impression A with sense-impression B and then to associate B
with some act C so that the presence of B in the mind will lead to the
performance of C. Presumably the representation of B, if present,
will lead to C just as the sense-impression B did. Now, if the chance
to associate B with A has been improved, you ought, when the animal is
confronted with the sense-impression A, to get a revival of B and so
the act C. Such a result would, if all chance to associate C with A had
been eliminated, demonstrate the presence of representations and their
associations. I performed such an experiment in a form modified so as to
make it practicable with my animals and resources. Unfortunately, this
modification spoils the crucial nature of the experiment and robs it of
much of its authority. The experiment was as follows:—
A cat was in the big box where they were kept (see p. 90) very hungry.
As I had been for a long time the source of all food, the cats had grown
to watch me very carefully. I sat, during the experiment, about eight
feet from the box, and would at intervals of two minutes clap my hands
four times and say, “I must feed those cats.” Of course the cat would at
first feel no impulse except perhaps to watch me more closely when this
signal was given. After ten seconds had elapsed I would take a piece of
fish, go up to the cage and hold it through the wire netting, three feet
from the floor. The cat would then, of course, feel the impulse to climb
up the front of the cage. In fact, experience had previously established
the habit of climbing up whenever I moved toward the cage, so that in the
experiment the cat did not ordinarily wait until I arrived there with the
fish. In this experiment
A = The sense-impression of my movements and voice when giving the signal.
B = The sense-impression of my movements in taking fish, rising, walking
to box, etc.
C = The act of climbing up, with the impulse leading thereunto.
The question was whether after a while A would remind the cat of B, and
cause him to do C before he got the _sense-impression_ of B, that is,
before the ten seconds were up. If A leads to C through a memory of B,
animals surely _can_ have association of ideas proper, and probably often
_do_. Now, as a fact, after from thirty to sixty trials, the cat does
perform C immediately on being confronted by A or some seconds later,
at all events before B is presented. And it is my present opinion that
their action is to be explained by the presence, through association, of
the idea B. But it is not impossible that A was associated _directly_
with the impulse to C, although that impulse was removed from it by
ten seconds of time. Such an association is, it seems to me, highly
improbable, unless the neurosis of A, and with it the psychosis,
continues until the impulse to C appears. But if it does so continue
during the ten seconds, and thus get directly linked to C, we have
exactly a representation, an image, a memory, in the mind for eight of
those ten seconds. It does not help the deniers of images to substitute
an image of A for an image of B. Yet, unless they do this, they have
to suppose that A comes and goes, and that after ten seconds C comes,
and, passing over the intervening blank, willfully chooses out A and
associates itself with it. There are some other considerations regarding
the behavior of the cats from the time the signal was given till they
climbed up, which may be omitted in the hope that it will soon be
possible to perform a decisive experiment. If an observer can make sure
of the animal’s attention to a sequence A-B, where B does not arouse any
impulse to an act, and then later get the animal to associate B with C,
leaving A out this time, he may then, if A, when presented anew, arouses
C, bid the deniers of representations to forever hold their peace.
Another reason for allowing animals representations and images is found
in the longer time taken to form the association between the act of
licking or scratching and the consequent escape. If the associations in
general were simply between situation and impulse and act, one would
suppose that the situation would be associated with the impulse to lick
or scratch as readily as with the impulse to turn a button or claw a
string. Such is not the case. By comparing the curves for Z on pages
57-58 with the others, one sees that for so simple an act it takes a
long time to form the association. This is not a final reason, for lack
of attention, a slight increase in the time taken to open the door after
the act was done, or an absence of preparation in the nervous system for
connections between these particular acts and definite sense-impressions,
may very well have been the cause of the difficulty in forming the
associations. Nor is it certain that _ideas_ of clawing loops would be
easier to form than ideas of scratching or licking oneself. The matter
is still open to question. But, as said before, my opinion would be that
animals _do_ have representations and that such are the beginning of the
rich life of ideas in man. For the most part, however, such are confined
to specific and narrow practical lines. There was no evidence that my
animals habitually _did_ form associations of ideas from their experience
throughout, or that such were constantly revived without the spur of
immediate practical advantage.[15]
Before leaving the topic an account may be given of experiments similar
to the one described above as performed on Cats 3 and 4, which were
undertaken with Cat 13 and Dogs 1, 2 and 3.
Cat 13 was fed with pieces of fish at the top of the wire netting 45
times, to accustom it to climbing up when it saw me come with fish. I
then went through the same process as with 3 and 4, but at intervals of
60 to 90 seconds instead of 120. After 90 such trials it occasionally
climbed up a little way, but though 135 trials in all were given, it
never made the uniform and definite reaction which 3 and 4 did. It
reacted, when it reacted at all, at from 5 to 9 seconds after the
signal. Whether age, weight, lack of previous habitual climbing when I
approached, or a slowness in forming the association made the difference,
is uncertain.
Dog 1 was experimented on in the following manner: I would put him in a
big pen, 20×10 feet, and sit outside facing it, he watching me as was
his habit. I would pound with a stick and say, “Go over to the corner.”
After an interval (10 seconds for 35 trials, 5 seconds for 60 trials)
I would go over to the corner (12 feet off) and drop a piece of meat
there. He, of course, followed and secured it. On the 6th, 7th, 16th,
17th, 18th and 19th trials he did perform the act before the 10 seconds
were up, then for several times went during the two-minute intervals
without regarding the signal, and finally abandoned the habit altogether,
although he showed by his behavior when the signal was given that he was
not indifferent to it.
Dogs 1, 2 and 3 were also given 95, 135 and 95 trials, respectively,
the acts done being (1) standing up against the wire netting inclosing
the pen, (2) placing the paws on top of a keg, and (3) jumping up onto
a box. The time intervals were 5 seconds in each case. No dog of these
ever performed the act before I started to take the meat to feed them,
but they did show, by getting up if they were lying down when the signal
was given, or by coming to me if they were in some other part of the
pen, that something was suggested to them by it. Why these cases differ
from the cases of Cats 3 and 4 (10 and 12 also presented phenomena like
those reported in the cases of 3 and 4) is an interesting though not
very important question. The dogs were not kept so hungry as were the
cats, and experience had certainly not rendered the particular impulses
involved so sensitive, so ready to discharge. Dogs 2 and 3 were older.
There is no reason to invoke any qualitative difference in the mental
make-up of the animals until more illuminating experiments are made.
ASSOCIATION BY SIMILARITY AND THE FORMATION OF CONCEPTS
What there is to say on this subject from the standpoint of my
experiments will be best introduced by an account of the experiments
themselves.
Dog 1 had escaped from AA (O at front) 26 times. He was then put in
BB (O at back). Now, whereas 2 and 3, who were put in without previous
experience with AA, failed to paw the loop in BB, No. 1 succeeded. His
times were 7.00, .35, 2.05, .40, .32, .10, 1.10, .38, .10, .05, and from
then on he pawed the loop as soon as put in the box. After a day or so he
was put in BB1 (O at back high). Although the loop was in a new position,
his times were only .20, .10, .10, etc. After nine days he was put in a
box arranged with a little wooden platform 2½ inches square, hung where
the loop was in BB1. Although the platform resembled the loop not the
least save in position, his times were only .10, .07, .05, etc.
[Illustration: FIG. 21.]
