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MIND IN EVOLUTION 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 THE 
 
 THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 A contribution to some problems of Logic and 
 Metaphysics 
 
 Price 10/6 
 
 METHUEN & CO 
 
MIND 
 IN EVOLUTION 
 
 BY 
 
 L. T. HOBHOUSE, D.Litt. 
 
 MARTIN WHITE PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON 
 
 LATE FELLOW AND ASSISTANT-TUTOR OF C.CC, OXFORD 
 
 FORMERLY FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED 
 ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 
 
 1915 
 
\,llji^(eH-0 
 
 First Edition^ igoi 
 Second Edition, 1915 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The form of the present work needs a preliminary 
 word of explanation. Its subject is "Mind in Evolution," 
 but no one will expect that such a subject should be 
 treated with any pretence of adequacy within a single 
 volume or by a single writer. The contribution offered 
 in the following pages is of a double character. There 
 is, first, an attempt to sketch in outline what seem to the 
 writer to be the main phases of mental development. 
 There is, secondly, an attempt to fill in this outline so 
 far as the lower phases are concerned. To put the same 
 distinction in different words, a hypothesis is propounded 
 as to the general trend of mental evolution, and an attempt 
 is made to test this hypothesis so far as animal intelli- 
 gence and the generic distinction between animal and 
 human intelligence are concerned. For the rest, that is 
 to say in all that relates to the higher development of the 
 human mind in society, the outline is left to be filled in 
 upon a future occasion. The whole subject naturally falls 
 into the two main divisions of animal and human evolu- 
 tion, and the mass of matter to be dealt with is so great 
 that it is convenient to keep the two parts separate. At 
 the same time evolution is a single continuous process the 
 different phases of which are only seen in their true 
 
VI 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 significance when treated as parts of the whole to which 
 they belong. This is my excuse for combining a general 
 design with a partial execution. 
 
 Even as to that portion of the hypothesis which I have 
 described as being tested in the present work I cannot 
 pretend that the test is in any sense final. The hypothesis, 
 though it appears to me to stand the test thus far, remains 
 a hypothesis. The nature and limits of animal intelli- 
 gence in its higher forms are matters of keen controversy, 
 and will long remain so. In a science so little advanced 
 as Comparative Psychology the justification for publishing 
 any opinions or arguments must lie not in any pretence 
 to finality, but in the hope of suggesting further 
 investigation. 
 
 The general conception of mental evolution presented 
 in this volume was formed some fourteen or fifteen years 
 ago when I had come into close contact with the criticisms 
 then current on Comte, Mill, and Spencer. The con- 
 ception has been in my mind ever since, subject to 
 constant modification as it was confronted with fresh 
 facts or the better psychological analysis of other thinkers. 
 The general view of evolution which most closely cor- 
 responds to it, is to be found, I think, in Dr. Lester 
 Ward's Outlines of Sociology, published in 1898. I 
 mention these points as indicating the general character 
 of my obligations to other writers. 
 
 My more special obligations in the present work are, 
 first, to Principal Lloyd Morgan and Professor Alexander, 
 who have read the manuscript, and made numerous valu- 
 able suggestions. I hasten to add that they must not be 
 held responsible for anything that appears in the text. 
 In the preparation of my material I was helped by 
 Mr. A. E. Taylor, some of whose work done originally 
 in this connection will, I hope, see the light in another 
 
PREFACE 
 
 vn 
 
 form. Many references to be found scattered through the 
 volume are due to his suggestion, and for some he is 
 wholly responsible. I have to thank Mr. W. E. Hoyle, 
 of The Owens College, for help in a number of technical 
 points. Miss M. V. Vernon for help in the preparation 
 of the MS., and several friends for aid in experiments. 
 Last, but not least, I am under a special obligation to 
 Messrs. Jennison, proprietors of the Belle Vue Gardens, 
 Manchester, for their courtesy in placing their great 
 collection of animals at my disposal for the purpose of 
 my investigations. 
 
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION 
 
 In the years that have elapsed since the first edition 
 was published, the subject of Comparative Psychology 
 has undergone a great change. It is hardly too much to 
 say that, owing to the activity of a group of workers 
 in the American Universities, the investigation of the 
 animal mind has, roughly within this period, established 
 for itself a place among the recognised sciences. Hence 
 much that was within the hands of pioneers when this 
 book was first written, has now been thoroughly 
 examined. Much, of course, still remains undetermined. 
 In some material respects I have found it necessary to 
 modify opinions formed on the data available in 1900. 
 In particular, the observations of Mr. H. S. Jennings 
 have shown me that something of the nature of mind 
 is to be carried further down in the organic world than 
 I supposed. His results, together with other work in 
 general psychology, have led me, however, to extend 
 rather than to narrow the view taken in the first edition 
 of the function of mind in evolution, and even to raise 
 the question whether mind (in the infinitely varied forms 
 of its activity from the groping of unconscious effort to 
 the full clearness of conscious purpose) may not be the 
 essential driving force in all evolutionary change. In 
 
X PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION 
 
 any case, the revolution which has overtaken biological 
 theory during the same period is profound. Its signifi- 
 cance is as yet imperfectly grasped, but it will, I believe, 
 be found, as time goes on, to have invested the constitu- 
 tion of the living being as against the environing con- 
 ditions with a new importance, and in this constitution the 
 fundamental fact everywhere is that the living being is 
 not passive but active, not mechanical in its reaction to 
 things, but assertive, plastic, and, in a measure propor- 
 tioned to its development, self-determining. If this is so, 
 psychology will in the future have a larger part to play 
 than has hitherto been supposed in the study of the rise 
 and decay of forms of life. 
 
 My obligations to many contemporary writers will, I 
 think, appear clearly enough in the text, but I should 
 like, in particular, to thank Professor Yerkes for informa- 
 tion kindly supplied in correspondence ; Mr. BuUough 
 for a valuable note on the Elberfeld Horses, and the 
 Society for Psychical Research for putting much literature 
 on this subject at my disposal at a time when it was 
 otherwise difficult to come by. In general psychology I, 
 like everyone else, have gained many new suggestions 
 from the work of Professor Stout, Professor Graham 
 "Wallas and Dr. McDougall. 
 
 L. T. H. 
 
 HiGHGATE, 
 
 September, 191 5' 
 
ANALYSIS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 MIND AS A FACTOR IN EVOLUTION 
 
 I. The normal tendency of evolution is not towards a higher, but (2) a 
 divergent type. 3. In the resulting diversity old types survive, and 
 there is deterioration as well as improvement. 4. Within these 
 divergencies there is one line of true development. This is the 
 evolution of Mind. 5. The generic function of Mind is to organise 
 Life by correlating its parts. 6. Its growth consists in the widening 
 scope and increasing articulateness of correlation, (7) with which 
 it replaces that organisation of life which rests on heredity. To 
 trace this growth in outHne is the object of this work. 
 
 Pa^es I — II 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 MIND AND MECHANISM 
 
 I. Two generic types of correlation, (2) of which one is logically attri- 
 buted to Mind. 3. Reserve necessary in attributing specific mental 
 functions, especially in interpreting animal behaviour. 4. Conation 
 and Purpose Pages 12 — 21 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 ORGANIC ADAPTABILITY AND THE VITAL PROCESSES 
 
 Without deciding the question whether organic processes are to 
 be explained by mechanical laws we may characterise organic 
 activity in general terms, (2) as that which tends to keep the 
 
xii • ANALYSIS 
 
 character of the organism constant at an equilibrium point through 
 unceasing change, a tendency illustrated by the rhythmical processes 
 of health, and (3) by repair, regeneration, and development. 4. In 
 this self-maintenance through change and by adaptability the 
 organism differs from the machine. 5. The same principle appears 
 in the expenditure of energy by an organism. 6. Resulting concep- 
 tion of organic adaptability. Difficulties both in the mechanical and 
 the teleological interpretation Pages 22 — 37 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 REFLEX ACTION 
 
 Action may be due to internal structural changes, (2) or to external 
 stimulus. A uniform response to sensory stimulus is a Reflex. 
 
 3. The reflex is not purposive but arises from a preformed structure. 
 
 4. It is however adaptable in varying degrees to the condition of the 
 organism as a whole, (5) and then simulates true conation (6) and 
 becomes a constituent element in higher forms of action. 7. Develop- 
 ment of the reflex by selection among random actions effected by 
 experience in the individual (10) and by the survival of successful 
 types in the race Pages 38 — 56 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 CONATION 
 
 I. Conation in its simplest form is tendency to change the condition. 
 Selection of successful efforts. 2. Sensori-motor action adapted to 
 unique combinations of stimuli. Function of consciousness. 
 
 Pages 57—65 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 INSTINCT 
 
 Instinct is a product of Evolution. 2. It cannot be resolved into a 
 form of intelligence. 3. Its evolution is merely one aspect of the 
 evolution of structure. 4. The more mechanical instincts approxi- 
 mate to compound reflexes. 5. But in true instinct behaviour is 
 governed by a persistent interest to the service of which action is 
 adapted, (6) and which in varying degrees respnods to the 
 " situation " as a whole. 7. " Pure " instinct employs reflex and 
 sensori-motor action, but intelligence proper arises within the sphere 
 of instinct, (8) though operating within narrow limits. 9. Hence 
 arise strange contrasts of sagacity and stupidity in the same animal, 
 to be ascribed to the limited scope of intelligence. 10. As its scope 
 widens, intelligence gradually replaces instinct. 11. The place of 
 instinct in the human mind Pages 66 — 106 
 
ANALYSIS xiii 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 ASSIMILATION AND READJUSTMENT 
 
 I. Generically, Intelligence is distinguished from Instinct as a correlation 
 of experiences and actions effected by the individual within his own 
 life-history. 2. The experience on which intelligence rests is 
 generically an experience of relations. (3) The operation of experience 
 begins with Primary Retentiveness. 4. The simplest form of the 
 inferential use of experience is Assimilation, (5) which involves a 
 modified revival. 6. The main function of experience at this stage 
 is to define general instinctive tendencies. 7. Cases in which a 
 response is not modified, but created, by close association with a 
 feeling may also be referred to assimilation. 8. For such operations 
 of experience ideas are not necessary. 9. Their results in human 
 consciousness are acquired perceptions and perceptual impulses. 
 10. Intelligence at this level is Inarticulate. 11. Evidence for the 
 diffusion of this form of intelligence in the animal kingdom 
 
 Pages 107 — 142 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 CONCRETE EXPERIENCE AND THE PRACTICAL JUDGMENT 
 
 I. Judgment as a synthesis of distinct elements is to be distinguished 
 from Assimilation and from the Association of Ideas. As a 
 synthesis of perceptual elements, it may be called the Practical 
 Judgment. 2. The Practical Judgment rests on the revival of 
 Concrete Experience. 3. It involves ideas. 4. The conditions of 
 revival differ from those of Association. 5. Such a synthesis is the 
 condition of the knowledge of individual objects, of memory and 
 anticipation, of purpose and desire. 6. The knowledge of objects 
 also makes possible (ci) a rudimentary analogical inference, and {b) 
 the selective application of the data of experience. 7. The effect of 
 the Practical Judgment as seen in behaviour is that instead of a mere 
 modification of response the results of experience are applied to the 
 guidance of action. 8. There is thus in this stage of intelligence a 
 correlation of articulate complexes, which may be compared to the 
 logical inference from minor premiss to conclusion on the basis of a 
 perceived parallel Pages \/^'3, — 173 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 LEARNING AMONG THE HIGHER ANIMALS. THE METHOD OF TRIAL 
 
 AND ERROR 
 
 I. Acts of apparent purpose can hardly be explained by Association of 
 Ideas, but may grow up through Trial and Error. 2. Mr. Thorn- 
 dike's experiments show that many novel acts can be learnt in this 
 way. 3. But his results do not prove that all cats and dogs learn by 
 habituation. 4. Nor is it universally true that animals learn nothing 
 by being put through an action. 5. Experimental results are in the 
 main unfavourable to reflective imitation, but the preliminary ques- 
 tion should be settled whether an animal can learn by perception of 
 results affecting itself Pages 174 — 185 
 
xiv • ANALYSIS 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 
 
 I. Starting with the purpose of testing the power of perceptual learning, 
 the experiments dealt with the power of learning as a whole. 2. The 
 factor of attention. 3. Inducement, suggestion, and encouragement 
 as methods of teaching. 4. Description of experiments on method 
 of learning. 5. Further experiments show that though in learning a 
 trick there is a tendency to form habits, this is controlled by percep- 
 tion of results. 6. Probable reasons for imputing perceptual learning, 
 (7) and direction of effort towards the production of physical 
 changes implying what may be called practical ideas in a very crude 
 form. 8. Further evidence in favour of perceptual learning. Sheer 
 accident does not seem to count for much unless attended to. 
 g. The normal process of learning shows that more importance 
 attaches to attention than to repetition of instances. 10. Summary 
 of probable deductions Pages 186 — 254 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE KNOWLEDGE OF CONCRETE OBJECTS 
 
 Animals appear to draw inferences from one object to another similar 
 only in the relation of its parts. Thus they know an object as a concrete 
 whole, (2) and as a centre of many relations. 3. They display the 
 emotional states which go naturally with knowledge of individuals, 
 (4) and there is some evidence that they apply knowledge of how 
 persons or other animals will act so as to devise somewhat original 
 plans of action. 5. Summary. There is in animal behaviour some 
 independent evidence for each of the functions mentioned as 
 characteristic of the Practical Judgment Pages 2^^^ — -269 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 ARTICULATE IDEAS 
 
 Both for practical ideas in a less crude form and for a certain 
 originality of application there is experimental evidence in the 
 behaviour of apes. 2. Use of stick, &c., to reach food. 3. Dealing 
 with tied rope. 4. With bolt and hook. 5. Case of failure in com- 
 paring one situation with another. 6. Inserting stick in a tube. 
 7. Use of stool. 8. Removing obstacle from chain. 9. Unwinding 
 chain. 10. Attemfjted theft. 11. Evidence for similar articulation 
 or original application of experience among other mammals is of the 
 "anecdotal" kind. It cannot be wholly rejected. 12. Practical 
 Judgment may be attributed to apes with high probability, and with 
 some probability to other of the more intelligent mammals. 
 
 Pages 270 — 306 
 
ANALYSIS XV 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 INTELLIGENCE AND THE SOCIAL INSTINCTS 
 
 I. There is evidence of an element of intelligence in the more complex, 
 especially the social instincts, (2) while conversely, the social 
 instincts apparently implying recognition of individuals are especially 
 characteristic of the most intelligent animals. 3. It is thus probable 
 that the social act is in the concrete sense purposive, and if so, the 
 rudiment of morality cannot be denied to animals . Pages 307—317 
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 THE CONCEPT 
 
 Concrete experience vcill explain the highest developments of animal 
 experience, (2) but not the power of communication by language, 
 (3) which rests on the power of detaching ideas from perception and 
 recombining them, (4) which is precisely the point in which animal 
 language and baby talk in its first stage fail. 5. From this stage 
 language advances in the human being to the formation of general 
 conceptions, (6) which rest on a cross correlation of the perceptual 
 order, (7) and are the foundation of Universal Judgments in which 
 (8) thought explicitly recognises the necessary connection which is 
 the real basis of all inference, (9) and thereby deals with experience 
 past and future in masses, (10) thus building up the world of Ideas. 
 
 Pages 318—337 
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 THE PRODUCTS OF CONCEPTUAL THOUGHT 
 
 Akin to the Universal in genesis and function is the conception of 
 Personality, with its abiding interests in Self (2) and others (3) and of 
 organised society. 4. On the basis of conceptions universal and 
 individual are built the distinctively human thought-products of 
 creative imagination, morals, religion, and science. 5. Psychologic- 
 ally the real difference between this and lower stages is in degree of 
 scope and clearness, but it may be regarded as specially distinguished 
 by the appearance of Conceptual Thinking, Self-consciousness, and 
 Will. 6. Morally the difference is that conduct is («) directed to 
 comprehensive ends, (7) and {b) standardised and made subject to 
 general rules. 8. Through this medium, tradition becomes fused 
 with instinct as the basis of conduct. 9. In sum, by an advance in 
 scope and articulation, we arrived at a higher level of thought, in 
 which the affinities underlying lower inferences are analysed out, and 
 through them the permanent elements of experience past and future, 
 individual and racial, are brought into correlation . . Pages 338—363 
 
xvi ' ANALYSIS 
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 SYSTEMATIC THOUGHT 
 
 I, In the three stages examined, the organisation of life becomes 
 constantly more comprehensive, but in the highest remains very 
 fragfmentary. 2. Completeness of system is first made a direct 
 object by science. 3. But the study Of principles and methods leads 
 back to philosophy, which by evaluating the work of the mind (4) 
 makes possible a true systematisation of the sciences. Thus syste- 
 matic thought deals with the conditions on which less developed 
 thought rests. 5. The goal of the whole development is the 
 appreciation by the Mind of the conditions and possibilities of its 
 own growth, i.e., the completed "organisation" of life. 6. This 
 organisation implies an ethical development in which the principle ot 
 the unity of the species has overcome that of individual self- 
 aSsertion. Both principles are at work in the animal world (7) and 
 their interaction explains the inconsistencies of ordinary morals, 
 (8) which is fostered by the organisation of the race into a vast num- 
 ber of groups competing in a variety of ways. 9. As against this 
 organisation, humanitarianism, imperfectly incorporated in the 
 higher religions, stands for the unity of the race (10) and for its 
 development, which it makes the supreme object of human effort, 
 and the touchstone of recognised institutions and codes. 11. Thus 
 the ethical and intellectual development converge on the same point 
 — the organisation of the life of the race through knowledge of its 
 conditions. 12. From this point the development of mind becomes 
 intelligent and self-determined Pages 364 — 394 
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 SUMMARY OF THE STAGES OF CORRELATION 
 
 I. Orthogenic evolution consists in a development of organisation cul- 
 minating in the determination of its own development by the race. 
 