From the curves given in Figure 21, which tell the history of 10, 11 and
12 in B1 (O at back) after each had previously been familiarized with A
(O at front), we see this same influence of practice in reacting to one
mechanism upon the time taken to react to a mechanism at all similar. It
naturally takes a cat a longer time to accidentally claw a loop in the
back than in the front, yet a comparison of these curves with those on
page 39, Figure 2, shows the opposite to have been the case with 10, 11
and 12. The same remarkable quickness was noted in Cats 1 and 3 when put
into B (O at back) after learning A (O at front). Moreover, the loops
were not alike. The loop in A was of smaller wire, covered with a bluish
thread, while the loop in B was covered with a black rubber compound, the
diameter of the loop being three times that of A’s loop.
If any advocate of reason in animals has read so far, I doubt not that
his heart has leaped with joy at these two preceding paragraphs. “How,”
he will say, “can you explain these facts without that prime factor in
human reason, association by similarity? Surely they show the animal
perceiving likenesses and acting from general ideas.” _This is the very
last thing that they show._ Let us see why they do not show this and what
they do show. He who thinks that these animals had a general notion of a
loop-like thing as the thing to be clawed, that they felt the loop in B,
different as it was in size, color and position, to be still a loop, to
have the essential quality of the other, must needs presuppose that the
cat has a clear, accurate sensation and representation of both. Only if
the cat discriminates can it later associate by noticing similarities.
This is what such thinkers do presuppose. A bird, for instance, dives
in the same manner into a river of yellow water, a pond or an ocean.
It has a general notion, they say, of water. It knows that river water
is one thing and pond water another thing, but it knows that both are
water, _ergo_, fit to dive into. The cat who reacts to a loop of small
wire of a blue color knows just what that loop is, and when it sees a
different loop, knows its differences, but knows also its likeness, and
reacts to the essential. Thus crediting the cat with our differentiation
and perception of individuality, they credit it with our conceptions and
perceptions of similarity. Unless the animal has the first, there is no
reason to suppose the last. Now, _the animal does not have either_.
It does not in the first place react to that particular loop in A,
with recognition of its qualities. It reacts to a vague, ill-defined
sense-impression, undiscriminated and even unperceived in the technical
sense of the word. Morgan’s phrase, “a bit of pure experience,” is
perhaps as good as any. The loop is to the cat what the ocean is to a
man, when thrown into it when half-asleep. Thus the cat who climbed up
the front of the cage whenever I said, “I must feed those cats,” would
climb up just as inevitably when I said, “My name is Thorndike,” or
“To-day is Tuesday.” So cats would claw at the loop or button when the
door was open. So cats would paw at the place where a loop had been,
though none was there. The reaction is not to a well-discriminated
object, but to a vague situation, and any element of the situation may
arouse the reaction. The whole situation in the case of man is speedily
resolved into elements; the particular elements are held in focus, and
the non-essential is systematically kept out of mind. In the animal the
whole situation sets loose the impulse; all of its elements, including
the non-essentials, get yoked with the impulse, and the situation may
be added to or subtracted from without destroying the association,
provided you leave something which will set off the impulse. The animal
does not think one is like the other, nor does it, as is so often said,
mistake one for the other. It does not think _about_ it at all; it just
thinks _it_, and the _it_ is the kind of “pure experience” we have
been describing. In human mental life we have accurate, discriminated
sensations and perceptions, realized as such, and general notions, also
realized as such. Now, what the phenomena in animals which we have been
considering show is that they have neither. Far from showing an advanced
stage of mentality, they show a very primitive and unspecialized stage.
They are to be explained not by the presence of _general_ notions, but by
the absence of notions of _particulars_. The idea that animals react to
a particular and absolutely defined and realized sense-impression, and
that a similar reaction to a sense-impression which varies from the first
proves an association by similarity, is a myth. We shall see later how an
animal does come in certain cases to discriminate, in one sense of the
word, with a great degree of delicacy, but we shall also see then what
must be emphasized now, that naturally the animal’s brain reacts very
coarsely to sense-impressions, and that the animal does not think about
his thoughts at all.
This puts a new face upon the question of the origin and development of
human abstractions and consequent general ideas. It has been commonly
supposed that animals had ‘recepts’ or such semi-abstractions as Morgan’s
‘predominants,’ and that by associating with these, arbitrary and
permanent signs, such as articulate sounds, one turned them into genuine
ideas of qualities. Professor James has made the simple but brilliant
criticism that all a recept really means is _a tendency to react in a
certain way_. But I have tried to show that the fact that an animal
reacts alike to a lot of things gives no reason to believe that it is
conscious of their common quality and reacts to that consciousness,
because the things it reacts to in the first place are not the
hard-and-fast, well-defined ‘things’ of human life. What a ‘recept’ or
‘predominant’ really stands for is no thing which can be transformed into
a notion of a quality by being labelled with a name. This easy solution
of the problem of abstraction is impossible. A true idea of the problem
itself is better than such a solution.
My statement of what has been the course of development along this line
is derived from observations of animals’ behavior and Professor James’
theory of the nature of and presumable brain processes going with the
abstractions and conceptions of human consciousness, but it is justified
chiefly by its harmony with the view that conception, the faculty of
having general notions, has been naturally selected by reason of its
utility. The first thing is for an animal to learn to react alike only
to things which resemble each other in the _essential_ qualities. On an
artificial, analytic basis, feelings of abstract qualities might grow out
of reacting alike to objects similar in such a respect that the reaction
would be useless or harmful. But in the actual struggle for existence,
starting with the mammalian mind as we have found it, you will tend to
get reactions to the _beneficial_ similarities by selection from among
these so-called mistakes, _before you get any general faculty of noticing
similarities_. In order that this faculty of indifferent reaction to
different things shall grow into the useful faculty of indifferent
reaction to different things _which have all some quality that makes the
reaction a fit one_, there must be a tremendous range of associations.
For a lot of the similarities which are non-essential have to be stamped
out, not by a power of feeling likeness, but by their failure to lead to
pleasure. With such a wide range of associations we may get reactions
on the one hand where impulses have been connected with one particular
sense-impression because when connected with all others they had failed
to give pleasure, and on the other hand, reactions where an impulse has
been connected with numerous different impressions possessing one common
quality, and disconnected with all impressions, otherwise like these,
which fail to have that one quality.
Combined with this multiplication of associations, there is, I think, an
equally important factor, the loosening of the elements of an association
from one another and from it as a whole. Probably the idea of the look
of the loop or lever or thumb latch never entered the mind of any one of
my cats during the months that they were with me, except when the front
end of the association containing it was excited by putting the cat
into the box. In general, the unit of their consciousness, apart from
impulses and emotions, is a whole association-series. Such soil cannot
grow general ideas, for the ideas, so long as they never show themselves
except for a particular practical business, will not be thought about
or realized in their nature or connections. If enough associations are
provided by a general curiosity, such as is seen among the monkeys,
if the mental elements of the association are freed, isolated, felt
by themselves, _then_ a realization of the ideas, feelings of their
similarity by transition from one to the other, feelings of qualities
and of meanings, may gradually emerge. Language will be a factor in the
isolation of the ideas and a help to their realization. But when any
one says that language has been the cause of the change from brute to
man, when one talks as if _nothing but it_ were needed to turn animal
consciousness into human, he is speaking as foolishly as one who should
say that a proboscis added to a cow would make it an elephant.
This is all I have to say, in this connection, about association by
similarity and conception, and with it is concluded our analysis of the
nature of the association-process in animals. Before proceeding to treat
of the delicacy, complexity, number and permanence of these associations,
it seems worth while to attempt to describe graphically, not by analysis,
the mental fact we have been studying, and also to connect our results
with the previous theories of association.