 2. Summary of the stages by which out of the struggle for existence 
 this organisation is step by step elaborated .... Pa^es 395 — 412 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 ORGANISATION, CONFLICT AND EVOLUTION 
 
 I. Orthogenic evolution consists in the rise of higher organisation — the 
 higher organisation being that in which unity is more complete and 
 scope greater. 2. The basis of the process is an improved physical 
 organisation on which the higher, intelligent organisation rests. 
 
 3. Organisation is the most efificient means of maintaining life, (4) 
 and this is true of the special forms of organisation by Intelligence 
 and social co-operation. ;. Fundamental antithesis between the 
 organisation of life and the struggle for existence. 6. With the 
 growth of organisation comes a modification of plan, substituting 
 pleasure, (7) and later happiness for bare existence as the end of 
 action. 8. Effort towards a higher development is made possible by 
 a mitigation of the struggle for existence, (9) and finally becomes the 
 explicit end upon which the whole plan of organisation is seen to 
 rest Pages 413—435 
 
Analysis xvU 
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 SELF-CONSCIOUS DEVELOPMENT 
 
 In the absence of mind, life is relatively anarchic, and evolution plan- 
 less. The evolution of mind consists in the introduction of order 
 and purpose. 2. It is an organic growth, and yet, at least in its 
 higher stages, the working out of a purpose. 3. As the purpose 
 becomes realised, the movement itself becomes more sure and swift. 
 
 4. Can orthogenic evolution as a whole be regarded as purposive ? 
 
 5. Reality as a whole is a single system which cannot be brought 
 under the category of teleology or mechanism. 6. But the ideal of 
 thought points to an organic self-development, at once mechanically 
 conditioned, and purposive, which closely corresponds to the facts 
 of Orthogenic Evolution Pages 436 — 446 
 
 APPENDIX 
 The Elberfeld Horses Pages 447—462 
 
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 
 
 Abbreviation. Full Title of Work. 
 
 Bethe, Ameisen . . . . Diirfen wirden Ameisen und Bienen psychische 
 Qualitaten zuschreiben ? von Albrecht Bethe, 
 1898. 
 
 Dahl . ... Veisuch einer Darstellung der psychischen 
 
 Vorgange in den Spinnen — F. Dahl, Viertel- 
 jahrschrift fiir wissenschaftliche Philosophie, 
 Vol. IX. 
 
 J. A. B Journal of Animal Behaviour. 
 
 J. C. N. P Journal of Comparative Neurology and 
 
 Pathology. 
 
 Miiller and Schumann . Experiraentelle Beitrage zur Untersuchung des 
 Gedachtnisses.— Zeitschrift fiir Psychologic 
 und Physiologie der Sinnes Organe, 1894. 
 
 Prayer I The Senses and the Will, by W. Preyer (Eng. 
 
 trans, by H. W. Brown, 1896). 
 
 Preyer II. . . . The Development of the Intellect, by W. Preyer 
 
 (Eng. trans, by H. W. Brown, 1896). 
 
 M. E. A. . . . Mental Evolution in Animals, by G. J. 
 
 Romanes, 1885. 
 
 Romanes .... Animal Intelligence, by G. J. Romanes, sixth 
 
 edition, 1895. 
 
 Wasmann, S. d. A. . . Vergleichende Studien iiber das Seelenleben 
 der Ameisen und der hohern Thiere, von Erich 
 Wasmann, S. J., second edition. 
 
 Wesley Mills The Nature and Development of Animal Intel- 
 ligence, by Professor Wesley Mills, 1898. 
 
MIND IN EVOLUTION 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 MIND AS A FACTOR IN EVOLUTION 
 
 I. Evolution is a natural process, moving without 
 regard to human judgments of what is good or bad, right 
 or wrong. So its exponents, who are often also its apostles, 
 assure us. None the less, it is held up to our admiration 
 as a process which makes for good. The term itself, in- 
 deed, suggests a growing fulness of existence, the unrolling 
 of latent powers, a tendency towards perfection, the process 
 by which a thing comes to be that for which it was destined. 
 Evolution is used as synonymous with progress, and pro- 
 gress, at least before its association with commercial sta- 
 tistics, meant a movement towards better things. The 
 doctrine that whatever is is right reappears in the modern- 
 ised form that whatever comes to be is justified. Nature 
 thus conceived is not perfect, but is always on the way to 
 become perfect. If only the fittest survive, each generation 
 since the world began must be able to boast with Sthenelos 
 that its members are much better than their fathers. 
 
 Unfortunately for the biological enthusiast, the perfection 
 which Nature seeks is not always a perfection which man 
 as a rational being can welcome or love. If the struggle 
 for existence has produced the wisdom of man, it has also 
 sharpened the tiger's claw and poisoned the cobra's fang. 
 Nothing lives "unless helped by another's death," and the 
 
2 M{ND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 progress of each species includes advance in the means of 
 destroying others as well as preserving itself. Nor can it 
 readily be conceded that the various species which thus 
 learn to destroy each other more efficiently are necessarily 
 higher or nobler in type than the ancestral forms from 
 which they are derived. If, indeed, the " higher " type 
 simply means that which is best capable of dealing with the 
 circumstances in which it is placed, then it is undeniably 
 true that the highest survive in the struggle for existence. 
 But the truth is at this point a truism not worth mention- 
 ing but for the mischief which it has wrought. In the 
 current theories of organic evolution, more particularly 
 in the doctrine of Natural Selection, there is nothing 
 whatever to prove that the individuals who prevail over 
 others in the struggle for existence must necessarily be in 
 any way " higher " in the sense which we human beings 
 attach to that word. There is nothing in the nature of 
 the struggle itself to show that the type which prevails 
 must always be one which we should recognise as morally 
 better, intellectually more developed, physically more 
 beautiful, or in any way more desirable. It all depends 
 on circumstances. In some parts of Africa the horse is 
 driven out by the Tsetse fly ; in others the white man 
 succumbs before the malaria germ, just as in this country 
 the honest investor goes down before the swindling com- 
 pany promoter. If it be said that in the end the better 
 type will prevail, that man is upon the whole dominant 
 among animals, and honesty upon the whole among men, 
 I do not wish to deny, nor yet at this stage to affirm it. I 
 am only concerned to protest against its being affirmed 
 upon a thoroughly false ground, and in a thoroughly false 
 form. The worst type very often survives, and evolution 
 is not always upwards. 
 
 2. It is not even normally upwards. If we take man as 
 the highest type of animal, and regard the line of evolution 
 which ends in man as the upward line, then, as we know, 
 at every point from the lowest upwards there are countless 
 diverging lines. Evolution is not serial. Its plan is not 
 that of a straight line or even a spiral, but rather that of a 
 tree. For the species that has moved some distance along 
 
I MIND AS A FACTOR IN EVOLUTION 3 
 
 a branch there is little or no chance of returning to the 
 main stem, and for such a species further development 
 means movement further away from the line of ascent. 
 Look at any general scheme of organic evolution (Haeckel's, 
 for example), and consider the lines of divergence.^ We 
 find, for example, Echinodermata, Arthropods, or MoUusca, 
 ranked as co-ordinate with the Tunicata from which Verte- 
 brates are derived. They are not stages in the evolution 
 of Vertebrates, nor can their further evolution bring them 
 nearer to the Vertebrate type. The crab does not become 
 more perfect by approximating insensibly to the Verte- 
 brates, but rather, if the expression be allowed, by becoming 
 more decisively and perfectly a crab — that is, by develop- 
 ing those features, strength of grip, hardness of outer shell, 
 or whatever they may be, which distinguish it from other 
 Crustacea. The evolution of the dog, under the guidance 
 of man, has not made him more human, but has brought 
 out all sorts of canine qualities — scent, strength, swiftness, 
 and the rest — and carried each to perfection after its own 
 kind. Normally, evolution accentuates the. existing ten- 
 dency, whatever it be. By whatever organ or faculty a 
 species is struggling to maintain itself, that organ or 
 faculty will be brought by the survival of the fittest to 
 the finest point of perfection. 
 
 3. This perfection may, from any point of view but 
 that of success in the struggle for existence, be nothing 
 but degradation. Eyes become atrophied as a useless en- 
 cumbrance to animals that dwell in caves. A general 
 degradation of type is suitable to the parasite, and the 
 thick-skinned man gets on best in the world. There are 
 many instances of sheer deterioration in organic as in social 
 evolution, and in each case the lower type is that which 
 most successfully adapts itself to circumstances and manages 
 to survive. Nor, though the higher type may become 
 in some degree dominant, is the lower eliminated. The 
 primitive organic forms appear to have subsisted with 
 comparatively little alteration to the present day. At any 
 rate, no organism could be very much simpler than the 
 
 ' Some good diagrams illustrating this point are given by Mr. Herbert 
 Spencer, Principles of Biology, Vol. I. Ch. XI. p. 388. 
 
 B 2 
 
4 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 lowest Rhizopods, which must either have remained nearly 
 unchanged through many geological periods, or represent 
 a process of degradation equal in extent and scope to that 
 of their previous evolution. But indeed there is nothing 
 in the physical conditions of Evolution to imply the 
 necessity of perpetual change. The fundamental fact of 
 Evolution is that through differentiation multiplication be- 
 comes easy. Ten beings requiring precisely the same food 
 would have much less chance of supporting themselves in 
 a given space than the same number feeding on different 
 things. Thus, if one of the ten develops a liking for food 
 of a different kind, the pressure on the others is lightened, 
 and their chance improved. If we apply this to variation 
 in a species, we see that, while its first effect will be very 
 adverse to the old stock, the future consequences may be 
 quite different. It may be that by striking out a fresh 
 line the variation relieves the old type from the pressure of 
 competition. Its reduced numbers find means of subsist- 
 ence again, and increase finally to their old point. Espe- 
 cially in social evolution, however rapid the rate of change, 
 we constantly find, if we look for them, survivals of the 
 primitive type. The small general shop is not utterly ex- 
 tinguished by the mammoth store. The village cobbler 
 remains, even if it be only to botch the boots that are 
 made at a Leicester factory. So also do the Protista sur- 
 vive, and there is not the slightest reason to suppose that 
 they are passing away. Many of them indeed in the 
 form of disease-germs wage an equal struggle with the 
 lords of creation. The tendency of biological evolution in 
 general is not to produce the highest type, but rather to 
 produce as many types as possible, filling in all the lacunae 
 of organic possibility, not necessarily destroying any but 
 those which have not the character of their own kind in 
 sufficient strength. Evolution tends to space out the types 
 that it suffers, to cut them deep and true. It multiplies 
 and it defines, but it does not necessarily elevate. 
 
 4. We have spoken already of at least one upward line 
 in the evolutionary tree. Can we trace this line ? Is there a 
 development in the true sense ? Is there progress, or the evo- 
 lution of a higher type ? To answer these questions, we must 
 
I MIND AS A FACTOR IN EVOLUTION 5 
 
 first know what is higher and what lower. To say that the 
 highest thing that man knows is Mind, or Soul, or Spirit, 
 may be to state an axiom, or to make an assumption. If 
 the latter, I must, at any rate, for the sake of clearness 
 make the assumption here. Evolution " upward s ' ' — Ortho- 
 genic or, as it has been called, Aristogenic Evolution^ — is 
 the growth of Mind, or of the conditions which make 
 Mind possible.^ Evolution in any other direction is the 
 growth of any other qualities whatever that assist survival. 
 The main purpose of this work is to inquire into the 
 character, tendency, and scope of Orthogenic Evolution : 
 in other words, into the growth of mind. It will be best 
 to say at once that we shall not be concerned with what 
 is called (as I think, confusedly and inappropriately called) 
 the ultimate nature of Mind. We shall not endeavour to 
 trace the origin of Mind out of something else that is not 
 mind. We shall take it as a factor in organic evolution 
 which we shall endeavour to trace backwards to its germ 
 and forwards to its mature development, ascertaining at 
 the same time its relation to other factors. In this inquiry 
 we shall have to do not so much with the inner nature of 
 Mind as with its functions, not so much with what Mind 
 is felt to be by its possessor, as with its operations as 
 apparent to an onlooker. What bearing these investiga- 
 tions may have on the nature of Mind, its origin in the 
 organic world, or its function in the whole of things, are 
 questions upon which our results must speak for them- 
 selves. We shall be occupied with its evolution, not in 
 the sense of its origin, but in the sense of that unrolling 
 of its full nature which is what evolution most strictly 
 means. If Mind is the highest thing, Orthogenic 
 Evolution must consist in the unfolding of all that there 
 is of latent possibility in Mind, the awakening of its 
 powers, the development of its scope. It will be well 
 to take a preliminary view of this development. 
 
 5. Mind, as we are to deal with it, is known by its 
 functions. The function which modern philosophy seized 
 
 1 By Mr. Sutherland, Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct 
 Vol. I. p. 29. 
 
 ^ Taking these conditions into account we shall be able to substitute 
 a more comprehensive definition at a later stage. 
 
6 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 upon as expressing the vital essence of Mind was that of 
 bringing things together so that they have a bearing upon 
 one another. Where there is mind there are order and 
 system, correlation and proportion, a harmonising of forces, 
 and an interconnection of parts. The organism which is 
 gifted with intelligence shows it by arranging its actions 
 on a certain plan. It adapts means to ends, which is one 
 sort of correlation, and in so doing it perhaps brings a 
 past experience to bear, interpreting a perception, for 
 example, by memory; and this is another sort of corre- 
 lation. Its scheme of action may include the good of its 
 young, or its mate, or its friends, along with its own, and 
 this is again another sort of correlation. In proportion as 
 its acts tend to promote the same end, its conduct may be 
 termed organised, and its several actions correlated. And 
 the organisation, as we have just seen, may include several 
 individuals, a pair of mates, a community, or conceivably 
 a whole species. 
 
 Not all organised action, as we shall presently see, is 
 intelligent. But all unorganised action is, just as far 
 as organisation is lacking, unintelligent. Where action 
 is random, blind, unconnected, conflicting, there is no 
 mind at work, or there is a failure in its control. Where 
 action proceeds on the impulse of the moment without 
 relation to permanent values, where past experience is not 
 used in interpreting perception, there is lack of mental 
 faculty, while, as between different people if their pur- 
 poses, however cleverly planned for the good of each, tend 
 to thwart one another, it is clear that, as the ordinary 
 phrase rightly expresses it, they are not of one mind. 
 In the latter case, which is important for our purposes, 
 there is mind — a mind in each individual — but there is no 
 mind which comprehends the ends of all in a single plan, 
 and makes of that plan its purpose. 
 
 6. Where minds differ is in organising power — that is, in 
 comprehensiveness or in scope. The dog who begs for 
 his dinner acts, to all appearance, intelligently. He adjusts 
 means to ends, and correlates a simple action with its' 
 immediate result. So also does a statesman who drafts a 
 clause in a Bill, or an engineer who decides on strengthen- 
 
I MIND AS A FACTOR IN EVOLUTION 7 
 
 ing a girder. In each case there is a certain correlation. 
 Actions are fitted together so that they form a connected 
 whole, or an intelligible plan. The difFerence is partly in 
 the scope of the plan, partly in the method of its con- 
 struction. The dog performs a single action with a view 
 to an immediate gratification. The man, whether states- 
 man or engineer, has to deal with a problem which it 
 would perhaps fill many pages even to formulate, and, in 
 adjusting each detail, has to think out a series of compli- 
 cated interactions, lest in filling a void at one place he may 
 disturb equilibrium somewhere else. If we turn to the 
 data by which dog and man are guided, we find a similar 
 result, of analogy and of contrast. The dog was trained 
 to beg ; that is, he learnt that by begging he obtained 
 food. When he applies the lesson, and begs of his own 
 accord, he connects this experience with his present 
 needs, brings it to bear on his present action. The 
 man also correlates experiences, but he has a thousand 
 and one data to take into account. A great propor- 
 tion of them may rest, not on his own observation, 
 but on the testimony of others, and he has to work 
 them up in all manner of ways, to reconstruct and 
 to calculate, before they can serve his purpose. There 
 is the same process of interconnecting distinct facts at 
 work, but as the interconnection is immeasurably broader 
 in its scope, so it is^ infinitely more subtle and intricate 
 in its methods. 
 
 ., The growth of mind in life is, then, manifested in the 
 wider and more subtle interconnection of what is otherwise 
 separate and even inconsistent. The rise of reason is a 
 swelling harmony which gradually subdues discord, and 
 uses it to its own ends. To the true rationalism the 
 supreme reason is no dry pedant living apart and blighting 
 the free spontaneous life of impulse, but the animating 
 spirit that interpenetrates experience and gives to its other- 
 wise scattered fragments new and harmonious meaning. 
 Aristotle,^ with much quaint nobility of phrase, has de- 
 scribed the inner harmony of the man in whom the real 
 or thinking self ^ is supreme, how he " agrees with him- 
 
 ^ Eth. Nic, IX. 4. 2 To StavoriTiKov — oirep eKaoros elvai Sowi. 
 
8 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 self," and "feels with his own joys and sorrows, because 
 the same thing Is at all times pleasant or painful to hini, 
 and not one thing at one time and another at another, 
 since with him is no variableness neither shadow of turn- 
 ing. Modern thinkers ^ have worked out in some detail 
 this correspondence between the "inner harmony" of the 
 moral or practical reason, and the " outer harmony " of 
 man's relations in society. Both within the soul and in 
 the relations between men, reason, as her sway extends, 
 harmonises, correlates, and connects. The clash of wills 
 is subdued, without loss of vigour or of personality, in 
 a common will. The experience, not merely of the in- 
 dividual but of the race, is brought to bear on the 
 problems which the race must solve. 
 