One who has seen the phenomena so far described, who has watched the
life of a cat or dog for a month or more under test conditions, gets,
or fancies he gets, a fairly definite idea of what the intellectual
life of a cat or dog feels like. It is most like what we feel when
consciousness contains little thought about anything, when we feel the
sense-impressions in their first intention, so to speak, when we feel our
own body, and the impulses we give to it. Sometimes one gets this animal
consciousness while in swimming, for example. One feels the water, the
sky, the birds above, but with no thoughts _about_ them or memories of
how they looked at other times, or æsthetic judgments about their beauty;
one feels no _ideas_ about what movements he will make, but feels himself
make them, feels his body throughout. Self-consciousness dies away.
Social consciousness dies away. The meanings, and values, and connections
of things die away. One feels sense-impressions, has impulses, feels the
movements he makes; that is all.
This pictorial description may be supplemented by an account of some
associations in human life which are learned in the same way as are
animal associations; associations, therefore, where the process of
formation is possibly homologous with that in animals. When a man
learns to swim, to play tennis or billiards, or to juggle, the process
is something like what happens when the cat learns to pull the string
to get out of the box, provided, of course, we remove, in the man’s
case, all the accompanying mentality which is not directly concerned in
learning the feat.[16] Like the latter, the former contains desire,
sense-impression, impulse, act and possible representations. Like it, the
former is learned gradually. Moreover, the associations concerned cannot
be formed by imitation. One does not know how to dive just by seeing
another man dive. You cannot form them from being put through them,
though, of course, this helps indirectly, in a way that it does not with
animals. One makes use of no feelings of a common element, no perceptions
of similarity. The tennis player does not feel, “This ball coming at
this angle and with this speed is similar in angle, though not in speed,
to that other ball of an hour ago, therefore I will hit it in a similar
way.” He simply feels an impulse from the sense-impression. Finally,
the elements of the associations are not isolated. No tennis player’s
stream of thought is filled with free-floating representations of any of
the tens of thousands of sense-impressions or movements he has seen and
made on the tennis court. Yet there is consciousness enough at the time,
keen consciousness of the sense-impressions, impulses, feelings of one’s
bodily acts. So with the animals. There is consciousness enough, but of
this kind.
Thus, the associations in human life, which compare with the simple
connections learned by animals, are associations involving connections
between novel, complex and often inconstant sense-impressions and
impulses to acts similarly novel, complex and often inconstant. Man has
the elements of most of his associations in isolated form, attended
to separately, possessed as a permanent fund, recallable at will, and
multifariously connected among themselves, but with these associations
which we have mentioned, and with others like them, he deals as the
animals deal with theirs. The process, in the man’s mind, leaving out
extraneous mental stuff, may be homologous to the association-process
in animals. Of course, by assiduous attention to the elements of these
associations, a man may isolate them, may thus get these associations
to the same plane as the rest. But they pass through the stage we have
described, even then, and with most men, stay there. The abstraction, the
naming, etc., generally come from observers of the game or action, and
concern things as felt by them, not by the participant.
CRITICISM OF PREVIOUS THEORIES
We may now look for a moment at what previous writers have said about the
nature of association in animals. The complaint was made early in this
book that all the statements had been exceedingly vague and of no value,
except as retorts to the ‘reason’ school. In the course of the discussion
I have tried to extricate from this vagueness definite statements about
imitation, association of ideas, association by ideas. There is one more
theory, more or less hidden in the vagueness,—the theory that association
in animals is the same as association in man, that the animal mind
differs from the human mind only by the absence of reason and what it
implies. Presumably, silence about what association is, means that it is
the association which human psychology discusses. When the silence is
broken, we get such utterances of this theory as the following:—
“I think we may say then that the higher animals are able to proceed a
long way in the formation and definition of highly complex constructs,
analogous to but probably differing somewhat from those which we form
ourselves. These constructs, moreover, through association with
reconstructs, or representations, link themselves in trains so that a
sensation, or group of sensations, may suggest a series of reconstructs,
or a series of remembered phenomena.” (C. L. Morgan, Animal Life and
Intelligence, p. 341.)
“Lastly, before taking leave of the subject of the chapter, I am
most anxious that it should not be thought that, in contending that
intelligence is not reason, I wish in any way to disparage intelligence.
Nine tenths at least of the actions of average men are intelligent and
not rational. Do we not all of us know hundreds of practical men who are
in the highest degree intelligent, but in whom the rational, analytic
faculty is but little developed? Is it any injustice to the brutes to
contend that their inferences are of the same order as those of these
excellent practical folk? In any case, no such injustice is intended;
and if I deny them self-consciousness and reason, I grant to the higher
animals perceptions of marvelous acuteness and intelligent inferences of
wonderful accuracy and precision—intelligent inferences in some cases,
no doubt, more perfect even than those of man, who is often disturbed by
many thoughts” (_ibid._, pp. 376-377).
“Language and the analytic faculty it renders possible differentiate man
from the brute” (_ibid._, p. 376).
Here, as elsewhere, it should be remembered that Lloyd Morgan is not
quoted because he is the worst offender or because he represents the
opposite in general of what the present writer takes to be the truth. On
the contrary, Morgan is quoted because he is the least offender, because
he has taken the most advanced stand along the line of the present
investigation, because my differences from him are in the line of his
differences from other writers. With the theory of the passages just
quoted, however, which attribute extensive association of ideas and
general powers comparable to those of men minus reason, to the brutes,
and which repeat the time-honored distinction by language, I do not, in
the least, agree. Association in animals does not equal association in
man. The latter is built over and permeated and transformed by inference
and judgment and comparison; it includes imitation in our narrow sense
of transferred association; it obtains where no impulse is included; it
thus takes frequently the form of long trains of thought ending in no
pleasure-giving act; its elements are often loose, existing independently
of the particular association; the association is not only thought,
but at the same time thought _about_. None of these statements may
be truthfully made of animal association. Only a small part of human
association is at all comparable to it. My opinion of what that small
part is has already been given. Moreover, further differences will be
found as we consider the data relating to the delicacy, complexity,
number, and permanence of associations in animals. I said a while ago
that man was no more an animal with language than an elephant was a cow
with a proboscis. We may safely broaden the statement and say that _man
is not an animal plus reason_. It has been one great purpose of this
investigation to show that even after leaving reason out of account,
there are tremendous differences between man and the higher animals.
The problem of comparative psychology is not only to get human reason
from some lower faculties, but to get human _association_ from animal
association.
Our analysis, necessarily imperfect because the first attempted, of the
nature of the association-process in animals is finished, and we have now
to speak of its limitations in respect to delicacy, complexity, number
and permanence.
DELICACY OF ASSOCIATIONS
It goes without saying that the possible delicacy of associations is
conditioned by the delicacy of sense-powers. If an animal doesn’t feel
differently at seeing two objects, it cannot associate one with one
reaction, the other with another. An equally obvious factor is attention;
what is not attended to will not be associated. Beyond this there is no
_a priori_ reason why an animal should not react differently to things
varying only by the most delicate difference, and I am inclined to think
an animal could; that any two objects with a difference appreciable
by sensation which are also able to win attention may be reacted to
differently. Experiments to show this are very tedious, and the practical
question is, “What will the animal naturally attend to?” The difficulty,
as all trainers say, is to get the animal’s attention to your signal
somehow. Then he will in time surely react differently, if you give him
the chance, to a figure 7 on the blackboard from the way he does to a
figure 8, to your question, “How many days are there in a week?” and to
your question, “How many legs have you?” The chimpanzee in London that
handed out 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7 straws at command was not thereby proved of
remarkable intelligence or of remarkably delicate associative power. Any
reputable animal trainer would be ashamed to exhibit a horse who could
not do as much ‘counting’ as that. The maximum of delicacy in associating
exhibited by any animal, to my knowledge, is displayed in the performance
of the dog ‘Dodgerfield,’ exhibited by a Mr. Davis, who brings from four
cards, numbered 1, 2, 3 and 4, whichever one his master shall _think of_.