 7. At this point it will naturally be urged that, after 
 all, things are not, in the absence of reason, as anarchic as 
 might appear from our argument. If the lower animals 
 do not act from purpose, they still behave in a perfectly 
 determinate manner, and in the way best suited to their 
 needs. The singing of the birds or the play of the butter- 
 fly is no mere frivolity, but is serious courtship. Even 
 the kitten that seems to be amusing itself with a ball of 
 string is really preparing, after the fashion that Nature has 
 provided, for the serious business of hunting mice. In 
 short, in the brute creation Instinct replaces intelligence 
 as the correlating or unifying principle in life. On the 
 basis of instinct, means are adapted to ends, food is ob- 
 tained, danger avoided, the young cared for, and long con- 
 nected trains of action, like the nest-building of birds or in- 
 sects, carried out with undeviating persistence. Andnotonly 
 does instinct adapt means to ends, but, it may be further 
 urged, in so doing it uses the very same means which we 
 have dwelt upon as the peculiar property of intelligence. 
 For on any theory of Evolution it is the past experience 
 of the species which directly or indirectly conditions the in- 
 stinctive reactions of the individual. Just as in human 
 life the arts develop from stage to stage as new experi- 
 ments are made and found successful, so in the animal 
 
 ' See particularly Prof. Alexander, Moral Order and Progress 
 p. 117, &c. 
 
I MIND AS A FACTOR IN EVOLUTION 9 
 
 world slight variations which turn out well are preserved. 
 The physical structure which made them possible is handed 
 on, and becomes the basis from which a fresh start can be 
 made. The structure of eye, wing, beak, and claw that 
 makes perfect the swoop and pounce of the falcon is the 
 result of countless ancestral variations in the course of which 
 the structure which made some slight approach to this 
 point of perfection prevailed over others, and prevailed 
 more surely the more nearly it reached its goal.^ 
 
 Now Instinct, a term which has here been used, in a 
 popular sense, is not when fully defined to be taken as 
 exclusive of Intelligence. On the contrary, as we shall 
 see later, the relations are subtle and closely interwoven. 
 But we may put the criticism in more radical fashion by 
 substituting for Instinct the conception of hereditary 
 physical structure acting in accordance with mechanical 
 laws. Every living being, it may be said, possesses such a 
 structure. It has grown up bit by bit under the con- 
 ditions of heredity and of the struggle for existence, every 
 variation that helped to keep the organism alive and 
 to perpetuate the stock being preserved, while every 
 adverse change is weeded out by the destruction of the 
 stock which it entails. This structure effects the corre- 
 lations which we find in the world of life. The spring of 
 the cat involves a cunning adjustment of numerous pro- 
 cesses, from the rise of the retinal excitement which we 
 call the sight of the mouse to the combination of muscular 
 contractions which lands the cat with her prey in her 
 claws. This adjustment subserves what, from the out- 
 sider's point of view, we call a purpose, the purpose of 
 
 ' Later researches on heredity have thrown grave doubts on the 
 permanent value of small individual variations. Biology seems to be 
 reversing the old adage and proclaiming that in evolution natura nil 
 facit nisi per salium. If this view is finally substantiated it must 
 profoundly affect the entire philosophy of development. Clearly it 
 postulates some originating factor of organic change the nature of which 
 is at present wholly unknown. Nevertheless the argument of the para- 
 graph stands, if it is clearly understood that " experience," i.e., realised 
 success in meeting the conditions of life, is not spoken of as the cause of 
 new experiments in behaviour but the condition governing the survival 
 of the individual making the experiment and of his line. We may still 
 regard a complex instinct like a complex structure as growing by stages, 
 though we may have to take each stage as a definite step, not as the 
 infinitesimal prolongation of a continuous curve. 
 
lo MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 securing a meal. But purpose as a conscious process ^ in 
 the cat has no causal efficacy. What works is the physical 
 system, and we ought to attribute to this system not the 
 fulfilment of a purpose but the performance of a function 
 in the life of the cat. Indeed, according to one theory all 
 actions of living beings from the pounce of the cat to the 
 inventions of the engineer or the creations of the poet 
 are in the last resort to be explained in this fashion. All 
 are the reactions, highly specialised it may be, but still the 
 reactions of a complicated machine. If we keep to the 
 facts, however, we recognise great differences of type in 
 the behaviour not only of men but of animals. Some 
 forms of behaviour conform to the mechanical type. They 
 serve a function, but in doing so they proceed with 
 a machine-like uniformity. Others bear no resemblance 
 to machine-processes, and the more closely we analyse 
 them the more definite does the difference become, and 
 these are the modes of behaviour usually attributed 
 to Mind. Now whether this distinction is fundamental 
 or superficial, whether the apparent independence of Mind 
 is an illusion or a reality, how the relations between the 
 mental and the physical are to be understood are philo- 
 sophical questions which we can only approach with any 
 advantage when we have all the apparent differences before 
 us. But that there are differences between forms of 
 behaviour, and in particular differences in the kind and 
 degree of correlation that they exhibit is, as we shall argue 
 in the next chapter, simple matter of fact. Our main 
 object in this volume is to exhibit these differences, 
 to distinguish the principal types of correlation that are 
 found in the behaviour of living beings. These will be 
 found to range themselves under the two great classes of 
 the mechanical and the mental. Even if ultimate analysis 
 should resolve one of these into the other or both into a 
 more ultimate unity, within that unity the distinction 
 would still hold. There would still be specific differences 
 in correlation of the highest significance for the evolution 
 of life. In particular we shall see that the kind of corre- 
 lation which we attribute to Mind is wider in scope and 
 more complete in the detail of its adjustment than that 
 
I MIND AS A FACTOR IN EVOLUTION ii 
 
 which we call mechanical, and the more so in proportion 
 as Mind develops. Thus if our study of orthogenic 
 evolution is an inquiry into the growth of Mind, it will 
 also follow the successive stages by which the life of 
 animals and men become more completely organised, and 
 if a completer organisation may fairly be called a higher 
 organisation, that is some justification for our provisional 
 application of the term to the work of Mind. Our 
 subject then is the development of Mind as seen in its 
 functions, and this will involve a review of the principal 
 types of correlation, whether attributable to Mind or 
 to any other factor, that are discoverable in the world 
 of life. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 MIND AND MECHANISM 
 
 I. Our object being the study of correlation in general, 
 and of correlation as effected by Mind in particular, our 
 first task must be to justify the distinction drawn in the 
 last chapter between the mechanical and the mental. We 
 must establish, first, that there exist two generically 
 different modes of correlation, and, secondly, that one of 
 these may justly be attributed to Mind. The data on 
 which the first of these conclusions rests must obviously 
 consist of external facts of behaviour. There must be 
 positive differences in the relation of act to act or act to 
 circumstances to justify a deep distinction between the 
 correlating functions. The data of the second conclusion 
 cannot consist in external behaviour alone, for we know 
 Mind each of us directly within himself. The relation 
 between these two arguments is the chief source of 
 difficulty in our subject, and we must at this early stage 
 do our best to make it clear. Let us begin by re-stating 
 the mechanical theory of correlation and examining it 
 from the point of view of an observer of external 
 behaviour alone. By general admission many of the 
 processes of the living body can be explained upon 
 mechanical principles. Given the contraction of the 
 muscle the movements of the limbs illustrate simple 
 principles of the lever. Given the pulsations of the heart, 
 the broad fact of the circulation could be inferred from 
 the action of the common pump. Given the respiratory 
 centre and its control over the muscles that move the ribs 
 
CHAP. II MIND AND MECHANISM 
 
 13 
 
 and the diaphragm, respiration follows as a matter ot 
 pneumatics. In all these cases there are indeed qualifica- 
 tions induced by more searching inquiry. Not all the 
 facts of circulation are explicable on the principles of the 
 common pump. When the dilatation and contraction of 
 the arteries, for example, are taken into account, we can no 
 longer think of the blood as circulating through a simple 
 system of elastic tubes. When all the facts are known 
 the phenomena of digestion are not found to correspond 
 accurately to the chemical laws of osmosis. Moreover, 
 in stating each of these processes in mechanical terms, we 
 have to assume certain forces which are not like those of 
 an ordinary inanimate mechanism. Nevertheless the 
 advocates of the mechanical theory of life point with 
 triumph to a series of successes. Time and again they 
 have reduced some mysterious process, which seemed 
 distinctive of living beings and explicable only by the 
 assumption of some vital force, to mechanical terms. 
 Their belief is that the residue which is at present 
 ■unreduced only requires further investigation to be set 
 upon the same basis. If we knew enough about the 
 structure of the heart and the nature of nerves and 
 muscular action, we should be able to state the law of its 
 pulsations in mechanical formulas. A similar extension 
 of our knowledge would explain the adaptation of the 
 arteries to the fluctuating requirements of the body, the 
 control of the respiratory mechanism by the medullary 
 centre, the absorption of foodstuff by the cells lining 
 the alimentary canal, and so forth. Finally, a still more 
 perfect knowledge would enable us to reduce purposive 
 action, artistic creation, philosophic thought to a complex 
 of mechanical changes in nervous tissue. All would be 
 recognised as mechanism if we could only know the 
 whole of the intimate structure of the body. 
 
 In order to examine this theory and to decide what 
 part, if any, is played by Mind in modifying mechanical 
 processes, we must ask in general terms what is meant by 
 the mechanical and what sort of function we suppose 
 mind to introduce in the business of correlating vital 
 activities. Now if we take a confessedly inanimate 
 
14 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 machine, the work of human hands, it exhibits, like the 
 human body itself, a complex dovetailing of various parts, 
 such that when the whole is put in motion some definite 
 result is produced, and in the production of this result 
 every part of the machine, like every organ of the human 
 body, performs some specific function, thus contributing 
 to the whole. But in the machine, though each part 
 performs this function, its motions do not directly depend 
 upon the result that does, as a fact, come about from 
 them, and though the machine when perfect acts as . a 
 whole, yet the movement of each part is dependent on its 
 own structure and on the behaviour of those which are 
 immediately in contact with it, not on the unity and en- 
 tirety of the machine. This particular wheel is turned 
 by cogs fitting in, let us say, to a ratchet. If the ratchet 
 moves the wheel turns. It does not matter whether the 
 machine as a whole is in order or out of order, whether 
 it is doing the work for which it was made or doing 
 nothing at all ; given that the wheel is in place and that 
 the ratchet is moving, the wheel will turn. It has no 
 regard to the performances of any other part. It has no 
 concern with the effects that it produces by turning. It 
 turns in response to the force immediately impressed 
 upon it. These conditions hold generally of mechanical 
 aggregates. Every element in such an aggregate acts 
 uniformly in response to the force immediately operating 
 upon it and without relation to the contemporaneous 
 behaviour of any other part or to the result which will in 
 fact accrue from its action. 
 
 Now, whenever Mind is at work, these conditions are in 
 appearance reversed. It may be only appearance, but 
 even so it will have its importance as bearing upon the 
 methods of correlation. Let us then examine the 
 difference. Mind, as studied from outside, in its functions, 
 is most clearly recognisable in the purposive act. Now 
 the purposive act, again studied not from within but from 
 without, is an act apparently directed by relation to its 
 result. It chooses means to ends, rejects those that 
 are unsuitable, varies its behaviour in accordance with 
 circumstances, surmounts, destroys, or circumvents 
 
11 MIND AND MECHANISM 15 
 
 obstacles, adapts itself to an indefinite number of varying 
 circumstances in accordance with their relation to the 
 matter in hand. If a philosopher from another planet, 
 ignorant of all forms of life as they exist upon this world, 
 were to watch a stone rolling down hill and a man 
 running to catch his train, he would come to the con- 
 clusion that the stone and the man were actuated by very 
 different principles. He would, for example, see the man 
 go round the obstacle which caught up the stone, and if 
 he proceeded to compare their behaviour under many 
 circumstances and in difFerent relations, he would arrive 
 at the result that the broad difference could be most 
 easily formulated by conceiving the stone's action as 
 determined always by the reaction of its inherent qualities 
 upon the forces directly impressed upon it without regard 
 to the ultimate issue, while the man's action would be, in 
 the majority of cases, determined by its relation from 
 moment to moment to some result more or less remote. 
 If, further, our observer was to extend his investigations 
 to the operation of man-made machines, he would 
 discover in their working a co-operation of parts, a 
 correlation of processes, in subservience to certain results. 
 But if he carefully analysed and compared different cases, 
 he would arrive at the conclusion that the working of 
 every part of the machine rested on causes fundamentally 
 identical with those which urge the rolling stone. He 
 would see that the bearing of its act upon the outcome 
 never affects the behaviour of any cog in the machinery. 
 If, however, he looked into the workshops where the 
 machines are made, and especially into the offices where 
 they are designed, he would discover that the behaviour 
 of the beings that made them is continually adjusted and 
 readjusted in accordance with the relation of the act 
 to the result. That is to say, proceeding purely by 
 inferences based on comparison of behaviour, he would 
 discover two fundamentally distinct types of correlation, 
 one in which each element of behaviour is conditioned by 
 its relation to its result, the other in which no such 
 relation is operative although the result is in fact pro- 
 duced. Now he might ultimately decide that these two 
 
1 6 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 types are reducible to one. He might, for example, find 
 that all mechanical correlations are to be referred to 
 a plan in which the result is pre-arranged. Or he might 
 find that the apparent determination of behaviour by- 
 result is due to an infinitely more subtle combination of 
 purely mechanical arrangements which at first escaped 
 him. But even in the latter alternative he would still 
 acknowledge two clearly distinct types of correlated 
 behaviour, in one of which the bearing of act on result 
 is operative, while in the other it is not. He would now 
 hold that this relation is made operative by a mechanical 
 arrangement. But operative it still would be, and this 
 would generically distinguish the type of correlation from 
 the type in which there is no such element operating. 
 
 2. So far, then, our first point. There exist two types of 
 correlation, the first conforming to that of known 
 machines, the second radically differing. Whatever more 
 ultimate unity may be suggested between them, this 
 difference in the nature of correlation will remain, and this 
 difference is established purely by observation of be- 
 haviour. But now comes our further question. We 
 provisionally attributed the second type of correlation to 
 Mind. In so doing we are deserting the test of behaviour 
 pure and simple. Mind is something of which I have 
 direct knowledge within me, and you within you, but 
 neither of us sees, hears, or feels it at work in another. 
 By what logic then is behaviour of any kind attributed to 
 Mind ? The broad answer is as follows. In my be- 
 haviour I am conscious of certain states, acts, processes. 
 For example, when I effect that kind of correlation which 
 I call acting with a purpose, I am aware of the acts and 
 have an idea of the end, and such awareness is within my 
 experience essential to activity of that kind. The sum of 
 all such conscious activity together with the processes in- 
 volved in it and the permanent conditions underlying it 
 constitute that body of my experience which I call my 
 own mind. Now in referring any act of my own to my 
 mind as a cause I may be mistaken. It may be that 
 physical processes of brain and nerve of which I am 
 unconscious form the true vehicle of the act. But in 
 
II MIND AND MECHANISM 17 
 
 speaking of my mind as implicated in my purposive 
 behaviour, I am only recording facts of my experience just 
 as certainly as if I were noting the movements of the 
 barometer. On the other hand, it is only my own in- 
 dividual mind that is thus given to a direct experience, 
 and if all reference to mind other than that based on 
 direct experience were ruled out, each of us would have to 
 be a Solipsist.^ I find, however, that many other 
 objects, constituted externally much like myself, also 
 behave in ways broadly corresponding to my own 
 and I attribute to them also minds and states or acts of 
 Mind accordingly. The inference is quite logical, and 
 within limits is being repeatedly corroborated by the 
 whole of my intercourse with my specie^. ». Within limits, 
 because I may err by too great sirnpliflckion, taking others 
 as more like me than they really are, or again by failing to 
 recognise a common element which is really at work. 
 These are the ordinary fallacies to which all generalisation 
 is liable and from which it is saved only by a rigorous 
 inductive logic. The application of such logic to the 
 details of our subject will be examined presently. Mean- 
 while on the main point we must maintain that the attri- 
 bution of Mind to others on the basis of behaviour 
 is a perfectly consequent logical inference. Here is a 
 situation A upon which I react consciously in a definite 
 manner, B, the result being certain overt behaviour C. 
 Here is another being in a corresponding situation A', 
 which displays corresponding behaviour C. To infer 
 a corresponding link B' is a valid logical procedure, and 
 its validity is corroborated by the ever-repeated test of 
 daily intercourse with our fellows. 
 
 3. This being the logical basis of our attribution of one 
 class of correlations to Mind, it is open to two criticisms, 
 which have been hinted at but must be more fully stated 
 before we can proceed. First, Mind may not be the 
 operative cause of correlation. Internal consciousness 
 does not prove that it is so in me. Therefore no observa- 
 
 ' It may be said that other beings communicate their minds to me by 
 language, but in the last resort the use of words is an element of 
 behaviour of which only the external result is an immediate object of my 
 experience. 
 