That is, you write out an arbitrary list, e.g. 4, 2, 1, 3, 3, 2, 2, 1,
4, 2, etc., and hand it to Mr. Davis, who looks at the list, thinks of
the first number, says “Attention! Dodger!” and then, “Bring it.” This
the dog does and so on through the list. Mr. Davis makes no signals which
anyone sitting even right beside or in front of him can detect. Thus the
dog exceeds the human observers in delicacy and associates each with
a separate act four attitudes of his master, which to human observers
seem all alike. Mr. Davis says he thinks the dog is a mind reader. I
think it quite possible that whatever signs the dog goes by are given
unconsciously and consist only of some very delicate general differences
in facial expression or the manner of saying the words, “Bring it,” or
slight sounds made by Mr. Davis in thinking to himself the words one or
two or three or four. Mr. Davis keeps his eyes shut and his hands behind
a newspaper. The dog looks directly at his face.
To such a height possible delicacy may attain, but possible delicacy is
quite another thing from actual untrained and unstimulated delicacy.
The difference in reaction has to be brought about by associating with
pleasure the reaction to the different sense-impression when it itself
differs and associating with pain tendencies to confuse the reactions.
The animal does not naturally as a function of sense-powers discriminate
at all delicately. Thus the cat who climbed up the wire netting when
I said, “I must feed those cats!” did not have a delicate association
of just that act with just those words. For after I had dropped the
clapping part of the signal and simply used those words, it would react
just as vigorously to the words, “To-morrow is Tuesday” or “My name is
Thorndike.” The reaction naturally was to a very vague stimulus. Taking
cat 10 when just beginning to learn to climb up at the signal, “I must
feed those cats!” I started in to improve the delicacy, by opposing to
this formula the formula, “I will not feed them,” after saying which, I
kept my word. That is, I gave sometimes the former signal and fed the
cats, sometimes the latter and did not. The object was to see how long
the cat would be in learning always to go up when I gave the first, never
to do so when I gave the second signal. I said the words in both cases
as I naturally would do, so that there was a difference in emphasis and
tone as well as in the mere nature of the syllables. The two signals were
given in all sorts of combinations so that there was no regularity in the
recurrence of either which might aid the animal. The cat at first did not
always climb up at the first signal and often _did_ climb up at the wrong
one. The change from this condition to one of perfect discrimination is
shown in the accompanying curves (Fig. 22), one showing the decrease in
_failures_ to respond to the wrong signal. The first curve is formed by
a line joining the tops of perpendiculars erected at intervals of 1 mm.
along the abscissa. The height of a perpendicular represents the number
of times the cat failed to respond to the food-signal in 20 trials, a
height of 1 mm. being the representative of one failure. Thus, the entire
curve stands for 280 trials, there being no failures after 60 trials, and
only 1 after the 40th.
[Illustration: FIG. 22.]
In the other curve, also, each 1 mm. along the abscissa stands for 20
trials, and the perpendiculars whose tops the curve unites represent the
number of times the cat in each 20 _did_ climb up at the signal which
meant no food. It will be seen that 380 experiences were necessary before
the animal learned that the second signal was different from the first.
The experiment shows beautifully the animal method of acquisition. If
at any stage the animal could have isolated the two ideas of the two
sense-impressions, and felt them together in comparison, this long and
tedious process would have been unnecessary.
It might be stated here that the animals also acquired associations of
moderate delicacy in discriminating between the different boxes. No cat
tried to get out of A or B by licking herself, for instance.
The question may naturally be raised that if naturally associations
are thus vague, the common phenomenon of a dog obeying his master’s
commands, and no one else’s, is inexplicable. The difference between
one man and another, one voice and another, it may be said, is not
much of a difference, yet is here uniformly discriminated, although we
cannot suppose any such systematic training to reject the other slightly
differing commands. My cats did not so discriminate. If any one else sat
in my chair and called out, “I must feed the cats,” they reacted, and
probably very many animals would, if untroubled by emotions of curiosity
or fear at the new individual, go through their tricks as well at
another’s voice as at that of their master. The other cases exemplify the
influence of attention. Repeated attention to these sense-impressions has
rendered them clear-cut and detailed, and the new impression consequently
does not equal them in calling forth the reaction.
The main thing to carry away from this discussion is the assurance that
the delicacy of the animal in associating acts with impressions is
nothing like the delicacy of the man who feels that a certain tone is
higher, or weight is heavier, than another, but _is_ like the delicacy
of the man who runs to a certain spot to hit one tennis ball and to a
different spot to hit one coming with a slightly different speed.
COMPLEXITY OF ASSOCIATIONS
An important question, especially if one wishes to rate an animal on a
scale of intelligence, is the question of how complex an association it
can form. A man can learn that to open a door he has to put the key in
its hole, turn it, turn the knob, and pull the door. Here, then, is a
complex act connected with the simple sense-impression. Or, conversely,
a man knows that when the ringing of a bell is followed by a whistle and
that by a red light he is to do a certain thing, while if any of the
three happens alone, he is not to. How far, then, we ask, can animals go
along the line of increased complexity in the associations?
We must not mistake for a complex association a series of associations,
where one sense-impression leads to an act such as to present a new
sense-impression which leads to another act which in its turn leads to
a new sense-impression. Of the formation of such _series_ animals are
capable to a very high degree. Chicks from 10 to 25 days old learned to
go directly through a sort of big labyrinth requiring a series of 23
distinct and in some cases fairly difficult associations, of which 11
involved choices between two paths. By this power of acquiring a long
series animals find their way to distant feeding grounds and back again.
But all such cases are examples of the _number_, not of the complexity,
of animal associations.
Some of my boxes were such as did give a chance for a complex association
to be formed. Such were G (thumb latch), J (double), K and L (triples)
for the cats, and O (triple) for the dogs. It would be possible for a
cat, after stepping on the platform in K, to notice that the platform was
in a different position, and so feel then a different sense-impression
from before, and thus turn the thing into a serial association. The
cat would then be like a man who on seeing a door should feel only the
impulse to stick the key in the hole, but then, seeing the door plus
a key in the hole, should feel the impulse to turn the key and so on
through. My cats did not give any signs of this, so that with them it
was either a complex association or an irregular happening of the proper
impulses. Probably the same was the case with Dog 1. Cats 10, 11, 12 in L
knew all the movements separately before being experimented on with the
combination. Cats 2, 3, 4 had had some experience of D, which worked by a
string something like the string part of K. The string in K was, however,
quite differently situated and required an altogether different movement
to pull it. Since further No. 2, who had had ten times as much experience
in D as 3 or 4, succeeded no better with the string element of K than
they, it is probable that the experience did not help very much. All else
in all these compound associations was new. At the same time the history
of these animals’ dealings with these boxes would not fairly represent
that of animals without general experience of clawing at all sorts of
loose or shaky things in the inside of a box. These cats had learned
to claw at all sorts of things. The time-curves were taken as in the
formation of the other associations, and, in addition, the order in which
the animal did the several things required was recorded in every trial.