 C 
 
1 8 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 tion of behaviour can prove that it is so in another. This 
 criticism we must provisionally accept. What our reason- 
 ing can prove is that the operation of Mind is implicated 
 in certain forms of correlation, and it is on this ground 
 that for the time being we call them mental. The proof 
 that Mind is the operative cause must rest on the analysis 
 of the nature of mechanism on the one hand and of mental 
 causation on the other. For our present purposes the 
 names mechanical and mental must be held to import, the 
 one correlation corresponding to that of known machines 
 and not involving mental activity, the other correlation 
 involving mental activity and radically different from 
 that of known machines. Secondly, in imputing a specific 
 mode of consciousness to another we argue from the 
 situation and the behaviour. If these were in all respects 
 similar from case to case, there would be no difficulty. 
 But no' two situations are absolutely alike. If we argue 
 from our own behaviour in one case to that of another 
 person in his case, we are justified only if the cases 
 are alike in all relevant points. What is relevant we 
 decide, as in all induction, by comparison of instances 
 wherein those things which go uniformly together are 
 distinguished from those which vary independently. But 
 now when we come to beings which differ permanently 
 from ourselves, a graver difficulty is introduced. This 
 difficulty appears even in human psychology in our judg- 
 ments of the other sex or of another race, even of another 
 class or another age than our own. It is still more serious 
 when we are dealing with animals whose whole organisa- 
 tion presents points of difference from ours, who are 
 relatively poor in means of expression, and whose behaviour 
 does not therefore afford so many opportunities for test- 
 ing a doubtful point. The attribution of consciousness 
 to animals rests ultimately on the same logic as its 
 attribution by you or me to our fellow men. But the 
 differences which already give us trouble in judging our 
 fellows are deeper, and the tests by which we may measure 
 their effect more difficult to apply. But this at least we 
 can say : if the behaviour of another being corresponds 
 precisely in all its outer relations to that which I know of 
 
II MIND AND MECHANISM 19 
 
 in myself as carried out in consciousness and never with- 
 out consciousness, it is clear that in that other being some 
 process occurs which performs the same functions as con- 
 sciousness performs in me. The antecedent situation 
 corresponds, let us suppose, in every detail which experi- 
 ence has shown to be relevant to its causation. The 
 resulting act corresponds. It is an inevitable inference 
 that the linking process corresponds in function. The 
 organisation of the animal being different, it is possible 
 that the state of consciousness may differ in any respect 
 not essential to its function. This is a possibility which 
 our method cannot exclude. But it can establish the 
 existence of corresponding functions. We shall confine 
 ourselves to the analysis of such functions without attempt- 
 ing to ascertain the nature of the animal mind in other 
 respects. That Is to say, we shall not try to form a 
 picture of the animal consciousness. But we shall in the 
 course of this work use the term consciousness and terms 
 importing consciousness or specific modes of conscious- 
 ness to describe any function corresponding precisely in 
 its outer relations to one which among ourselves neces- 
 sarily involves consciousness or the particular mode of 
 consciousness which is in question. Given the criteria as 
 we have stated them, this attribution is logically justified. 
 The similarities between the functions which the terms 
 are used to describe would subsist whatever the differ- 
 ences may be, and no other way of describing them 
 lies to hand that does not involve repeated and in- 
 tolerable periphrasis. 
 
 We conclude then (i) that there exist two generic 
 forms of correlation distinguishable by the observation of 
 external behaviour alone ; (2) that one of these is held on 
 sufficient logical grounds to Involve the operation of 
 Mind. Further, we propose to distinguish and compare 
 types of mental correlation on the basis of the behaviour 
 involved. We shall find that the method of correlation 
 Involved will give us a common measure applicable to 
 every stage of mental development from the lowest to 
 the highest, enabling us, therefore, to determine at any 
 point how much is achieved. Lastly, to each form of 
 
 c 2 
 
20 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 observable correlation we shall impute a corresponding 
 mental function, and shall hold ourselves justified in 
 so doing even in the animal world so far as we restrict 
 ourselves to terms importing function and do not attempt 
 a picture of a state of consciousness as known only to its 
 possessor. We remark finally that any doubt attaching 
 to the use of such terms will not apply to the descrip- 
 tion of the types of correlation effected, which depend 
 entirely on accuracy in the analysis of observed facts of 
 behaviour. 
 
 4. In order to apply our conception of mental correlation 
 and distinguish it from the mechanical, we must include 
 within it every class of action in which the relation to 
 results enters in as a factor. For purposes of illustration 
 we have employed purposive behaviour. But fully 
 developed Purpose is not the only practical operation of 
 Mind. This we may ascertain by regarding operations 
 either from within or from without. If we look at 
 purpose from the inside the relation to the result is 
 a matter of consciousness. We have an idea of the end 
 in view, and this idea is a factor in promoting and 
 guiding our behaviour until the end is reached. But 
 the employment of ideas is a relatively advanced stage in 
 the life of mind. We shall find types of action that 
 resemble purpose in that they are determined by relation 
 to the result, although no idea of the result is consciously 
 formulated. We shall find that, viewed externally as 
 modes of correlation, they differ in a manner correspond- 
 ing to the difference ascertained by conscious analysis. 
 We need, therefore, a generic name for all action which 
 is in one way or another determined by relation to the 
 result which will accrue from it, whether there is a full 
 antecedent awareness of that result or not. For this 
 purpose psychology employs the term Conation. Cona- 
 tion is a mental state which as such tends to pass into 
 some other. The " other " may be clearly or ill defined. 
 The method of operation may be precise or wavering and 
 uncertain. We shall have to take up these points at a later 
 stage and seek a closer understanding of the relation of 
 Conation to purpose. Meanwhile it results from our 
 
II MIND AND MECHANISM 21 
 
 definition that relation to some other state that is to come 
 out of it is essential to conation, and the name may there- 
 fore serve to characterise the activity of mind in general 
 as a factor in the organisation of conduct. What is 
 involved in conation as such and what is peculiar to its 
 distinctive forms, will be questions occupying us at a 
 later stage. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 ORGANIC ADAPTABILITY AND THE VITAL PROCESSES 
 
 I . To determine the part played by Mind in behaviour 
 we must begin, as the preceding discussion will have 
 suggested, with its opposite. We must seek to determine 
 the scope and measure the achievement of the mechanical 
 factor in the life of organised beings. For this purpose 
 we naturally turn to those processes which in ourselves 
 go on without the aid of conscious mind. We may begin 
 with the ordinary vital functions of nutrition, respira- 
 tion, secretion, and the like which are common to all 
 organisms. These functions exhibit a measure of adapt- 
 ability which is the common character of all living organic 
 matter. We find it in plants no less than in animals, in 
 Protozoa no less than in Mammals. This adaptability, 
 however, is commonly referred by physiologists to 
 mechanical causes. The prevailing view is that the 
 white blood-corpuscle which makes its way through the 
 blood to the bacteria which it is about to devour is as 
 certainly moved by mechanical forces, if we could only 
 detect them, as the red corpuscle which is carried along 
 passively in the blood-stream. The waving of the cilia, 
 or delicate threads which proceed from the lining of the 
 windpipe, and by a constant upward swish sweep away 
 any chance foreign body from the approaches to the lungs, 
 is held no more spontaneous than the alternate bending and 
 recovery of the long grass in the wind. We can tell what 
 it is that bends the grass. We do not at present know 
 what moves the cilia. It is no massive outer force ; it is 
 
CHAP. Ill ORGANIC ADAPTABILITY 23 
 
 a series of molecular, presumably chemical, changes. But 
 physiologists for the most part agree in the hypothesis — 
 which it is well to remember is no more than a hypothesis 
 — that if we knew all about these changes, we should find 
 them to be only very complicated results of the same set 
 of physical laws in accordance with which the grass bows 
 before the wind. 
 
 Before discussing this question let us look at the broad 
 facts of organic adaptability as we find them, and form 
 from them a conception of what the organism can do. If 
 we assume that the prevailing physiological conception is 
 correct, and that the organism is in fact a cunningly 
 contrived machine, we may remember that every machine 
 has a function and character of its own. It is composed 
 of parts which, taken by themselves, are common to many 
 machines, and work in accordance with highly general 
 laws, yet in their combination make up a machine which 
 may be quite individual, and work in a way peculiar to 
 itself. The machine as a whole may draw a train, or spin 
 cotton, and any one, an onlooker or a purchaser, may be 
 allowed to ask what it does without asking how it is 
 built. If the organism is a machine, if it is made up of 
 parts each of which can be found also in the inorganic 
 world, and acts in accordance with the very same laws 
 which prevail in that sphere, still the combination of these 
 parts may be distinctive, and the work it does may be 
 peculiar. It may be to evolve carbonic acid, or it may be 
 to produce poetry. We can learn something of the 
 character of its work, and of the way in which it does it, 
 even if we can form no satisfactory theory as to the 
 structure of the machine. 
 
 2. The normal life of any organism from highest to 
 lowest is a process of unceasing change. It involves a con- 
 stant interchange of substance with the outer world, an 
 equally constant metabolism or transformation within itself 
 of the substances which it takes up from without, and a 
 no less constant transformation of energy. Such processes 
 are common to all organisms. If we spoke only of the 
 higher forms, many other activities could of course be 
 added. Throughout this unceasing process oi change. 
 
24 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 which differentiates it from inanimate matter, the organisrn 
 preserves its own identity as clearly as the unchanging rock. 
 This feat of preserving itself in the midst of change could 
 not be accomplished as it is in the midst of ever varying 
 circumstances unless there were a certain equilibrium point, 
 as we may call it, which the organism is always striving to 
 maintain. It is true that the equilibrium is a moving 
 equilibrium. The process of rapid growth in youth, of 
 slow change during maturity, and of gradual decay enaing 
 in death (or internal transformation ending in fission), is 
 of course the normal orbit of every organism. The equili- 
 brium point moves along this orbit, and the momentary 
 changes of which we speak are so many oscillations about 
 the equilibrium point as it moves. What immediately 
 concerns us is that every organism is so built, whether on 
 mechanical principles or not, that every deviation from the 
 equilibrium point sets up a tendency to return to it. This 
 is true both of the normal and of the abnormal circum- 
 stances that afi-ect the organism. A few illustrations may 
 make this general statement a little clearer. 
 
 The normal breathing of the healthy man serves among 
 other things to maintain a certain balance between the 
 demand and supply of oxygen within the body. In 
 the alternate expansion and contraction of the lungs we 
 have a simple instance of oscillation about a mean point, 
 in which by whatever mechanism the deviation in one 
 direction itself tends to bring about the contrary motion. 
 Under certain circumstances, normal breathing does not 
 supply oxygen in sufficient quantities. If the atmosphere is 
 deficient in oxygen, or if by violent exercise the muscles 
 consume more than their due share, we begin to pant, to 
 take deeper breaths, and take them more quickly. The 
 same action has the effect of eliminating the extra quantity 
 of carbonic acid' evolved by the muscles during violent 
 exercise. The organism makes an effort to maintain as 
 nearly as possible its normal state. 
 
 Still more instructive for our purposes is the mainten- 
 
 1 It seems doubtful, however, whether the carbonic acid has a direct 
 effect. See Foster, Text Book of Physiology, II. pp. 632 and 634 sixth 
 edition, 1895, 
 
Ill ORGANIC ADAPTABILITY 25 
 
 ance of an almost even temperature by all warm-blooded 
 animals. In man, the temperature of the blood is main- 
 tained, no matter what the temperature of the surrounding 
 air, at 98*4° F. The fluctuations around this point 
 during health are so narrow that any marked deviation is 
 at once taken as a symptom of illness. Without going 
 into detail, it is sufficient to say that this balance is main- 
 tained principally by two mechanisms, the vasomotor 
 system ^nd the perspiration. The vasomotor nerves 
 govern the calibre of the small arteries which supply the 
 surface of the body with blood, dilating or constricting 
 them as the case may be. The application of something 
 cold to the skin acting through these nerves causes con- 
 striction of the blood-vessels. The result is that less 
 blood comes to the surface, and as it is the blood that 
 brings the heat the skin is cooled, but the body as a 
 whole gives off less heat than usual. Exactly the opposite 
 result follows from the application of heat. Now the 
 small arteries are dilated, the surface is flushed with 
 blood, and heat is rapidly lost. Similarly, the increase 
 of heat again acting through a nervous mechanism throws 
 the sweat glands into activity, and the consequent 
 evaporation keeps the body cool. 
 
 " The working of this heat-regulating mechanism is well seen 
 in the case of exercise. Since every muscular contraction gives 
 rise to heat, exercise must increase for the time being the pro- 
 duction of heat ; yet the bodily temperature rarely rises so much 
 as a degree centigrade, if at all. By exercise the respiration is 
 quickened, and the loss of heat by the lungs increased. The 
 circulation of blood is also quickened, and the cutaneous vascular 
 areas becoming dilated, a larger amount of blood passes through 
 the skin. Added to this, the skin perspires freely. Thus a large 
 amount of heat is lost to the body, sufficient to neutralise the 
 addition caused by the muscular contraction, the increase which 
 the more rapid flow of blood through the abdominal organs might 
 tend to bring about being more than sufficiently counteracted by 
 their smaller supply for the time. The sense of warmth, which 
 is felt during exercise in consequence of the flushing of the skin, 
 is in itself a token that a regulative cooling is being carried on. 
 In a similar way the application of external cold or heat defeats its 
 own ends, either partially or completely." ^ 
 
 1 Foster, op. cit. Part II. p. 849. 
 
26 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 It is merely a familiar instance of the same well adapted 
 rhythm, that work makes us hungry, that being hungry 
 we find something to eat, that eating it makes us able to 
 work again, and thereby earn our next meal. It is a more 
 special application of the same fact that the muscle which 
 we especially exercise gets an extra supply of blood . and 
 grows in proportion. 
 
 3. Thus both in general and in special ways the normal 
 healthy life is a process of unceasing oscillation about an 
 imaginary equilibrium point, departure from which tends 
 of itself to set up processes which take the organism back 
 again. The same feature of organic action appears in a 
 more curious shape in more or less abnormal life. A 
 machine can be made to regulate its own action within 
 certain limits. Thus, in the steam engine, the forward 
 thrust of the piston opens and shuts valves by which the 
 backward thrust is at once brought about. Here there is 
 perhaps a parallel to the automatic rhythm of breathing, or 
 of the heart's beat. More than that, by the device of the 
 " governor " a steam engine can regulate its own available 
 energy in accordance with the work required of it. There 
 is a close analogy here to the laboured breathing of hard 
 exercise where more oxygen is required. But I do not 
 think that any machine can repair itself when its own 
 structure is in some way injured. This, within limits, 
 every organism can do. Even the human body can repair 
 its skin and its broken bones. This repairing means that 
 in the healthy organism a lesion sets up processes which 
 tend to restore the normal condition. Let us first observe 
 the degree and kind of adaptation involved in the healing 
 of a broken bone. The spongy substance of the long 
 bones in the higher vertebrates is — 
 
 " . . . . arranged on a similar mechanical principle to that ot 
 arched structures in general ; it is composed of numerous fine bony 
 plates, so arranged as to withstand the greatest amount of tension 
 and pressure, and to give the utmost firmness with a minimum 
 expenditure of material. But the direction, position, and strength 
 of these bony plates are by no means congenital or determined in 
 advance : they depend on circumstances. If the bone is broken 
 and heals out of the straight, the plates of the spongy tissue 
 
Ill ORGANIC ADAPTABILITY 27 
 
 become rearranged, so as to lie in the new direction ot greatest 
 tension and pressure ; th us they can adapt themselves to changed 
 circumstances." ^ 
 
 But it is among the lowest organisms that " Regeneration " 
 performs the most remarkable feats. As long as one 
 condition is maintained, a Protozoon may be not merely 
 injured, but divided into several pieces, and yet each piece 
 will, in a few hours, grow into the entire animal again, 
 dwarfed perhaps, but otherwise, to all appearance, healthy 
 and content. The condition is that each fragment should 
 contain a portion of the " nucleus " of the cell in addition 
 to some of the surrounding protoplasm. If this condition 
 is not observed, if, for example, a portion of the proto- 
 plasm is cut off by itself, it retains for some while activities 
 as similar as may be to those of the entire animal, but it 
 shows no power of reconstruction or recuperation, and in 
 the end it perishes. But a Stentor, for example, may be 
 divided into twenty-seven parts, and the twenty-seventh 
 fraction may, if containing a fragment of nucleus in its 
 protoplasm, live to become a complete Stentor again.^ The 
 remarkable nature of this process is best illustrated by the 
 diagram on the following page, which I take from Prof. 
 E. B. Wilson's work. The Cell in 'Development and 
 Inheritance, p. 250. 
 
 It will be seen that, however much the fragments diiFer, 
 they end by reproducing the entire organism, the repro- 
 ductive process having in each case the same equilibrium 
 point at which waste and repair balance one another and 
 growth ceases. 
 
 Equally remarkable is the tendency of a mutilated 
 embryo to develop into a perfect animal. When the 
 fertilised ovum divides into two distinct cells, it would be 
 natural to suppose that each one of these was destined to 
 develop into one half of the body, and it might be inferred 
 that if one were destroyed, the other must either perish or 
 develop into one half of the embryo only. But it is found, 
 in point of fact, that there are further possibilities. In 
 
 1 Prof. Weismann, Romanes' Lecture, p. 15, quoted by Mr. Lloyd 
 Morgan ; Habit and Instinct, p. 313. 
 
 2 Wilson, The Cell in Development and Inheritance, p. 249. 
 
28 
 
 MIND IN EVOLUTION 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 some cases the half embryo is formed first, and the missing 
 half is regenerated from it later on. In other cases the 
 half-embryo formation is found only in the earliest stages, 
 while in others again it is entirely suppressed. Thus, to 
 illustrate the first case, Roux destroyed one of the two 
 " cleavage cells " into which the ovum of a frog divides, 
 and found that the other grew into an embryo which 
 
 B 
 
 C 
 
 Regeneration in the Unicellular Animal Stentor [Gruber]. 
 A. Animal divided into three pieces, each containing a fragment of the nucleus. 
 B. The three fragments shortly afterwards. C. The three fragments after 
 twenty-four hours, each regenerated to a perfect animal. 
 
 wholly lacked one half of the body. The missing half 
 could, however, grow out of the existing half at a later 
 stage.'^ For the second case we may quote experiments on 
 the ova of sea-urchins, which divide first into two and 
 then into four cells. If at either stage these cells are 
 isolated, they continue to segment — 
 
 "as if still forming part of an entire larva, and give rise to a 
 
 half (or quarter) blastula. The opening soon closes, however, to 
 
 ' Verworn, General Physioloey, trans. F. S. Lee, 1899, p. 534. 
 
Ill ORGANIC ADAPTABILITY 
 
 29 
 
 form a small complete blastula, and the resulting gastrula and 
 Pluteus larva is a perfectly formed dwarf of only half (or quarter) 
 the normal size." ^ 
 
 In Amphioxus the isolated blastomere cells produced 
 by division of the ovum segment from the beginning 
 like a smaller ovum.^ Lastly if the gastrula of sea-urchin 
 or starfish be bisected either along the axis or at right 
 angles to it complete little organisms are obtained.* 
 
 One might say, looking at these cases alone, that the 
 embryo was determined to do its duty, and grow up true 
 to type, whatever happened. Or, dropping metaphor, one 
 might infer the existence of internal forces in the germ 
 cells absolutely determining the lines of growth, irre- 
 spectively of the material supplied to them. This infer- 
 ence, however, would not be altogether sound. Both re- 
 generation and development are largely conditioned by 
 external circumstances. Thus a Tubularia has the very 
 useful faculty of growing a new head, in case it should 
 have the misfortune to be decapitated. But this regenera- 
 tion can only go forward in water, and if the decapitated 
 end is buried in the sand, it is the other end which 
 develops the head.* Either end of the worm is able to 
 grow a head with the help of water, neither end without 
 it.^ So again if growth were fixed by internal causes 
 alone, a tadpole must necessarily develop into a frog when 
 the time comes. But if at that point in its career a tad- 
 pole is prevented from leaving the water, it retains its tail 
 and gills while increasing in size.*^ Similarly the crus- 
 tacean Artemia salina assumes two specifically different 
 forms according as it is brought up in sea water or in 
 fresh water .'^ Thus while on the one side we find the 
 organism clinging, as it were, to its type, in spite of 
 
 • Wilson, op. at. p. 308. ^ lb. p. 309. 
 
 ^ Driesch, Science and Philosophy of the Organism, vol. I. p. 8. See 
 the whole of Part I. (especially A and B) for numerous illustrations and 
 a full discussion of the problem. * Wilson, op. cit. p. 325. 
 
 * Another remarkable point is that the " head " does not bud out from 
 the wound (and is therefore not technically regenerated) but can be 
 shown to be restored by the combined work of many parts of the stem. 
 Its position and size depend on the length of the section, and the growth 
 will occur at whatever point the stem is cut (Driesch, vol. I. p. 127). 
 
 " Verworn, p. 182. ^ lb. p. 183. 
 
30 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 adverse circumstances, we find it, on the other, departing 
 from its type to suit special circumstances. The growth 
 and maintenance of the organism are due, not merely to a 
 complex balance of internal forces, but also to compli- 
 cated reactions between these forces in their successive 
 phases and the forces of the environment. 
 
 4. What appears to be the distinguishing mark of an 
 organism is that, through all these complications, it main- 
 tains its hold on the balance of forces necessary to its 
 existence. It is not merely that its functions run smoothly 
 in the particular groove marked out for them by its struc- 
 ture, but that, within tolerably wide limits, it can survive 
 accidents, which cause a considerable departure from its 
 normal course, and either struggle back to the typical life 
 of the species again, or effect some compromise with cir- 
 cumstances by which life is maintained in some more or 
 less modified form. Adaptability of this kind does not 
 seem to be found in the inorganic world. A stone main- 
 tains its existence for centuries, it may be, but maintains it 
 unchanged. If the stone could be said to have a life, it 
 would be one of dull mechanical persistence in the estab- 
 lished fact. If it is scratched, dinted, or broken, it remains 
 scratched, dinted, or broken, and there is no more to be 
 said. There is nothing comparable to the recuperation 
 of the living being. 
 
 It may very well be true that, if we take the common char- 
 acteristics of organised beings one by one, and look about 
 us for comparisons, we can find something to match each 
 one severally in the inanimate world. Thus the tendency 
 to regain the equilibrium point is common to mechanical 
 arrangements, like the pendulum, and to all bodies so far 
 as they are elastic. The analogy is real so far as it goes. 
 In one particular way the elastic body can be made to 
 deviate from, and then will tend to return to, an equilibrium 
 point. But the tendency is limited to a single kind of 
 reaction ; it is called into being only by the application of 
 an external force, to which the reaction is strictly pro- 
 portioned, and the existence of the object as an elastic 
 body does not consist in, nor depend upon, a state of con- 
 stant activity in oscillating about the point of equilibrium. 
 
Ill ORGANIC ADAPTABILITY 31 
 
 It is possible, again, to take up those points of difference, 
 and urge that each can be matched in the inorganic world. 
 The pendulum, for example, is in fact constantly oscil- 
 lating about the equilibrium point, and its existence as a 
 pendulum may not unfairly be said to depend upon its so 
 doing. But the continued motion of the pendulum de- 
 pends upon an outside force. It has no power of accumu- 
 lating afresh the energy which it loses at each swing. It 
 is not like the organism, self-maintaining. That is to 
 say, it does not of itself find the means of maintaining the 
 process which constitutes its existence. 
 
 This last point of contrast is, indeed, challenged by 
 Dr. Verworn,^ who compares an organism with a steam 
 engine in its need for being supplied with energy from 
 without. The steam engine is supplied with fuel, and 
 this, he urges, is analogous to the supply of energy to the 
 organism, through its food. But here, again, the analogy 
 seems only to carry us a part of the way. The steam 
 engine does not go to look for coal when it runs short, nor 
 would it dream, as the engineer has dreamt, of substituting 
 oil in case coal were not available.^ The case of machinery 
 
 ' Op. cit. p. 123. 
 
 ^ A similar criticism applies to an ingenious example adduced by Dr. 
 Verworn to show that continuous metabolism, by which a body is con- 
 tinually being built up from certain materials which are as constantly 
 broken down and excreted, is not peculiar to living organisms. 
 
 " A simple example of this is found in the behaviour of nitric acid in 
 the production of concentrated sulphuric acid. If nitric acid be mixed 
 with sulphurous anhydride, which is obtained in the manufacture of 
 sulphuric acid by roasting sulphur ore, the sulphurous acid withdraws 
 oxygen from the nitric acid and passes over into sulphuric acid, while the 
 nitric acid becomes nitrous acid. If the constant entrance of fresh air 
 and water be provided, the nitric acid is constantly reformed from the 
 nitrous acid and gives a part of its oxygen again to new quantities of 
 sulphurous acid, so that the molecule of nitric acid is continually being 
 alternately broken down with loss of oxygen and built up with absorption 
 of oxygen. In this manner, with the same quantity of iiitric acid, an 
 unlimited quantity of sulphurous acid can be changed into sulphuric 
 acid." Op. cit. p. 125. 
 
 This continuous process can be maintained under certain uniform con- 
 ditions. An organism will maintain a number of such processes at once, 
 digesting, respiring, secreting, and at the same time adapting its actions 
 to the acquisition of new material, and all under more or less varying 
 conditions of the outer world. Could the nitric acid adapt itself to a 
 change of diet? Of course, the adaptability of the organism is also 
 limited. But the point seems to be this : — If we change the conditions 
 which afifect the nitric acid, we shall inevitably increase or decrease its 
 
32 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 is, indeed, not a little instructive. Human ingenuity has 
 succeeded in mimicking one form of organic activity after 
 another. Up to a certain point the steam engine can be 
 made self-acting. We have already drawn attention to 
 the opening and closing of the valves by the piston as com- 
 parable to the rhythm of respiration. In speaking of the 
 pendulum, we might have referred to the " compensating" 
 arrangement whereby it is made to adjust itself so nicely 
 to differences of temperature that its length remains 
 approximately constant, though every portion of it ex- 
 pands. Here is an adaptation as remarkable in its way as 
 the vasomotor adjustments which maintain the even tem- 
 perature of the warm-blooded animal. If finally we were 
 to take refuge in the uniformity of machinery, and con- 
 trast it with the infinite capacity of the organism for 
 adjusting itself to the changing details of its surroundings, 
 which are never twice the same, if we urged that machinery 
 must always turn out the same pattern, and cannot 
 achieve individuality, our last card of this suit is trumped 
 by the linotype. No two consecutive lines of a book or a 
 newspaper contain the same number of words of the same 
 size. Hence the " spaces " required to bring the line to 
 the right length diifer from line to line in a manner which 
 it is absolutely impossible to predict. There is no rule 
 and no uniformity in the matter. The human compositor 
 puts in the spaces as he sees that they are needed, and one 
 would say that this was a point at which the service of the 
 human eye could not be dispensed with. But, by a very 
 simple arrangement, the same end is achieved by the lino- 
 type, and with equal accuracy.^ 
 
 bulk and the rapidity of its formation, and this in direct proportion to the 
 change in the conditions. If we change the conditions affecting an 
 organism, it will, up to a certain limit, adapt itself to the change, and 
 after, perhaps, an interval of disturbance, appear very much as it was 
 before. Its bulk, for example, will not uniformly increase or decrease in 
 direct proportion to its food supply. 
 
 ' It IS of some importance to notice the limitation of the achievement. 
 The number of spaces in the line is determined by the human compositor. 
 What the machine does is to thrust a wedge in between the words so as 
 to space them to the required length of the line. The method of response 
 given by the machine is unvarying. The variations are effected in 
 accordance with a plan by which the objects acted on, viz., the length of 
 the several words, determine the extent of the mechanical movement. 
 
Ill ORGANIC ADAPTABILITY 
 
 33 
 
 In these and no doubt in many other ways that might 
 be specified the machine is made to perform functions 
 which in this or that feature recall the behaviour of a living 
 organism. Such examples are instructive both in their 
 success and in their failure. For the condition of success 
 is a combination of mechanical forces expressly designed 
 to meet the end in view, and this suggests that whatever 
 the creative force that brings the organism into being, the 
 organic structure is a combination of parts determined in a 
 general way by the functions which they will have to per- 
 form in the structure as a whole. They are so arranged 
 as to maintain a certain balance, to regain it from within 
 tolerably wide limits of variation, and even to readjust 
 the principle of the balance itself {i.e., to modify the 
 organic structure), if this is demanded by the environment. 
 Any single characteristic in this self-maintaining process 
 can probably be paralleled from the inorganic world ; but 
 whether the process as a whole can be paralleled is quite 
 another question. It seems rather from the illustra- 
 tions I have given that the thing that resembles an organ- 
 ism in one respect differs in another, and that where this 
 difference is overcome a new one breaks out. 
 
 5. In the most fundamental feature of self- mainten- 
 ance, it may be doubted whether any inanimate substance 
 can be fairly matched against the living organism. It is by 
 suitable response to stimulus in the main that organisms 
 preserve themselves. Now the excitability of living tissue 
 differs from the response of an elastic spring to pressure 
 in that the energy evolved in the response bears no definite 
 relation to the energy of the stimulus. It is interesting 
 to see how Dr. Verworn deals with this point. 
 
 " It can be said in gejieral that irritability is the capacity of a 
 body to react to an external influence by some kind of change in 
 its condition, in which the extent of the reaction stands in no 
 definite proportion to the extent of the influence. As a matter 
 of fact, irritability, or excitability, is a property of all living sub- 
 stance, whether the organism responds to the external influence 
 by the production of definite substances, as with secreting gland- 
 cells, or definite forms of energy, as with muscle-cells, phosphor- 
 escent cells, and electric cells, or whether it responds by depression 
 or even standstill of its vital activities. But irritability is not the 
 
34 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 exclusive property of organisms, for lifeless substances are likewise 
 irritable and respond to external influences by definite changes, 
 e.g., by the production ot definite substances or of energy, in 
 which process the extent of the production by no means corre- 
 sponds always to the extent of the external impulse. The clearest 
 examples of such cases are afforded by explosive substances. By 
 a slight shock nitro-glycerine is decomposed into water, carbonic 
 acid, oxygen and nitrogen, the process being accompanied by a 
 powerful evolution of energy ; in other words, nitro-glycerine 
 responds to an external influence by an enormous production of 
 energy and a change of material. Hence irritability is not an 
 absolute sign of difference between organisms and inorganic 
 bodies, and it is seen that a fundamental contrast between the 
 two is afforded no more by their dynamical than by their structural 
 and genetic relations." ^ 
 
 Here again then an analogy can be found, but here again 
 the analogy does not carry us the whole way. After the 
 explosion the nitro-glycerine is gone once for all. Its 
 identity is lost. It is dissipated into component parts. 
 But the muscle which has violently contracted in response 
 to a slight tickling of the skin remains as good a muscle as 
 before. Doubtless it has lost a certain amount of potential 
 energy, and its cells have undergone a chemical change 
 parallel to that experienced by the nitro-glycerine. But 
 there is the muscle sound as ever, and already actively 
 engaged in assimilating new substances from the blood 
 which will restore the proteids oxidised in the contraction. 
 The organism in short in letting energy loose still main- 
 tains itself, and the letting loose of the energy is ordinarily 
 a means of maintaining it. The organism is apparently 
 the only thing that maintains itself by the liberation in 
 response to a stimulus of its own energy.^ In other words, 
 the liberation of energy is controlled by a principle of 
 organisation or correlation of changes whereby fresh sub- 
 stance or fresh energy is stored up which will bring the 
 organism back to the very same condition in which it was 
 found before the liberation of energy took place. The 
 example of the muscle will recur to the reader as illus- 
 trating what I mean. 
 
 1 Op. cit. p. 124. 
 
 ^ I owe this point to some remarks made to me some years ago by Sir 
 J. Burden Sanderson. 
 
Ill ORGANIC ADAPTABILITY 35 
 
 6. An organism then, as we are led to conceive it, may 
 be roughly described as a whole consisting of parts each of 
 which is conditioned in its behaviour, and even often in its 
 existence, by its relation to the remainder. These relations 
 are such that as the parts interact with one another and 
 with the outside world they tend to undergo a regular 
 series of changes which constitute the development of the 
 organism from birth to death. The general course of the 
 development is to this extent fixed by the original consti- 
 tution of the organism. But as the surroundings with 
 which it is brought into contact are infinitely various, what 
 may be called the typical course of development is a purely 
 imaginary line from which the life-history of any organism 
 diverges at every moment in greater or less degree. But 
 the forces that keep its various parts together are such 
 that within tolerably wide limits it can accommodate itself 
 to changes in the forces acting on it, maintaining its 
 existence, and even its general character, unchanged in their 
 despite. This is achieved by an appropriate modification 
 of its action, a change at one point for example compen- 
 sating a change at another, whereby under novel circum- 
 stances, or perhaps with grave modification of some part of 
 the organism itself, the plan of the whole is as nearly 
 constant as may be. If we sum all this up by saying that 
 the living organism is distinguished by its tendency to 
 maintain itself through -process and against change we are 
 merely formulating the known facts. Underlying this 
 formula is the question whether this tendency is a true 
 conation or the result of an intricate combination of 
 mechanical parts so dovetailed that any disturbance of the 
 organic equilibrium at any point automatically sets up 
 compensating processes which tend to restore the balance. 
 The strongest argument against this view is provided by 
 experimental mutilations. We can with difficulty conceive 
 a machine so intricately planned as always, in all the varying 
 assaults to which the living being is exposed, to yield that 
 reaction which tends to restore its normal method of work- 
 ing, as long as all its parts remain intact. But the very 
 delicacy of such a machine would lead us to suppose that 
 a breakage at any point must at least be fatal to the opera - 
 
 D 2 
 
36 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 tlons of the part affected. Now this is what mutilations, 
 particularly those of the embryo, disprove. If the 
 embryo is a machine for the assimilation, storage, and 
 modification of material or of energy whereby the mature 
 organism is to be produced, then there is no doubt that in 
 its normal life-history one portion of this machine resides 
 in one blastomere and another in another. But experi- 
 ment shows that one blastomere artifically separated can 
 generate the entire organism, and the advocates of the 
 mechanical view are thrown back on the suggestion that 
 nature has provided a secondary set of these highly perfect 
 machines in case of accidents — accidents, moreover, which 
 are by no means likely to occur except in the laboratory, 
 an environment which nature can hardly have foreseen. 
 Machines, as Driesch has elaborately argued, can do 
 wonderful things, but what do we ordinarily expect 
 of a broken machine .'' 
 
 On the other hand, the teleological view is full of diffi- 
 culty. We do not by taking thought heal our wounds. 
 Our purposive activity supplies unguents and bandages, 
 but "the rest nature transacts within." Our tissue is 
 not, as far as we know, consciously aware of the purpose 
 of restoring itself. Nor can we suppose the stem of 
 Tubularia to plan the production of a new head. What 
 we do know is that an organism subject to injury or 
 distress not sufficient to overwhelm it, is stimulated to 
 intense effort. If it does not know how to act it never- 
 theless acts, and continually varies its action, abandoning 
 that which is fruitless and persisting in that which yields 
 relief. We shall see in the following chapters how by 
 this method living beings frequently obtain satisfactory 
 results which apparently they could not plan or foresee. 
 To conceive restorative vital processes to depend on 
 conation in this rudimentary form, we must suppose 
 successive stages in the process, each of which is satis- 
 factory by comparison with the preceding, but gives rise 
 to renewed efforts. We must also suppose the effort to 
 be made by each part of the organism affected, and must 
 assume a possibility of co-operation. This is to postulate 
 an arrangement certainly, but not an arrangement that is 
 
Ill ORGANIC ADAPTABILITY 37 
 
 mechanically perfect. It is rather an arrangement which 
 sets effort at work and provides a basis of co-operation 
 between parts. In the most general terms the organism 
 is a structure which maintains, reproduces, and develops 
 Itself by co-ordinated conations, the basis of the conations 
 and their co-ordination being laid by the inherited arrange- 
 ment of the structure. We shall see that this formula is 
 applicable to higher and confessedly intelligent as well as 
 to lower activities, and serves to indicate the connection 
 between them. Whether it supplies a basis for the 
 explanation of vital processes, whether these can after all 
 be referred to some peculiar complication of mechanism, 
 or whether some wholly distinct agent, neither mechanical 
 nor teleological, is to be prayed in aid, the future of 
 physiology must decide.^ 
 
 ^ Driesch's Entelechy which is neither conation nor mechanism, 
 comes at the end altogether to transcend the individual (see especially 
 vol. II. p. 318). If the directive forces are within the individual I know 
 of no alternative between the mechanical and the conational. Both of 
 these are at least verae causae. The study of conation is still in its 
 infancy, and to say the least, further light may be expected from the 
 exploration of its possibilities. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 REFLEX ACTION 
 
 I . The organism maintains itself by continual adapta- 
 tions. There is adaptation in every process of life, inward 
 as well as outward, in absorption, secretion, respiration, no 
 less than in those movements of the limbs which for the 
 observer constitute pre-eminently the actions of an organism. 
 These actions, however, whereby it modifies its relations to 
 other organisms and the outer world generally, form one 
 case, and for us the most important case, of the exercise 
 of its powers of adaptation. 
 