In the case of all the curves, except the latter part of 3 in G, one
notices a very gradual slope and an excessive irregularity in the curve
throughout. Within the limits of the trials given the animals are unable
to form a perfect association and what advancement they make is very
slow. The case of 3 in G is not an exception to this, but a proof of it.
For 3 succeeded in making a perfect association, by accidentally hitting
on a way to turn the compound association into a simple one. He happened
one time to paw down the thumb piece at the same time that his other fore
limb, with which he was holding on between the door and the top of the
box, was pressing against the door. This giving him success he repeated
it in later trials and in a short time had it fixed as an element in a
perfect association. The marked change in his curve, from an irregular
and gradual slope at such a height as displayed a very imperfect
association, to a constant and very slight height, shows precisely the
change from a compound to a simple association.
Compound associations are formed slowly and not at all well. Further
observation shows that they were really not formed at all. For the
animals did not, except 3 in K for a certain period, do the several
things in a constant order, nor did they do them only once apiece. On the
contrary, an animal would pull the string several times after the bolt
had gone up with its customary click, and would do sometimes one thing
first, sometimes another. It may also be noted here, in advance of its
proper place, that these compound associations are far below the simple
in point of permanence. The conduct of the animals is clearly not that
of minds having associated with a certain box’s interior the idea of a
succession of three movements. The animal does not feel, “I did this and
that and that and got out,” or, more simply still, “this and that and
that means getting out.” If it did, we should soon see it doing what was
necessary without repetition and in a fairly constant time.
I imagine, however, that an animal could learn to associate with one
sense-impression a compound act so as to perform its elements in a
regular order. By arranging the box so that the second and third elements
of the act could be performed _only after the first had been_, and the
third _only after the first and second_, I am inclined to think you
could get a very vigorous cat to learn the elements in order and form
the association perfectly. The case is comparable to that of delicacy.
The cat does not _tend_ to know what he is doing or to depart from the
hit-or-miss method of learning, but by associating the other combinations
of elements with failure to get pleasure, as in delicacy experiments we
associated the reactions to all but the one signal, you could probably
stamp out all but the 1, 2, 3 order.
The fact that you have to thus maneuver to get the animals to have the
three impulses in a regular order shows that even when they are so,
there is no idea of the three as in an order, no thinking about them.
Representations do not get beyond their first intention. They are not
carried up into a free life which works them over anew. A complex _act_
does not imply a complex _thought_, or, more exactly, a performance of a
series does not imply the thought of a series. Consequently, since the
complexity of the act depends on the power which failure has to stamp out
all other combinations, it is far more limited than in man.
NUMBER OF ASSOCIATIONS
The patent and important fact is that there are so few in animals
compared to the human stock. Even after taking into account the various
acts associated with various smells, and exaggerating the possibility
of getting an equipment of associations in this field which man lacks,
one must recognize how far below man any animal is in respect to mere
quantity of associations. The associations with words alone of an
average American child of ten years far outnumber those of any dog. A
good billiard player probably has more associations in connection with
this single pastime than a dog with his whole life’s business. In the
associations which are homologous with those of animals man outdoes them
and adds an infinity of associations of a different sort. The primates
would seem, by virtue of their incessant curiosity and addition to
experience not for any practical purpose but merely for love of mental
life, to represent an advanced stage toward this tremendous quantity
of associations. In man not only this activity and curiosity, but also
education, increases the number of associations. Associations are
formed more quickly, and the absence of need for self-support during
a long infancy gives time. Associations thus formed work back upon
practical life, and by showing better ways decrease the need of work,
and so again increase the chance to form associations. The result in
the case of a human mind to-day is the possession of a thesaurus of
valuable associations, if the time has been wisely spent. The free life
of ideas, imitation, all the methods of communication, and the original
accomplishments which we may include under the head of invention, make
the process of acquisition in many cases quite a different one from the
trial and error method of the animals, and in general much shorten it.
Small as it is, however, the number of associations which an animal may
acquire is probably much larger than popularly supposed.
My cats and dogs did not mix up their acts with the wrong
sense-impressions. The chicks that learned the series of twenty-three
associations did not find it a task beyond their powers to retain
them. Several three-day-old chicks, which I caused to learn ten simple
associations in the same day, kept the things apart and on the next
morning went through each act at the proper stimulus. In the hands
of animal trainers some animals get a large number of associations
perfectly in hand. The horse Mascot is claimed to know the meaning of
fifteen hundred signals! He certainly knows a great many, and such as
are naturally difficult of acquisition. It would be an enlightening
investigation if some one could find out just how many associations a
cat or dog could form, if he were carefully and constantly given an
opportunity. The result would probably show that the number was limited
only by the amount of motive available and the time taken to acquire
each. For there is probably nothing in their brain structure which
limits the number of connections that can be formed, or would cause such
connections, as they grew numerous, to become confused.
In their anxiety to credit animals with human powers, the psychologists
have disregarded or belittled, perhaps, the possibilities of the strictly
animal sort of association. They would think it more wonderful that a
horse should respond differently to a lot of different numbers on the
blackboard than that he should infer a consequence from premises. But
if it be made a direct question of pleasure or pain to an animal, he
can associate any number of acts with different stimuli. Only he does
not form any associations until he has to, until the direct benefit is
apparent, and, for his ordinary life, comparatively few are needed.
On the whole our judgment from a comparison of man’s associations with
the brutes’ must be that a man’s are naturally far more delicate,
complex and numerous, and that in as far as the animals attain delicacy,
complexity, or a great number of associations, they do it by methods
which man uses only in a very limited part of the field.
PERMANENCE OF ASSOCIATIONS
Once formed, the connections by which, when an animal feels a certain
sense-impression, he does a certain thing, persist over considerable
intervals of time. With the curves on pages 39 to 58 and 60 to 65 are
given in many instances[17] additional curves showing the animal’s
proficiency after an interval without experience. To these data may be
added the following:—
The three chicks that had learned to escape through the long labyrinth
(involving twenty-three associations) succeeded in repeating the
performance after ten days’ interval. Similarly the chicks used as
imitators in V, W, X and Y did not fail to perform the proper act
after an interval of twenty days. Cat 6, who had had about a hundred
experiences in C (button), had the association as perfect after twenty
days as when it left off. Cat 2, who had had 36 experiences with C and
had attained a constant time of 8 seconds, escaped fourteen days later
in 3, 9 and 8 seconds, respectively, in three trials. Cat 1, after an
interval of twenty days, failed in 10 minutes to escape from C. The
signal for climbing up the front of the cage was reacted to by No.
3 after an interval of twenty-four days. No. 10, who had learned to
discriminate between ‘I must feed those cats’ and ‘I will not feed them,’
was tried after _eighty_ days. It was given 50 trials with the second
signal mingled indiscriminately with 25 trials with the first. I give
the full record of these, ‘yes’ equalling a trial in which she ‘forgot’
and climbed up, ‘no’ equalling a trial in which she wisely stayed down.
Dashes represent intervening trials with the first signal, _to which
she always reacted_. It will be observed that 50 trials put the cat in
the same position that 350 had done in her first experience, although in
that first experience she had had only about a hundred trials after the
association had been perfected. The association between the first signal
and climbing up was perfect after the eighty days.