 Actions whether inward or outwardly apparent may be 
 due to purely internal changes. Just as the kettle goes 
 on quietly simmering till presently the lid lifts and the 
 water boils over, so in a nerve centre, or for that matter 
 in any mass of protoplasm, internal changes may go on, 
 while for the outward observer all is peace, till suddenly 
 a culminating point is reached, and a limb or the whole 
 body is thrown into decided, perhaps sudden and violent, 
 movement. Internally initiated movements are found In 
 the foetal life of the higher animals. Movements of the 
 chick in the egg from the fifth day are reported by Preyer,^ 
 and according to the same observer the "outstretching 
 and bending of the arms and legs " of new-born children 
 is " nothing else than a continuation of the intra-uterine 
 movements.^ The aimless waving about of arms and 
 legs noticeable up to the third quarter of the first year 
 are referred by him to the same class.* Actions of this 
 
 1 Preyer, I. p. 201. ^ 7,5 p 205. 
 
 ^ lb. p. 207. It may be, of course, that these motions have a casual 
 good effect as exercise, but this would not exclude them from the scope 
 of our definition. 
 
 3S 
 
CHAP. IV REFLEX ACTION 
 
 39 
 
 class, according to Dr. Verworn, make up a considerable 
 part of the life of Protista. 
 
 " A Stentor draws itself suddenly together, stretches itself out, 
 draws in again after a short time, may remain stretched out a 
 long time without the slightest contraction, till presently it gives 
 vent to a whole series of contractions at irregular intervals." 
 
 There is no appearance of purpose in these irregular 
 movements, and Dr. Verworn ^ points out that by im- 
 perceptible degrees they pass over into periodical, that is to 
 say, automatic movements. Automatic movement indeed, 
 as we see it in the pulsating vacuole among Protista, and 
 among higher animals in the beating of the heart or the 
 action of the respiratory centre, is a development and 
 adaptation of the persistent structural activity to special 
 requirements of the organism. It is due to the inter- 
 action of internal forces (though it may be modified by 
 outer influences) but it is repeated at regular intervals, or 
 rather, like the beating of the heart, it forms a connected 
 cycle of events each of which introduces the next, till at 
 length the cycle is completed and starts afresh. 
 
 To understand movements of this class we must bear 
 in mind that in any living cell chemical changes are 
 constantly going on. The protoplasm of the cell is 
 building itself up out of materials supplied by the 
 surrounding medium. This is the assimilative process. 
 At the same time an opposite process of dissimilation 
 is going on, in which the constituents of the protoplasm 
 form new combinations, and ultimately become waste 
 products of which the cell gets rid. These changes 
 involving a constant molecular movement, the cell is 
 never in a condition of stable equilibrium. But the outer 
 results may be very different, according as the internal 
 changes do or do not tend to balance one another. 
 If they merely oscillate slightly about the point of 
 equilibrium, there will be no outward sign of change. 
 If there is a slow but decided gain of one set of forces 
 in one part of the cell, an amoeboid movement will 
 result. The cell will slowly put out a projection or 
 
 I Protisten Studieti, p. 142, 
 
40 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 " pseudopodium " in one direction, or draw in another 
 from an opposite quarter. If the nature of the molecular 
 change is to produce a large mass of unstable chemical 
 compounds in a certain part, then the efFect of the final 
 touch will be to " explode " this mass, and a sudden 
 and violent contraction follows. In the higher organisms, 
 besides the interaction of molecules in each cell, there is 
 the interaction of many distinct cells, and indeed distinct 
 organs, to be taken into account. The restless move- 
 ments of the infant may be due to changes in the nerve 
 centres, but they may also arise from a thousand and one 
 different stimuli from the muscles, joints, digestive organs, 
 or any part of the body, and indeed of other things with 
 which the body comes into contact. It thus becomes^ 
 impossible to draw a clear and certain line between actions 
 of this class and the lowest kind of reflexes, with which 
 we shall have presently to deal. It remains only to add 
 that in the case of automatic actions the internal changes 
 of which we speak appear to have become regulated, pre- 
 sumably under the influence of natural selection, so as to 
 follow one another in a fixed order and at a determinate 
 speed. There are the same processes of building up and 
 breaking down, and they give rise in the same way to 
 contraction and expansion, but they have become more 
 accurately adjusted to one another in their proportions, so 
 that each contraction is of measured length, force, and 
 speed, and is succeeded at a fixed interval by an equally 
 determinate movement of expansion. 
 
 2. Reflex Action. 
 
 Hitherto we have dealt with actions resulting from 
 inward changes. We have now to consider actions 
 brought about by the influences of the environment. 
 All organisms may be affected by the direct contact of 
 outer things with their surface, and most organisms, except 
 the lowest, can be affected in other ways as well as 
 through their organs of sense. Such an affection is called 
 a stimulus, and the resulting change in the organism a 
 response. It is of course principally by Its responses to 
 stimuli that the organism succeeds in adjusting Its 
 behaviour towards changes in the outer world in a way 
 
IV REFLEX ACTION 
 
 41 
 
 favourable to its own existence. If the mouse were not 
 stimulated to run away by the sight of the cat, it would 
 not be long for this world, and if the cat were not so 
 excited by the sight of the mouse and of other food as to 
 make the movements necessary for catching, seizing, and 
 eating, she in her turn would starve. The most primitive 
 form in which response is adapted to requirements is that 
 in which a simple sensory stimulus calls forth a uniform 
 reaction on the part of the organism. Such a response is 
 known as a Reflex action. This is an extended usage, and 
 etymologically is, it must be admitted, not altogether 
 appropriate. The term applies strictly to animals with a 
 developed nervous system. In such animals the reflex act 
 consists of two distinct movements or processes, a sensory 
 or afferent process, and a motor or efferent process. Thus 
 if one inadvertently touches a hot iron the burning of the 
 hand sends a wave of excitement along the sensory nerves 
 to some part of the central nervous system. This is the 
 sensory or afferent process. From the brain descends a 
 back wave of excitement causing the contraction of several 
 muscles whereby the hand is withdrawn. This is the 
 efferent or motor process. The two together with what- 
 ever central process is required to connect them' make up 
 a reflex action. 
 
 But the above definition, which corresponds to the 
 extended usage of the term now common, applies very 
 clearly to the responses of many animals which have no 
 nervous system at all. If the long hair-like " flagellum " 
 of a Poteriodendron be lightly touched as it waves about 
 in the water, the effect is instantaneous. The waving 
 thread suddenly rolls itself up in a coil, while the body, 
 which consists of a mass of protoplasm standing on a 
 sort of stalk, fixed to the bottom of a miniature cup, is 
 withdrawn hastily to the bottom of the cup, where it 
 
 ^ The more modern definitions of reflex action make a different 
 partition, distinguishing a receptor organ, where the excitement starts 
 {e.g., the retina), an effector, which carries out the response {e.g., the 
 muscles of the arm), and a conductor, which includes the entire nervous 
 portion between the two. The centre is in this description only of 
 importance as a name for any point or points where different conductors 
 may meet and different impulses impinge on one another (see Sherring- 
 ton, Integrative Action of the Nervous System, p. 7, &c.). 
 
42 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 lies for a few seconds, after which it begins to rise again.^ 
 If the pseudopodium — or temporary arm of protoplasm 
 stretching out from the cell body — of a Rhizopod, like 
 Difflugia urceolata, be touched with a needle it becomes 
 wrinkled, and if touched somewhat harder withdraws into 
 the cell mass.^ It is needless to multiply instances. 
 Reflex action in the sense of uniform response to isimple 
 stimulus is found all along the scale of organic evolution 
 from the Protista to man. 
 
 3. If we regard only the function that it subserves in 
 the life of the organism, reflex action impresses us as 
 purposive. If we look only at the method by which it is 
 carried out, it impresses us as mechanical. If something 
 comes straight at my face, I blink. The action is well 
 adapted to the purpose of protecting my eyes from the 
 blow. But it is unintelligent. I may know perfectly well 
 that the object is not going to hit me, but notwithstanding 
 every effort I blink. Whether itself to be regarded as 
 intelligent or not, reflex action proceeds independently of 
 the conscious intelligence of human beings. It is in many 
 cases both among men and animals independent of the 
 higher cerebral centres which are essential to intelligent 
 action in the ordinary sense. There are some reflexes of 
 which we are not conscious at all ; for example, the con- 
 traction of the iris under the influence of light. There 
 are others of which we may or may not be conscious, but 
 which we cannot hinder. Such are, for many people, 
 blinking, and probably for all people vasomotor reflexes 
 like blushing and growing pale. There are others which 
 we can interfere with in some slight degree, like breathing, 
 coughing, sneezing, and laughing. Others again can be 
 inhibited by a strong effort of will, such as weeping, 
 screaming, and groaning. But in all alike the conscious 
 intelligence seems to have nothing to do with initiating or 
 directing the action. The action proceeds of itself. It 
 does not need consciousness nor the other activities of the 
 organism. I remember being thrown by a sudden accident 
 over the handles of an old-fashioned high bicycle. The 
 thing happened so quickly that I realised nothing about 
 1 Verworn, Prot. St. p. 86. 2 /^_ p g^ 
 
IV REFLEX ACTION 43 
 
 it till I found myself on the ground. Yet I fell on my 
 hands, and my face and head were not touched. And the 
 throwing out of the hands is a complex action involving 
 the well adapted duly proportioned contraction of quite a 
 number of muscles. 
 
 4. There are certain fallacious arguments against the 
 mechanical conception of reflex action which it will be well 
 to consider. Take first the fact of adaptation. Many 
 reflexes among the higher animals involve very complex 
 co-ordination of muscular movements, a definite order and 
 simultaneity of contractions, a careful adjustment of the 
 length and vigour of each contraction, and so forth. In 
 this respect the higher reflexes contrast very markedly 
 with the simple contractions of, for example, a muscle- 
 nerve preparation, or the slow withdrawal of a pseudo- 
 podium by a Rhizopod. 
 
 " When the peripheral stump of a divided sciatic nerve is 
 stimulated with the interrupted current, the muscles of the leg 
 are at once thrown into tetanus, continue in the same rigid 
 condition during the passage of the current, and relax immediately 
 on the current being shut off. When the same current is applied 
 for a second only to the skin of the flank of a brainless frog, the 
 leg is dravi^n up and the foot rapidly swept over the spot irritated, 
 as if to wipe away the irritation ; but this movement is a complex 
 one, requiring the contraction of particular muscles in a definite 
 sequence, with a carefully adjusted proportion between the 
 amounts of contraction of the individual muscles. And this com- 
 plex movement, this balanced and arranged series of contractions, 
 may be repeated more than once as a result of a single stimula- 
 tion of the skin. When a deep breath is caused by a dash of 
 cold water, the same co-ordinated and carefully arranged series of 
 contractions is also seen to result, as part of a reflex action, from a 
 simple stimulus." ^ 
 
 All this, of course, only proves that the machinery, if it 
 is machinery, is complex, and well adjusted to its end. 
 Put a penny on a balance, and it weighs down the scale 
 by the simple action of the lever. Put it into the slot of 
 an automatic machine, and it produces a stick of chocolate 
 by I know not what complication of levers and cogs. 
 Complexity of adjustment does not take us out of the 
 region of machinery. 
 
 1 Foster, I. p. 184. 
 
44 MINP IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 A second fallacious argument may be founded on the 
 disproportion in a reflex action between stimulus and 
 result. 
 
 " When we stimulate the nerve of a muscle-nerve preparation 
 the result, though modified in part by the condition of the muscle 
 and nerve, whether fresh and irritable or exhausted, for instance, 
 is directly dependent on the nature and strength of the stimulus." 
 ..." In a reflex action, on the other hand, the movements 
 called forth by the same stimulus may be in one case insignificant, 
 and in another violent and excessive, the result depending on the 
 arrangements and condition of the central portion of the reflex 
 mechanism. Thus the mere contact of a hair with the mucous 
 membrane lining the larynx, a contact which can originate only 
 the very slightest afferent impulses, may call forth a convulsive 
 fit of coughing, in which a very large number of muscles are 
 thrown into violent contractions ; whereas the same contact or 
 the hair with other surfaces of the body may produce no obvious 
 effect at all. Similarly, while in the brainless but otherwise 
 normal frog a slight touch on the skin of the flank will produce 
 nothing but a faint flicker of the underlying muscles, the same 
 touch on the same part of a frog poisoned with strychnia will 
 produce violent lasting tetanic contractions of nearly all the 
 muscles of the body." ^ 
 
 It might be inferred from this that the reflex is, in a 
 sense, originated by the organism, instead of being, as in 
 a machine, a transformation of energy from one shape to 
 another. But the truth is that the stimulus is not to 
 be compared to the fuel which supplies the engine with its 
 energy, but to the touch which turns the handle and sets 
 accumulated energy free to work. 
 
 " The nerve centre may be regarded as a collection of explosive 
 charges ready to be discharged, and so to start efferent impulses 
 along certain efferent nerves, and these charges are so arranged 
 and so related to certain afferent nerves, that afferent impulses 
 reaching the centre along those nerves may in one case discharge 
 a few only of the charges and so give rise to feeble movements, 
 and in another case discharge a very large number and so give rise 
 to large and violent movements." ^ 
 
 This fundamental feature of the reflex mechanism must, 
 however, be kept carefully in mind in judging the true 
 character of certain modifications of the reflex act to which 
 we shall shortly come. 
 
 ' Foster, I. pp. 182, 183. ^ lb. I. p. 183. 
 
IV REFLEX ACTION 45 
 
 5. So far we have found nothing to differentiate the 
 reflex mechanism from any other piece of machinery. 
 There is a certain arrangement — a sense-organ, an afferent 
 nerve, a nerve centre consisting essentially of a more or less 
 complicated ramification of nerve fibres, one or more 
 efferent or motor nerves, and one or more muscles. Apply 
 a stimulus, and the machinery works. Nerves, nerve 
 centres, and muscles are thrown into activity. As in a 
 machine the parts not merely act, but act together in a 
 prearranged harmony, the general tendency of which is to 
 deal with the stimulus in the way best suited to the needs 
 of the organism. 
 
 These last words recall us once more to the conception of 
 purpose, and we may now put the question thus. Is it 
 the needs of the organism that determine the action, or is 
 it the preformed structure ? Is the act the result of a struc- 
 ture that is already there, or is it adopted as a means to an 
 end, which is still to be realised .'' Broadly speaking the 
 facts leave us in no doubt as to the answer. In the typical 
 reflex the structure is " already there." The organism or 
 part of it is attuned to a certain kind of stimulus so as to 
 react to it in a special manner. It is so attuned that the 
 manner of reaction adopted for each stimulus is under 
 ordinary circumstances beneficial to the organism. Of the 
 structure we may perhaps say with certain reservations 
 that it has grown up because it is useful to the organism. 
 But of the particular act we must say that it is performed 
 not because it is useful at the present moment, but because 
 it is the necessary result of the action of a given stimulus 
 upon a given structure. Circumstances may be such that 
 this response does not serve the normal " purpose," but 
 unless these "circumstances" are counter stimuli acting on 
 the nerve centres, they have no effect. Taking this last 
 qualification into account, we may say that a reflex action 
 is a response to the present operative stimuli as such. 
 This differentiates it from an act of purpose. Purposive 
 action may also from one point of view be regarded as the 
 response of a structure to its surroundings in accordance 
 with laws which are uniform after their kind. But here 
 the fundamental law is precisely that action is determined 
 
46 MINP IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 not by the Immediate, perceptible surroundings as such, 
 but by whatever consideration afFects the attainment of the 
 end. Hence, far from being tied to a uniform response to 
 a given stimulus, purposive action deals with the whole 
 present situation at any moment by correlating it with any 
 relevant facts, however remote, finally shaping its action in 
 the way which, all things taken into account, will be most 
 likely to lead to its desired end. Hence the purposive 
 act is determined by its end, and it is thus to be contrasted 
 generically with the predetermined response of structure to 
 stimulus, the adjective "predetermined" meaning that the 
 structure must respond to the stimuli acting upon it as 
 such, and cannot bring them into relation with remote but 
 relevant facts so as to modify its behaviour appropriately. 
 To illustrate. The blinking reflex is carried out by the 
 muscles of the eyelids quite independently of real danger 
 to the eye, and most people are unable to hinder it even if 
 they try. Darwin ^ has told us how he tried to prevent 
 himself from starting back when a snake struck at the 
 plate glass which was a perfectly safe screen. Darwin's 
 intelligence grasped the truth of the situation, but his 
 lower motor-centres were rigidly bound to act in accord- 
 ance with ancestral custom. In a mammal the whole 
 machinery of breathing may be destroyed, but the suitable 
 movements of the nostrils and glottis still continue if their 
 connection with the medulla remains intact.^ The nostrils 
 dilate and contract not to let in air, but because their 
 muscles are governed by a rhythmic alternation of stimuli 
 emanating from the respiratory centre in the medulla. As 
 long as the centre and the connections remain intact, they 
 go on with their work whether it assists in breathing or 
 not.' In the same way might the screw of a sinking steamer 
 rotate wildly in the air as the bows plunge down. The 
 screw rotates not to propel the ship, but because its motion 
 is governed by connections with the engine, and as long as 
 
 ' Expression of the Emotions, p. 40 (2nd ed.). 
 
 2 Foster, 11. p. 616. 
 
 ^ A friendly critic points out that respiratory movements are automatic 
 rather than reflex (though constantly subject to reflex influences), but I 
 let the illustration stand as exemplifying a highly mechanical process in 
 the life of the organism. 
 
IV REFLEX ACTION 47 
 
 these remain uninterrupted, rotate it will. Similarly the 
 sucking reflex is well adapted to the needs of babies and 
 other young animals for food, but it is a response not to 
 the nipple nor to the food, but to anything that comes into 
 the lips.-^ Hence the infant in its leisure moments sucks 
 its thumb or anything else that comes handy. 
 
 "What has been said is perhaps sufficient to show that, 
 speaking generally, the reflex is determined by the struc- 
 ture, or a portion of the structure, of the organism which 
 is specially arranged to meet a specific sensory stimulus 
 with a specific reaction. It is easy to see, first, that such 
 a type of action can readily be conceived of as arising 
 under the influence of natural selection, where, under 
 ordinary circumstances, one sort of reaction, a, to a 
 stimulus a, is decidedly more often beneficial than any 
 other. It will also be seen that a mode of action so 
 arising will, in a preponderant number of cases, but not 
 necessarily in all, be suited to the actual needs of the 
 individual in a given case. While, lastly, such an action 
 would not imply on the part of the individual any sort 
 of intelligent purpose in the sense of a power to remodel 
 its behaviour at need in such a way as to bring about a 
 result to which it looks forward. 
 
 6. Uniform reaction to present stimulus is the charac- 
 teristic of unintelligent response in general. But given 
 such response, there are still two possibilities. It may de- 
 pend on the condition of the organism as a whole, and if 
 so, the normal reaction to one stimulus may be modified 
 by the effect of other simultaneous stimuli, internal and 
 external. Or it may be a response of a definite part of 
 the bodily structure assigned to one particular element in 
 
 ' Preyer, I. p. 127. "Experiments on little guinea-pigs, only eight to 
 sixteen hours old, and separated from the mother after two hours, proved 
 to me absolutely that concentrated water-solutions of tartaric acid, soda, 
 glycerine, introduced into the mouth through glass tubes, are swallowed 
 just as greedily or eagerly as cow's milk and water, with vigorous 
 sucking. But then the empty tube, placed with the end upon the tongue, 
 occasioned just such sucking. The experiments conducted in this 
 manner cannot, therefore, yield much that can be depended upon. 
 Touch, as a reflex stimulus to sucking in hungry new-born creatures, 
 overpowers any taste-stimuli acting at the same time. Newly-born 
 animals that have eaten enough do not, however, suck regularly in 
 general." For human infants, see p. no. 
 
48 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 the sensory surroundings. The latter kind is the typical 
 reflex, and is illustrated in the examples drawn above from 
 the respiratory mechanism. It is in such cases that the 
 reflex act especially impresses us as mechanical. But we are 
 not to regard all reflex actions as of this type. In all higher 
 organisms the reflex is the act of a part rather than the 
 whole of the bodily structure, but it is an act dependent in 
 very varying degrees upon the condition of the whole. If 
 there are some reflexes that proceed with the fixity and 
 sureness of fate, there are others that may be inhibited by 
 a counter stimulus or by a reaction of the whole organism, 
 which we call an effort of will. Such an interaction clearly 
 brings the reflex into closer relation with the condition of 
 the organism as a whole. And this process is carried a 
 step farther where we find reflexes that are not set in motion 
 at all unless the general bodily condition is suitable. Thus 
 " the babe that has had enough does not suck." -^ To put 
 it generally, in addition to the stimulus and the permanent 
 structure there must be a general condition of excitability, 
 or susceptibility to the specific excitement, and this con- 
 dition will depend very much on the requirements of the 
 organism. "We here get adjustment to needs again at a 
 higher remove. If the condition of the organism is such 
 that a reaction would be beneficial, then normally the state 
 of excitability is present, and the animal is ready to react 
 as soon as the stimulus appears. The dog's stomach being 
 empty it is good for him to eat, and he is accordingly 
 hungry (ready to be excited by food), and therefore pounces 
 on the bone when he sees it. Conversely the sated dog 
 either buries the bone or neglects it. All this goes to show 
 that the reflex machinery is a part of the whole organism, 
 and may be very dependent for its working on the condi- 
 tion of the remainder. Reflexes vary from the extreme 
 of independence to a comparatively close connection with 
 the general state of the organism. All alike are mechanical 
 in the sense in which mechanism is opposed to purpose. 
 Only the former are mechanical in the sense in which the 
 rigidity of a machine is contrasted with the adaptability of 
 an organism. 
 
 1 Preyer, I. p. 152. 
 
IV REFLEX ACTION 
 
 49 
 
 7. The controlled reflex may look externally very much 
 like a true conation. In particular cases indeed it may be 
 impossible to determine with certainty the class to which 
 an act belongs. If an irritant is not removed from the 
 windpipe by a cough, one goes on coughing. The action 
 is continued till satisfaction is obtained. In this case our 
 will seems at times to co-operate. Yet the mechanical 
 element may suffice of itself and the coughing fit may in 
 fact be uncontrollable. In this case the explanation is 
 simply that the stimulus is capable of calling forth 
 repetitions of the response as long as it persists or until 
 exhaustion sets in. In other cases additional stimulus 
 may increase the excitement so that it spreads to other 
 parts of the body, which by acting suitably give relief. 
 Thus : 
 
 ..." if a flank of a brainless frog be very lightly touched, the 
 only reflex movement which is visible is a slight twitching of the 
 muscles lying immediately underneath the spot of skin stimulated. 
 If the stimulus be increased, the movements will spread to the 
 hind-leg of the same side, which frequently will execute a move- 
 ment calculated to push or wipe away the stimulus. By forcibly 
 pinching the same spot of skin, or otherwise increasing the 
 stimulus, the resulting movements may be led to embrace the 
 fore-leg of the same side, then the opposite side, and finally, almost 
 all the muscles of the body." ^ 
 
 It would seem from this account as a whole that the suc- 
 cessive modifications of the response, which at one stage 
 have a purposive appearance, are due rather to something 
 of a mechanical nature such as the overflow of nervous 
 excitement. Even an excised muscle varies its response 
 to stimulus in a manner suited to the ordinary behaviour 
 of muscle when doing its work within the organism. 
 For if under a certain stimulus it lifts a given load a 
 certain height, it might be inferred on mechanical principles 
 that it would only lift double the weight half the height. 
 But this is not necessarily true. 
 
 ..." The height to which the weight is raised may be in the 
 second instance as great, or even greater, than in the first. That 
 is to say, the resistance offered to the contraction actually augments 
 
 Foster, I. p. 183. 
 
so MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 the contraction, the tension of the muscular fibre increases the 
 facility with which the explosive changes resulting in a con- 
 traction take place. And we have other evidence that anything 
 which tends to stretch the muscular fibres, whether during rest or 
 during contraction, increases the metabolism of the muscle." ^ 
 
 Here again physiologists offer a mechanical explanation 
 of something which looks like a special effort. We 
 have not in this place to pass on these explanations in 
 particular instances. It is enough for us that any action 
 may be considered reflex as long as it is (i) a response 
 of uniform type to present sensory stimulus, or (2) a 
 resultant of tendencies to such uniform response acting 
 together. Action that can be so explained is mechanical. 
 That which cannot be so analysed is conational. 
 
 8. To put together our results up to this point. We 
 have found two classes of actions which proceed uniformly 
 from pre-existent structure and are not determined by 
 relation to the results accruing from them in the particular 
 instance. The first class are initiated by processes within 
 the organism, the second by stimulus from without. The 
 latter we call Reflex action, which we define as the action 
 of a structure which is specially framed so as to respond 
 to present sensory stimulus in a uniform manner. Such 
 structures may be formed under the influence of natural 
 selection,^ where it is in general beneficial to the organism 
 to respond in one way rather than another to stimuli of 
 any given kind. The reflex action is not called forth or 
 determined by the purpose that it serves in the economy 
 of the organism, for it persists even where useless or 
 injurious. It is, however, subject in varying degrees to 
 the condition of the organism as a whole, and thereby 
 arises a further adaptation of its action to what is required. 
 In the typical reflex this subjection is at a minimum, and 
 there is uniform response of a special structure to appro- 
 priate stimulus. The more absolute this uniformity, the 
 more close does the reflex approach the dead-mechanical 
 type. But the response of the special structure may, in 
 
 1 Foster, I. p. 143. 
 
 ^ They may also be formed at least in higher organisms by habit, and 
 when so formed have the same general character. 
 
IV REFLEX ACTION 
 
 51 
 
 higher cases, depend in some measure on the state of the 
 organism as a whole, and this not merely in the negative 
 sense that it is liable to inhibition, but in the sense that a 
 certain state of the organism is a positive condition of its 
 exercise. Such an adaptation though more complex is 
 still a response of preformed structure to present stimuli, 
 and is as such unintelligent. But in proportion as it thus 
 becomes adaptable to the whole state of the organism, the 
 reflex has in reality become a constituent element in 
 action of a higher type. In this capacity we shall meet it 
 again in subsequent chapters as the servant of Instinct 
 and Intelligence. 
 L^^. Reflex action in development. 
 
 Reflex actions are not always perfect from birth. There 
 is in this respect a remarkable difference between one action 
 and another, and also between one animal and another. 
 Even the young chick, whose pecking was taken by 
 earlier observers to be almost perfect from the first, has 
 been shown by later very careful records to require 
 practice, and to take some days to reach perfection.^ The 
 human infant has but few established reflexes in the first 
 week of its existence. Darwin^ found sneezing, hiccough- 
 ing, yawning, stretching, sucking, and screaming to be "well 
 performed " during the first seven days. On the other 
 hand, the blinking reflex, which is so markedly mechanical 
 later on, does not appear on the first day, and the ability 
 to direct the eyes to an object — to " fixate " — is utterly 
 lacking.^ Even breathing — in which reflex as well as 
 automatic movements are concerned — is less regular with 
 babies than in later life, and of the more complicated re- 
 flexes involved in walking and grasping, it is needless to 
 speak.* The rapidity and uniformity with which many 
 reflexes are learnt suggests that the mechanism is almost 
 but not quite perfected by heredity. At the best it is 
 
 ' Shepherd and Braid, The Development oj an Instinct, J. A. B., 1913, 
 pp. 278 ff. 
 
 2 Mind, Vol. II. p. 285. ^ Prayer, op. cit. pp. 25 and 41. 
 
 * The grasping of an object placed within the fingers appears from the 
 first ; but grasping at a thing, or even looking at it in the hand, is 
 delayed for some weeks. See Darwin, op. cit. p. 286, and Preyer, I. 
 p. 47, &c. 
 
 E 2 
 
52 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 probably at birth like a new machine which needs to be 
 worked two or three times before it is thoroughly in order. 
 In the machine the thousand strains and stresses upon 
 different parts have to adjust themselves to one another 
 in actual working before the running is really smooth 
 and easy. We may readily suppose an even greater 
 degree of self-adjustment in the living organism, the 
 result of which is merely to smooth and facilitate the 
 working of a structure which is already there in all its 
 essential parts. 
 
 Such a structure, we have seen, is conceived by evolu- 
 tionists as growing up under the influence of natural 
 selection.^ Among the higher animals, and not least 
 in man, the reflex structure also grows more rapidly 
 under another influence. We have all experienced 
 the growth through practice of true reflexes. If we 
 have forgotten our experience in learning to walk, 
 we remember learning to shave, skate, swim, or ride a 
 bicycle. We remember learning, though we might have a 
 good deal of difficulty in explaining how we learnt. In 
 general what we know is that we attempt to follow certain 
 instructions and in so doing flounder about, making random 
 shots which go on all sides of the mark, and every now and 
 then hit it. The cyclist as he learns is always falling, and 
 his attempt to save himself from a tumble on one side 
 merely lands him in danger of a fall on the other. As our 
 training advances, there are some things which we are 
 definitely conscious of finding out. We see how the thing 
 is done by doing it, though the most careful explanation 
 on the part of our teacher could not show us the way. 
 But having done it once, we know how to do it again. 
 There are other things, and perhaps they are more numer- 
 ous, in which consciousness does not seem to play by any 
 means so important a part. We learn to do them uncon- 
 sciously. Each time that we succeed we find it becomes 
 easier to repeat them. Success in these cases plays the part 
 which conscious intelligence plays in the former class. 
 
 1 Whatever difficulties there are in such a conception are those that 
 beset the whole problem of variation. There is at least no reason to 
 doubt that the conditions of existence determine which of several 
 variations survive. 
 
IV REFLEX ACTION 
 
 S3 
 
 Each action that achieves its end leaves behind it a tend- 
 ency to repeat that action, while the unsuccessful actions 
 are inhibited. Thus in the individual life, below the level 
 of intelligence, success — the attainment of the equilibrium 
 to which the organism is tending — plays the part which in 
 the life of the species falls to Natural Selection. It con- 
 firms the tendency which makes for organic equilibrium, 
 and checks the opposing tendencies. 
 
 This selective force acts equally upon reflexes with a 
 hereditary basis. In the co-ordinating movements of the 
 eyes or the legs many irregular and unsuitable movements 
 occur at first, but are gradually discarded in favour of the 
 movements required by the organic equilibrium.^ Children 
 make random movements about the breast and often suck 
 at the wrong place.^ Even the localisation of a part of 
 the body by the hand is arrived at after this fashion, as is 
 shown by the following very instructive instance given 
 by Prof. Preyer.^ 
 
 ..." In the case of two children, who in the first half-year 
 suffered from local itching eruptions of the skin (milk-crust), the 
 reflexive movements of the limbs were quite irregular, and at the 
 beginning absolutely unsuited, afterwards not in all cases suited, 
 to relieve the pain or the feeling of tickling ; at all events, apart 
 from the turnings of the head, which was the most tormented, 
 and which was moved hither and thither like a pendulum when 
 the arms were confined (fourth month). Many times when the 
 arms had escaped from the tethers in the night, the face was 
 scratched to bleeding in several places that were evidently not 
 troublesome (fourth to sixth month). At every unguarded 
 moment the hands went to the head, and the skin, even the 
 sound part of it, was rubbed and scratched. These scratching 
 movements cannot be inborn, they must be acquired. The 
 result of an accidental contact of the head and hand appearing in 
 the diminution of the tickling sensation must have induced a 
 preference of the movement of the hand to the head among all 
 sorts of movements." . . . 
 
 1 Preyer, I. p. 39. 
 
 " lb. p. 134. Puppies also miss the teat, and will try moreover to suck 
 one another or the master's finger. (Wesley Mills, pp. 118, 119.) 
 
 ^ lb. p. 223. Mr. Lloyd Morgan suggests, by way of contrast, the 
 apparent accuracy with which young birds, only a day or so old, scratch a 
 spot artificially irritated. 
 
54 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 Understanding that this comparatively rapid process of 
 acquisition in individual experience, which we find in the 
 higher and more adaptable animals, is replaced in the lower 
 orders by natural selection acting in the course of genera- 
 tions upon the race, we have in this instance the whole 
 scheme of the development of the reflex in a concrete 
 illustration. There is a stimulus which disturbs the 
 equilibrium of the organism. A certain reaction would 
 restore that equilibrium. The first result of the disturb- 
 ance is a series of random actions. These fail to remove 
 the source of disturbance. At length one succeeds. This 
 one has an advantage subsequently over others if the 
 individual is capable of training, and in course of time the 
 tendencies to perform this act preponderate over all others. 
 If the individuals of the species are not capable of training, 
 those which in their random movements come nearest to 
 the one required will have a certain advantage in the 
 struggle for existence, and thus in a more roundabout way 
 the reflex mechanism is built up by inheritance. 
 
 lo. The random, undifferentiated actions out of which 
 we suppose the reflex to be hewn are no mere fiction 
 of the scientific imagination. The random movements 
 of internally initiated activities are matched by numerous 
 instances of quite random reflexes. The latter occur 
 in all conditions of over excitability. Great joy and 
 pain throw the whole body into motions not adapted 
 to serve it in any way unless the draining off of the 
 excitement be itself regarded as a service. If any 
 stimulus be greatly increased in intensity, it not merely 
 calls forth the movements suited to dealing with it, 
 but brings more and more muscles into action till the 
 whole body may be convulsed.^ There is a tendency, 
 
 I Instances of undifferentiated or purposeless nervous discharge are 
 well seen in pathological states. In cases of injury to one hemisphere, 
 Goltz speaks of a regular " Entfesselung der reflektorischen vorgange" 
 {pp. cit. p. 59). In another dog a curious special reflex — putting out the 
 tongue and licking the nose — appeared regularly in response to tickling 
 of the back. Evidently the response has nothing to do with the stimulus, 
 and we can only suppose that the excitation of that particular part 
 happened for some reason to find the line of least resistance in discharging 
 along the nerve paths, ending finally in the muscles of the tongue. On 
 the permanent inhibitory function of that part of the cerebrum which he 
 calls the association centres, see Flechsig, Gehirn und Seele, p. 32. The 
 
IV REFLEX ACTION 
 
 55 
 
 well seen in the naked protoplasm of many unicellular 
 organisms, for an excitement to spread like a wave in 
 proportion to its Initial strength. A slight shake will 
 make Amoeba princeps hesitate in putting forth its " legs." 
 A prolonged concussion will gradually affect the entire 
 organism and make it roll up almost into a ball. In 
 strychnine poisoning, where the excitability of the nerves 
 is abnormally heightened, a slight touch produces general 
 convulsions. 
 
 The primitive fact to which these considerations bring 
 us back is the excitability of protoplasm. Protoplasm, in 
 whatever form, is a substance in very unstable chemical 
 equilibrium. Since it is never at rest internally, the 
 equilibrium is often upset by changes within the mass of 
 the protoplasm itself, and we get internally Initiated move- 
 ments. But various external events — the impingement of 
 a ray of light or heat, a chemical affinity, or a purely 
 mechanical contact — may also, in ways which at present 
 can only be surmised, gravely disturb the equilibrium of 
 the substance at every point. The disturbance has a 
 tendency to propagate itself, a tendency which goes on 
 until its energy is dissipated, or until a countervailing 
 force of some kind restores the balance. The result of 
 such a disturbance Is or may be a movement of the mass, 
 or an alteration of its form. Unless there Is something in 
 the previous history of the individual organism or its 
 species to direct the movement, there Is no reason why it 
 should be in any way suited to the needs of the organism 
 In relation to that stimulus. It will be a random move- 
 ment which may be useful, harmful or neutral to the 
 organism. It is clear that variations in the direction of 
 useful action will be helpful to a race In the struggle for 
 existence, and that a race In which they occur would be 
 likely to survive. But action at this stage depends on the 
 
 reflexes, if not held in constant quiet restraint, would run riot. The due 
 response of a lower centre is an application in an appropriate manner of 
 a portion only of the nervous discharge which the stimulus sets going. 
 This general discharge may be regarded as the matrix out of which 
 suitable or adaptive action is hewn. Or, to vary the metaphor, it is the 
 flow of water for which experience and natural selection find a useful 
 channel, while they also devise means of absorbing or damming up the 
 overflow. The primitive thing is the flow. The channel is formed later. 
 