TABLE 8
=======+========+========+========+========+========
TRIALS | TRIALS | TRIALS | TRIALS | TRIALS | TRIALS
1-7 | 8-17 | 18-27 | 28-35 | 36-42 | 43-50
-------+--------+--------+--------+--------+--------
— | yes | no | — | — | —
— | yes | yes | — | no | —
yes | yes | no | — | no | —
yes | — | no | no | — | —
no | yes | — | no | no | —
— | yes | — | yes | no | no
yes | no | yes | no | no | no
yes | yes | yes | — | — | yes
no | no | yes | no | — | no
no | — | yes | yes | no | no
— | — | no | no | no | no
— | yes | no | no | | no
— | yes | | | | no
| — | | | |
=======+========+========+========+========+========
All these data show that traces of the connections once formed are very
slow in being lost. If we allow that part of the time in the first trial
in all these cases is due to the time taken to realize the situation
(time not needed in the trials when the association is forming and the
animal is constantly being dropped into boxes), we may say that the
association is as firm as ever for a considerable time after practice
at it is stopped. How long a time would be required to annul the
influence of any given quantity of experience, say of an association
which had been gone through with ten times, I cannot say. It could, if
profitable, easily be determined in any case. The only case of total
loss of the association (No. 1 in C) is so exceptional that I fancy
something other than lapse of time was its cause. The main interest of
these data, considered as quantitative estimates, is not psychological,
but biological. They show what a tremendous advantage the well-developed
association-process is to an animal. The ways to different feeding
grounds, the actions of enemies, the appearance of noxious foods, are
all connected permanently with the proper reaction by a few experiences
which need be reënforced only very rarely. Of course, associations
without any permanence would be useless, but the usefulness increases
immensely with such a degree of permanence as these results witness. An
interesting experiment from the biological point of view would be to see
how infrequently an experience could occur and yet lead eventually to a
perfect association. An experiment approximating this is recorded in the
time-curves for Box H in Figure 7, on page 47. Three trials at a time
were given, the trials being two or three days apart. As may be seen from
the curves, the association was readily formed.
The chief psychological interest of these data is that they show that
permanence of associations _is not memory_. The fact that a cat, when
after an interval she is put into box G, proceeds to immediately press
the thumb piece and push the door, does not at all mean that the cat
feels the box to be the same from which she weeks ago freed herself by
pushing down that thumb piece, or thinks about ever having felt or done
anything in that box. She does not refer the present situation to a
situation of the past and realize that it is the same, but simply feels
on being confronted with that situation the same impulse which she felt
before. She does the thing now for just the same reason that she did it
before, namely, because pleasure has connected that act above all others
with that sense-impression, so that it is the one she feels like doing.
Her condition is that of the swimmer who starts his summer season after
a winter’s deprivation. When he jumps off the pier and hits the water,
he swims, not because he remembers that this is the way he dealt with
water last summer and so applies his remembrance to present use, but just
because experience has taught him to feel like swimming when he hits the
water. All talk about recognition and memory in animals, if it asserts
the presence of anything more than this, is a gross mistake. For real
memory is an absolute thing, including everything but forgetfulness. If
the cat had real memory, it would, when after an interval dropped into
a box, remember that from this box it escaped by doing this or that and
consequently, either immediately or after a time of recollection, go
do it, or else it would not remember and would fail utterly to do it.
On the contrary, we have all grades of _partial_ ‘forgetfulness,’ just
like the grades of swimming one might find if he dropped a dozen college
professors into the mill ponds of their boyhood, just like the grades of
forgetfulness of the associations once acquired on the ball field which
are manifested when on the Fourth of July the ‘solid men’ of a town get
out to amuse their fellow citizens. The animal makes attacks on a spot
around the vital one, or claws at the thing—but not so precisely as
before, or goes at it a while and then resorts to instinctive methods of
getting out. Its actions are exactly what would be expected of an animal
in whom the sense-impression aroused the impulse imperfectly, or weakly,
or intermittently, but are not at all like the actions of one who felt,
“I used to get out of this box by pulling that loop down.” In fact, the
record of No. 10 given on page 139 seems to be final on this point. If
at any time in the course of the 50 trials it had _remembered_ that ‘I
will not feed them’ meant ‘no fish,’ it would thenceforth have failed
to react. It would have stopped short in the ‘yes’ reactions, instead
of gradually decreasing their percentage. ‘Memory’ in animals, if one
still chooses to use the word, is _permanence of associations_, not the
presence of an idea of an experience attributed to the past.
To this proposition two corollaries may be added. First, these phenomena
of incomplete forgetfulness extend the evidence that animals do not have
a stock of independent ideas, the return of which, plus past associates,
equals memory. Second, there is, properly speaking, no continuity in
their mental streams. The present thought does not clutch the past to
its bosom or hold the future in its womb. The animal’s self is not a
being ‘looking before and after,’ but a direct practical association of
feelings and impulses. So far as experiences come continuously, they may
be said to form a continuous mental life, but there is no continuity
imposed from within. The feelings of its own body are always present, and
impressions from outside may come as they come to us. When the habit of
attending to the elements of its associations and raising them up into
the life of free ideas is acquired, these permanent bodily associations
may become the basis of a feeling of self-hood and the trains of ideas
may be felt as a continuous life.
INHIBITION OF INSTINCTS BY HABIT
One very important result of association remains to be considered, its
inhibition of instincts and previous associations. An animal who has
become habituated to getting out of a box by pulling a loop and opening
the door will do so even though the hole in the top of the box be
uncovered, whereas, if, in early trials, you had left any such hole, he
would have taken the instinctive way and crawled through it. Instances of
this sort of thing are well-nigh ubiquitous. It is a tremendous factor
in animal life, and the strongest instincts may thus be annulled. The
phenomenon has been already recognized in the literature of the subject,
a convenient account being found in James’ ‘Psychology,’ Vol. II, pages
394-397. In addition to such accounts, one may note that the influence
of association is exerted in two ways. The instinct may wane by not
being used, because the animal forms the habit of meeting the situation
in a different way, or it may be actually inhibited. An instance of the
former sort is found in the history of a cat which learns to pull a loop
and so escape from a box whose top is covered by a board nailed over it.
If, after enough trials, you remove a piece of the board covering the
box, the cat, when put in, will still pull the loop instead of crawling
out through the opening thus made. But, at any time, if she happens to
notice the hole, she _may_ make use of it. An instance of the second
sort is that of a chick which has been put on a box with a wire screen
at its edge, preventing her from jumping directly down, as she would
instinctively do, and forcing her to jump to another box on one side
of it and thence down. In the experiments which I made, the chick was
prevented by a second screen from jumping directly from the second box
also. That is, if in the accompanying figure, A is a box 34 inches high,
B a box 25 inches high, C a box 16 inches high, and D the pen with the
food and other chicks, the subject had to go A-B-C-D. The chick tried at
first to get through the screen, pecked at it and ran up and down along
it, looking at the chicks below and seeking for a hole to get through.
Finally it jumped to B and, after a similar process, to C. After enough
trials it forms the habit and when put on A goes immediately to B, then
to C and down. Now if, after 75 or 80 trials, you take away the screens,
giving the chick a free chance to go to D from either A or B, and then
put it on A, the following phenomenon appears. The chick goes up to the
edge, looks over, walks up and down it for a while, still looking down
at the chicks below, and then goes and jumps to B as habit has taught it
to do. The same actions take place on B. No matter how clearly the chick
sees the chance to jump to D, it does not do so. The impulse has been
truly inhibited. It is not the mere habit of going the other way, but the
impossibility of going _that_ way. In one case I observed a chick in whom
the instinct was all but, yet not quite, inhibited. When tried without
the screen, it went up to the edge to look over _nine times_, and at
last, after seven minutes, did jump straight down.
[Illustration: FIG. 23.]
ATTENTION
I have presupposed throughout one function which it will be well to now
recognize explicitly, attention. As usual, attention emphasizes and
facilitates the process which it accompanies. Unless the sense-impression
is focussed by attention, it will not be associated with the act which
comes later. Unless two differing boxes are attended to, there will be
no difference in the reactions to them. The really effective part of
animal consciousness, then, as of human, is the part which is attended
to; attention is the ruler of animal as well as human mind.
But in giving attention its deserts we need not forget that it is not
here comparable to the whole of human attention. Our attention to the
other player and the ball in a game of tennis _is_ like the animal’s
attention, but our attention to a passage in Hegel, or the memory which
flits through our mind, or the song we hear, or the player we idly watch,
is _not_. There ought, I think, to be a separate name for attention
when working for immediate practical associations. It is a different
species from that which holds objects so that we may define them, think
about them, remember them, etc., and the difference is, as our previous
sentence shows, not that between voluntary and involuntary attention. The
cat watching me for signs of my walking to the cage with fish is not in
the condition of the man watching a ball game, but in that of the player
watching the ball speeding toward him. There is a notable difference in
the permanence of the impression. The man watching the game can remember
just how that fly was hit and how the fielder ran for it, though he
bestowed only a slight quantity of attention on the matter, while the
fielder may attend to the utmost to the ball and yet not remember at all
how it came or how he ran for it. The one sort of attention leads you to
_think_ about a thing, the other to _act_ with reference to it. We must
be careful to remember that when we say that the cat attended to what was
said, we do not mean that he thereby established an idea of it. Animals
are not proved to form separate ideas of sense-impressions because they
attend to them, for the kind of attention they give is the kind which,
when given by men, results in practical associations, not in establishing
ideas of objects. If attention rendered clear the idea, we should not
have the phenomena of incomplete forgetfulness lately mentioned. The
animal would get a definite idea of just the exact thing done and would
do it or nothing. The human development of attention is in closest
connection with the acquisition of a stock of free ideas.
SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS
Besides attention there is another topic somewhat apart from our general
one, which yet deserves a few words. It concerns animals’ social
consciousness, their consciousness of the feelings of their fellows.
Do animals, for example, when they see others feeding, feel that the
others are feeling pleasure? Do they, when they fight, feel that the
other feels pain? So level-headed a thinker as Lloyd Morgan has said that
they do, but the conduct of my animals would seem to show that they did
not. For it has given us good reason to suppose that they do not possess
_any_ stock of isolated ideas, much less any abstracted, inferred, or
transferred ideas. These ideas of others’ feelings imply a power to
transfer states felt in oneself to another and realize them as there. Now
it seems that any ability to thus transfer and realize an idea ought to
carry with it an ability to form a transferred association, to imitate.
If the animal realizes the mental states of the other animal who before
his eyes pulls the string, goes out through the door, and eats fish,
he ought to form the association, ‘impulse to pull string, pleasure of
eating fish.’ This we saw the animal could not do.
In fact, pleasure in another, pain in another, is not a
sense-presentation or a representation or feeling of an object of any
sort, but rather a ‘meaning,’ a feeling ‘_of the fact that_.’ It can
exist only as something thought _about_. It is never ‘a bit of direct
experience,’ but an abstraction from our own life referred to that of
another.
I fancy that these feelings of others’ feelings may be connected pretty
closely with imitation, and for that reason may begin to appear in the
monkeys. There we have some fair evidence for their presence in the
tricks which monkeys play on each other. Such feelings seem the natural
explanation of the apparently useless tail-pullings and such like which
make up the attractions of the monkey cage. These may, however, be
instinctive forms of play-activity or merely examples of the general
tendency of the monkeys to fool with everything.
INTERACTION
I hope it will not be thought impertinent if from the standpoint of this
research I add a word about a general psychological problem, the problem
of interaction. I have spoken all along of the connection between the
situation and a certain impulse and act being stamped in when pleasure
results from the act and stamped out when it doesn’t. In this fact,
which is undeniable, lies a problem which Lloyd Morgan has frequently
emphasized. _How are pleasurable results able to burn in and render
predominant the association which led to them?_ This is perhaps the
greatest problem of both human and animal psychology. Unfortunately in
human psychology it has been all tangled up with the problems of free
will, mental activity, voluntary attention, the creation of novel acts,
and almost everything else. In our experiments we get the data which give
rise to the problem, in a very elementary form.
It should first be noted about the _fact_ that the pleasure does not
burn in an impulse and act themselves, but an impulse and act _as
connected with that particular situation_. No cat ever goes around
clawing, clawing, clawing all the time, because clawing in these boxes
has resulted in pleasure. Secondly, the connection thus stamped in
is _not contemporaneous, but prior to_ the pleasure. So much for the
fact; now for the explanation. I do not wish to rehearse or add to the
arguments with which so many pages have been already filled by scientists
and philosophers both. What we need most is not argument, but accurate
accounts of the mental fact and of the brain-process. But I do wish to
say to the parallelist, what has not to my knowledge been said, that if
he presupposes, to account for this fact, a ‘physical analogue of the
hedonic consciousness,’ it is his bounden duty to first show how any
motion in any neurone or group of neurones in the nervous system can
possess this power of stamping in any current which causes it. For no one
would, from our present knowledge of the brain, judge _a priori_ that any
motion in any part of it could be conceived which should be thus regnant
over all the others. And next he must show the possibility of the current
which represents the association being the excitant of the regnant motion
in a manner direct enough for the purpose.
I wish also to say that whoever thinks that, going along with the current
which parallels the association, there is an accompanying minor current,
which parallels the pleasure and which stamps in the first current when
present with it, flies directly in the face of the facts. _There is no
pleasure along with the association. The pleasure does not come until
after the association is done and gone._ It is caused by no such minor
current, but by the excitation of peripheral sense-organs when freedom
from confinement is realized or food is secured. Of course, the notion of
such a secondary subcurrent is mythology, anyway.
To the interactionist I would say: “Do not any more repeat in tiresome
fashion that consciousness _does_ alter movement, but get to work and
show when, where, in what forms and to what degrees it does so. Then,
even if it turns out to have been a physical parallel that did the work,
you will, at least, have the credit of attaining the best knowledge about
the results and their conditions, even though you misnamed the factor.”
Besides this contribution to general psychology, I think we may safely
offer one to pedagogical science. At least some of our results possess
considerable pedagogical interest. The fundamental form of intellection,
the association-process in animals, is one, we decided, which requires
the personal experience of the animal in all its elements. The
association cannot be taught by putting the animal through it or giving
it a chance to imitate. Now every observant teacher realizes how often
the cleverest explanation and the best models for imitation fail. Yet
often, in such cases, a pupil, if somehow enticed to do the thing, even
without comprehension of what it means, even without any real knowledge
of what he is doing, will finally get hold of it. So, also, in very
many kinds of knowledge, the pupil who does anything from imitation, or
who does anything from being put through it, fails to get a real and
permanent mastery of the thing. I am sure that with a certain type of
mind the only way to teach fractions in algebra, for example, is to get
the pupil to do, do, do. I am inclined to think that in many individuals
certain things cannot be learned save by actual performance. And I think
it is often a fair question, when explanation, imitation and actual
performance are all possible methods, which is the best. We are here
alongside the foundations of mental life, and this hitherto unsuspected
law of animal mind may prevail in human mind to an extent hitherto
unknown. The best way with children may often be, in the pompous words of
an animal trainer, ‘to arrange everything in connection with the trick
so that the animal will be compelled by the laws of his own nature to
perform it.’
This does not at all imply that I think, as a present school of
scientists seem to, that because a certain thing _has been_ in phylogeny
we ought to repeat it in ontogeny. Heaven knows that Dame Nature
herself in ontogeny abbreviates and skips and distorts the order of the
appearance of organs and functions, and for the best of reasons. We ought
to make an effort, as she does, to omit the useless and antiquated and
get to the best and most useful as soon as possible; we ought to change
what _is_ to what _ought to be_, as far as we can. And I would not
advocate this animal-like method of learning in place of the later ones
unless it does the same work better. I simply suggest that in many cases
where at present its use is never dreamed of, it may be a good method.
As the fundamental form of intellection, every student of _theoretical_
pedagogy ought to take it into account.
There is one more contribution, this time to anthropology. If the method
of trial and error, with accidental success, be the method of acquiring
associations among the animals, the slow progress of primitive man,
the long time between stone age and iron age, for instance, becomes
suggestive. Primitive man probably acquired knowledge by just this
process, aided possibly by imitation. At any rate, progress was not
by seeing through things, but by accidentally hitting upon them. Very
possibly an investigation of the history of primitive man and of the
present life of savages in the light of the results of this research
might bring out old facts in a new and profitable way.
Comparative psychology has, in the light of this research, two tasks
of prime importance. One is to study the passage of the child mind from
a life of immediately practical associations to the life of free ideas;
the other is to find out how far the anthropoid primates advance toward
a similar passage, and to ascertain accurately what faint beginnings
or preparations for such an advance the early mammalian stock may be
supposed to have had. In this latter connection I think it will be
of the utmost importance to bear in mind the possibility that _the
present anthropoid primates may be mentally degenerate_. Their present
aimless activity and incessant, but largely useless, curiosity may be
the degenerated vestiges of such a well-directed activity and useful
curiosity as led _homo sapiens_ to important practical discoveries,
such as the use of tools, the art of making fire, etc. It is even a
remote possibility that their chattering is a _relic_ of something like
language, not a _beginning_ of such. Comparative psychology should use
the phenomena of the monkey mind of to-day to find out what the primitive
mind from which man’s sprung off was like. That is the important thing
to get at, and the question whether the present monkey mind has not gone
back instead of ahead is an all-important question. A natural and perhaps
sufficient cause of degeneracy would be arboreal habits. The animal that
found a means of survival in his muscles might well lose the means before
furnished by his brain.
To these disconnected remarks still another must be added, addressed
this time to the anecdote school. Some member of it who has chanced to
read this may feel like saying: “This experimental work is all very
well. Your cats and dogs represent, it is true, specimens from the top
stratum of animal intelligence, and your negations, based on their
conduct, may be authoritative so far as concerns the average, typical
mammalian mind. But our anecdotes do not claim to be stories of the
conduct of the average or type, but of those exceptional individuals
who have begun to attain higher powers. And, if even a few dogs and
cats have these higher powers, our contention is, in a modified form,
upheld.” To all this I agree, provided the anecdote school now realize
just what sort of a position they hold. They are clearly in pretty much
the same position as spiritualists. Their anecdotes are on pretty much
the same level as the anecdotes of thought-transference, materializations
of spirits, supernormal knowledge, etc. Not in quite the same position,
for far greater care has been given by the Psychical Research Society to
establishing the criteria of authenticity, to insuring good observation,
to explaining by normal psychology all that can be so explained, in the
case of the latter than the anecdote school has done in the case of
the former. The off-hand explanation of certain anecdotes by invoking
reason, or imitation, or recognition, or feelings of qualities, is on a
par with the explanation of trance-phenomena and such like by invoking
the spirits of dead people. I do not deny that we may get lawfully a
supernormal psychology, or that the supernormal acts it finds may turn
out to be explained by these functions which I have denied to the normal
animal mind. But I must soberly declare that I think there is less
likelihood that such functions are the explanation of animal acts than
that the existence of the spirits of dead people is the true explanation
of the automatisms of spiritualistic phenomena. So much for the anecdote
school, if it calls itself by its right name and pretends only to give an
_abnormal_ animal psychology. The sad fact has been that it has always
pushed forward these exceptions as the essential phenomena of animal
mind. It has built up a general psychology from abnormal data. It is like
an anatomy written from observations on dime-museum freaks.
CONCLUSION
I do not think it is advisable here, at the close of this paper, to give
a summary of its results. The paper itself is really only such a summary
with the most important evidence, for the extent of territory covered
and the need of brevity have prevented completeness in explanation or
illustration. If the reader cares here, at the end, to have the broadest
possible statement of our conclusions and will take the pains to supply
the right meaning, we might say that our work has described a method,
crude but promising, and has made the beginning of an exact estimate of
just what associations, simple and compound, an animal can form, how
quickly he forms them, and how long he retains them. It has described
the method of formation, and, on the condition that our subjects were
representative, has rejected reason, comparison or inference, perception
of similarity, and imitation. It has denied the existence in animal
consciousness of any important stock of free ideas or impulses, and so
has denied that animal association is homologous with the association of
human psychology. It has homologized it with a certain limited form of
human association. It has proposed, as necessary steps in the evolution
of human faculty, a vast increase in the number of associations, signs of
which appear in the primates, and a freeing of the elements thereof into
independent existence. It has given us an increased insight into various
mental processes. It has convinced the writer, if not the reader, that
the old speculations about what an animal could do, what it thought, and
how what it thought grew into what human beings think, were a long way
from the truth, and _not on the road to it_.
Finally, I wish to say that, although the changes proposed in
the conception of mental development have been suggested somewhat
fragmentarily and in various connections, that has not been done because
I think them unimportant. On the contrary, I think them of the utmost
importance. I believe that our best service has been to show that
animal intellection is made up of a lot of specific connections, whose
elements are restricted to them, and which subserve practical ends
_directly_, and to homologize it with the intellection involved in such
human associations as regulate the conduct of a man playing tennis. The
fundamental phenomenon which I find presented in animal consciousness is
one which can harden into inherited connections and reflexes, on the one
hand, and thus connect naturally with a host of the phenomena of animal
life; on the other hand, it emphasizes the fact that our mental life has
grown up as a mediation between stimulus and reaction. The old view of
human consciousness is that it is built up out of elementary sensations,
that very minute bits of consciousness come first and gradually get built
up into the complex web. It looks for the beginnings of consciousness to
_little_ feelings. This our view abolishes and declares that the progress
is not from little and simple to big and complicated, but from direct
connections to indirect connections in which a stock of isolated elements
plays a part, is from ‘pure experience’ or undifferentiated feelings, to
discrimination, on the one hand, to generalizations, abstractions, on
the other. If, as seems probable, the primates display a vast increase
of associations, and a stock of free-swimming ideas, our view gives to
the line of descent a meaning which it never could have so long as the
question was the vague one of more or less ‘intelligence.’ It will,
I hope, when supported by an investigation of the mental life of the
primates and of the period in child life when these directly practical
associations become overgrown by a rapid luxuriance of free ideas,
show us the real history of the origin of human faculty. It turns out
apparently that a modest study of the facts of association in animals has
given us a working hypothesis for a comparative psychology.