56 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap, iv 
 
 molecular relations of protoplasm, whether in its undifferen- 
 tiated form or as later in the highly conductile form of 
 nerve fibres. The preponderance of a certain type of 
 action therefore means the prevalence of a certain structure. 
 In this way structures are built up under the influence of 
 natural selection so planned that a stimulus of a given kind 
 inevitably produces a certain reaction. Such a reaction is a 
 reflex. It is mechanical in so far that it is the result of a 
 pre-existing structure which acts uniformly in response to 
 stimuli of a particular kind. Though it produces a certain 
 result, it is not the fact that it will produce the particular 
 result which brings it into being, but the fact that similar 
 actions have in the past produced similar results. It is 
 thus a consequence, not a means. It is also in some degree 
 mechanical in another sense, viz., that it is in part 
 independent of the rest of the organism and its condition. 
 But that is a matter of degree, and we get many variations 
 from the extreme type in which a reflex appears to go on 
 quite independently of the organic life, up to cases in 
 which it is dependent on the general state of the organism, 
 and may be subordinated to some higher type of activity. 
 This interdependence gives occasion for ambiguity in the 
 interpretation of special classes of action, but in no 
 way obscures the principle on which the classification 
 depends. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 CONATION 
 
 I 'The influence of present conditions. Conative selection 
 
 We have seen that a reflex response may be repeated 
 as long as the stimulus persists. We have now to deal 
 with a class of cases in which what persists is a certain 
 condition of the organism or of its relation to the environ- 
 ment while the reactions vary until the condition is 
 changed. Suppose we find ourselves in an uncomfortable 
 position. We turn this way or that. It may be we get 
 no relief. In that case we are apt to continue our uneasy 
 motion without any definite method, until in fine we 
 happen into a more comfortable posture. Of course we 
 human beings always have intelligence at our side, which 
 can foresee the process, give a reason for it, and perhaps in 
 some particular direct it. But at the basis of behaviour of 
 this type, even in man, there seems to be an effort directed 
 rather by the general need of some escape from the dis- 
 agreeable present than by a clear idea of the condition to 
 be substituted. If so, the effort is less than a purposeyet 
 it is more than a reflex, because it is the outcome of a 
 persistent uneasiness. It is a state actively seeking to 
 change itself, to pass into something different, even 
 though" that something different be not clearly defined. 
 Further, the result acts upon the effort, for if it does not 
 bring relief one effort is abandoned and another is tried, 
 and the process continues until the relief is in fact obtained. 
 That is to say, the series of efforts as a whole is governed 
 by the results that come out of it. We nfiay formulate 
 these facts by saying that the determining element in 
 
 57 
 
58 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 effort is its own tendency to produce a result other than 
 itself, and this conforms to our general definition of 
 conation and distinguishes it from reflex action, in which, 
 as in everything mechanical, the result is indiiferent. 
 
 The simplest form of conation then seems to be action 
 directed vaguely to a change of conditions, persisted in or 
 varied until new and more suitable conditions are obtained. 
 Such action is not purpose because it does not clearly 
 fo rese e thes£ conditions, but it is conation because~~it is 
 determined by the contrast between the existing state of 
 the organism and the relief which in fact it tends to bring 
 about. Conation at this stage is found to all appearance 
 among unicellular organisms. Thus Paramecium, in 
 normal conditions, swims gently forward, absorbing food 
 by whirling its cilia. If it encounters a solid body it backs 
 a little, then swings round through an angle of varying 
 magnitude and advances again. If again it strikes the 
 object, the process is repeated and various directions are 
 tried, so that in the end. If there Is any egress, It is found. 
 The animal seems in a fashion to explore the object, but 
 the exploration Is indirect and persists through the inhi- 
 bition of repeated errors. Paramecia will behave in the 
 same way to a drop of many chemical solutions. It swims 
 up to the edge of the drop if not too strong, and then 
 reacts in the way described, so that, seen through the 
 microscope, the drop remains empty, while the weaker 
 solution around Is crowded with Paramecia. This occurs 
 when the reaction to the drop is what is called negative. 
 The converse case has a special interest. When a drop of 
 weaker solution Is contained in one of a stronger the 
 Paramecia appear to be positively attracted to it, and 
 superficially it looks as though they swam deliberately to 
 the spot preferred, which is soon crowded with Paramecia, 
 while the rest of the liquid Is empty. But in reality the 
 result is only reached by an indirect method and the 
 continued repetition of the negative reaction. The organ- 
 ism swims at random, but any individual which enters the 
 drop proceeds across it until it reaches the edge of the 
 stronger solution. There it gives the avoiding reaction 
 and starts off swimming in a new direction till it reaches 
 
CONATION 
 
 59 
 
 another edge. Here the same process is repeated. The 
 result is that individuals which have once entered the 
 drop do not leave it, and as in the course of random move- 
 ments many are constantly entering, the majority and in 
 the end all the individuals will finally be congregated 
 there, just as though they had sought the drop deliber- 
 ately.^ Both these illustrations are instructive. The 
 second one shows that what appears as an act definitely 
 directed towards a particular end is in fact achieved by an 
 indirect process of successive movements, some of which 
 are inhibited while others are persisted in — the process 
 known generally as Trial and Error. 
 
 Paramecium's action then does not seem as though 
 directed to a definite result apart from the conditions in 
 which it finds itself. On the other hand, when it is 
 unpleasantly situated or confronted with an obstacle, its 
 actions do appear to be in a manner directed to the 
 avoidance of the obstacle and the resumption of its 
 normal course. Now it is just conceivable that in this 
 case the reactions are a series of reflexes, but as a 
 minimum we must suppose a persistent state of the 
 organism, which, under certain disturbing influences, 
 maintains a series of reactions and repeatedly varies them 
 until a new situation is achieved. This differentiates the 
 case from that of the cough, which continues till the 
 crumb is expelled, for that is a single reflex indefinitely 
 repeated. Here we have as a minimum varying reflexes 
 with rejection and selection. The internal state which 
 governs them may or may not correspond to the kind of 
 consciousness which we have when we make an eifort, but 
 it arises under corresponding circumstances and has an 
 exactly corresponding effect. In accordance with our 
 criteria, therefore, we are justified in speaking of it in the 
 same terms.^ 
 
 * Jennings, 48-58. 
 
 ''' Cf. Jennings on the Amoeba, p. 22. The entire reaction method may 
 be summed up as follows : The stimulus induces movements in various 
 directions as defined by internal causes. One of these directions is then 
 selected through the fact that by subjecting the animal to new conditions 
 it relieves it from stimulation. 
 
6o MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 2 Sensori-motor action 
 
 So far we have dealt with cases in which the internal 
 need selects one among a number of type actions. We 
 pass to cases in which type actions are variously com- 
 bined, measured and adjusted to suit the position or 
 motions of an outer object and so achieve some efFect 
 in relation to it. A simple reflex is indeed related to 
 an outer object. If a pencil is put into a baby's fingers, 
 they close over it and we classify the grasp as a mere 
 reflex. The baby's eyes will also follow the light reflexly 
 and its lips will suck anything put into them. But the 
 new-born infant does not grasp at a thing, and it is not 
 for some weeks that a change occurs in this respect. The 
 child will then direct its hand towards anything that 
 catches the eyes, fixating vision upon it at the same time, 
 and if it succeeds in catching hold will convey the object 
 to its mouth. Much of this is still automatic, but we 
 observe, first, a combination of processes which were 
 previously distinct, and secondly, what is more important 
 for our purpose, an adaptation, at first exceedingly 
 imperfect but rapidly improving, of the grasping move- 
 ment to the position and movements of the attractive 
 object. Now the position and movements of outer 
 objects are highly individual, and we can attain no success 
 in dealing with them until we can similarly individualise 
 our response. The cricketer who catches the ball no 
 doubt discharges type-motions which have become habits, 
 but all depends on his judgment, that is to say, on a 
 rapidly formed combination of a number of relevant 
 data — his own position, the speed and direction of the 
 ball, and possible allowance for wind, and so on. This 
 combination is unique and varies from case to case, and 
 it is so adjusted as to secure a satisfactory result. Is it 
 then purposive 1 Is the cricketer inspired by the idea 
 of the catch and of its glorious results ? The answer 
 appears to be in the negative. Such an idea may of course 
 be present, but our experience teaches us that if we think 
 we shall probably miss. Success is obtained by concen- 
 tration on the field of perception, and the slightest 
 
V CONATION 6 1 
 
 emotional disturbance imported by ideas of results gets 
 on our nerves, as we say, and disturbs the coolness which 
 is requisite to the exactness and freedom of our poise. 
 The phenomena of learning point to the same conclusion, 
 for though we certainly set out to learn a game with a 
 purpose, connected ideas play but a very small part in the 
 process. We are roughly told what to do, and then we 
 proceed to do it wrong. We do it wrong many times 
 and we do it a little less wrong. We make a hit, and 
 then, after failures, we make a second hit, and the hits 
 and the failures appear by an automatic process, certainly 
 by a process of which we can give no conscious account, 
 to effect our training. Practice is the divinity which 
 shapes our ends, which conscious purpose merely rough- 
 hews, and the beginner on the bicycle is far more acutely 
 conscious of effort to keep his balance in which he fails, 
 than the expert cyclist who rides merrily along looking at 
 the view or thinking about metaphysics. We conclude 
 that in man the part of consciousness in action of this 
 type is purely perceptual. It is concentrated on the 
 object with mere fringes of survival from past perception, 
 which aid in its interpretation and are strictly subservient 
 to the combination of present elements which is the focus 
 of the whole proceeding. This perceptual consciousness 
 then discharges the required motion, and so we speak of 
 response of this type as sensori-motor action. What, 
 then, is the precise function of consciousness in these 
 actions .'' 
 
 " We have as the basis of the skilled act a structure 
 fitted to respond to stimuli of a certain order. But a 
 structure, as we have seen, can only be adapted to general 
 requirements, i.e., to meet a certain type of stimulus. A, 
 with a type of response a, and a type B with a response 
 y8, the response in each case being that which is generally 
 suitable. Now, what happens in any matter requiring 
 much skill in the treatment is that the situations are often 
 unique, that what is wanted is not a or /8, but a certain 
 combination of a with /8, involving perhaps some grading 
 or modification of each. The function of the close 
 conscious attention to the precise position, distance, move- 
 
62 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 ment, size, etc., of the object dealt with at any moment 
 is to combine or correlate these distinct data, to yield us 
 the precise combination, A — B, of sense-elements which 
 corresponds accurately to the situation as a whole. Each 
 element in this combination discharges its appropriate 
 motor impulse a, /8, but their union in consciousness 
 effects through a machinery which does not enter into 
 consciousness a corresponding modification of impulse by 
 impulse, of a by /3. The precise function of consciousness 
 then in sensori-motor action is to grasp the unique com- 
 bination of stimuli, each of which having its special 
 reaction modified by the concomitant reactions, there 
 follows a response appropriate to the unique situation as a 
 whole." 1 
 
 Now, consciousness we know only from within. But 
 the function which consciousness performs in sensori- 
 motor action is definite, and wherever a corresponding 
 combination of data and adjustment of action is formed 
 an exactly corresponding function must exist. We shall 
 therefore in accordance with our criteria treat all sensori- 
 motor activity as conscious. The same reasoning will 
 apply to conative selection, which we know in ourselves 
 as involving conscious uneasiness and conscious effort. 
 This consciousness in us determines our behaviour, 
 sustaining repeated movements, checking, encouraging, 
 and varying them in relation to their results. A corre- 
 sponding function must exist when corresponding be- 
 haviour is found, and again in accordance with our rule 
 we shall describe this function as a conscious act. We 
 arrive then at this result, that conation even in its lowest 
 stages is a conscious function. As we know it internally 
 it is a state seeking to pass into some other. In terms of 
 behaviour it is not a uniform response to stimulus but a 
 state governing action by relation to the results at the 
 moment. The grasp of the unique and changing relations 
 involved is the function which we attribute to conscious- 
 ness.^ 
 
 ' From the writer's Development and Purpose, p. 54. 
 
 ^ It may be asked whether variation to suit unique circumstances is a 
 good test of conation in view of the possibility (suggested above, Ch. II. 
 p. 32, by the example of the linotype) that a machine may be constructed 
 
V 
 
 CONATION 63 
 
 Among ourselves sensori-motor action is acquired. It 
 is a matter of trained skill and disciplined judgment. 
 The type reactions employed are themselves for the most 
 part acquisitions, the perceptive judgment which combines 
 them a still more difficult acquisition. But there is no 
 difficulty in conceiving that hereditary type reactions 
 should be uniquely combined, provided there exists 
 in the animal some power strictly corresponding in 
 origin and function to our perceptual consciousness which 
 can combine present data. It would seem that we must 
 in fact carry such power down to the lowest grades of 
 animal life. The amoeba, which is pursuing a prey, 
 employs not one reaction but a number of type reactions 
 selectively, in combination or in succession, in accordance 
 with the behaviour of the prey, which again varies as the 
 play of circumstances may direct. Here is the description 
 of amoeba's hunting from Mr. Jennings's work : 
 
 " I had attempted to cut an Amoeba in two with the tip of a 
 fine glass rod. The posterior third of the animal, in the form of 
 a wrinkled ball, remained attached to the rest of the body by only 
 a slender cord — the remains of the ectosarc. The Amoeba began 
 to creep away, dragging with it this ball. This Amoeba may be 
 called a, while the ball will be designated b. A larger Amoeba 
 (c) approached, moving at right angles to the path of the first 
 specimen. Its path accidentally brought it in contact with the 
 ball b, which was dragging past its front. Amoeba c thereupon 
 turned, followed Amoeba a, and began to engulf the ball b. A 
 
 to adapt itself in specified cases to the variations of individual circum- 
 stances. The reply is that in conation the act is so adjusted to 
 indefinitely varying changes in an outer object as to meet not the present 
 situation but one that is just about to occur. Now if there is a uniform 
 correlation between the acts, states or position of the object such that a 
 series of variations in its present state Ai, A^ A^. . . are always succeeded 
 in definite time and space relation by a series a^, a^, a^. ■ . such adjust- 
 ment might be mechanical. That is, the stimulus administered by A-^ 
 might by a uniform process discharge the movement suited to deal with 
 the object at a-^ and so on. This would be an admissible explanation in, 
 say, the chase of a prey in open country. We might suppose all the 
 responses of the hunter to be adapted by heredity to those of the prey, 
 which, though endlessly varying, may vary on a fixed pattern. But when 
 we consider the synthesis of several mdependent objects which we find in 
 sensori-motor action, we are dealing with things that vary independently 
 and pass from one unique relation irregularly to another. In this case 
 the given situation varies in no uniform relation to the situation which 
 will emerge from it. The only thing that is common to the several 
 responses is their suitability to the result accruing from them. 
 
64 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 cavity was formed in the anterior part of Amoeba c, reaching back 
 nearly or quite to its middle, and much more than sufficient to 
 contain the ball b. Amoeba a now turned into a new path ; 
 Amoeba c followed. After the pursuit had lasted for some time 
 the ball b had become completely enveloped by Amoeba c. The 
 cord connecting the ball with Amoeba a broke, and the latter 
 went on its way, disappearing from our account. Now the 
 anterior opening of the cavity in Amoeba c became partly closed, 
 leaving only a slender canal. The ball b was thus completely 
 enclosed, together with a quantity of water. There was no 
 adhesion between the protoplasm of b and c ; on the contrary, as 
 the sequel will show clearly, both remained independent, c merely 
 enclosing b. 
 
 "Now the large Amoeba c stopped, then began to move in 
 another direction, carrying with it its meal. But the meal — the 
 ball b — now began to show signs of life, sent out pseudopodia, 
 and became very active ; we shall therefore speak of it henceforth 
 as Amoeba b. It began to creep out through the still open canal, 
 sending forth its pseudopodia to the outside. Thereupon Amoeba 
 c sent forth its pseudopodia in the same direction, and after 
 creeping in that direction several times its own length, again 
 enclosed b. The latter again partly escaped, and was again 
 engulfed completely. Amoeba c now started again in the opposite 
 direction, whereupon Amoeba b, by a few rapid movements, 
 escaped from the posterior end of Amoeba c and was free — being 
 completely separated from c. Thereupon c reversed its course, 
 overtook b, engulfed it completely again, and started away. 
 Amoeba b now contracted into a ball and remained quiet for a 
 time. Apparently the drama was over. Amoeba c went on its 
 way for about five minutes without any sign of life in b. In the 
 movements of c the ball became gradually transferred to its 
 posterior end until there was only a thin layer of protoplasm 
 between b and the outer water. Now b began to move again, 
 sent pseudopodia through the thin wall to the outside, and then 
 passed bodily out into the water. This time Amoeba c did not 
 return and recapture b. The two Amoebae moved in opposite 
 directions and became completely separated. The whole per- 
 formance occupied about fifteen minutes." (Pp. 17, 18.) 
 
 This behaviour, as Mr. Jennings justly remarks, is 
 evidently complex, and " analysis into simple reactions 
 and simple stimuli is difficult if possible at all." Un- 
 doubtedly the impression made both by this and other 
 observations is that the amoeba's action is of sensori- 
 motor type. It certainly uses only two or three type 
 
V CONATION 6s 
 
 methods, which belong to its structure and may be re- 
 garded as hereditary, but it appears to vary and adjust 
 them from moment to moment in relation to the be- 
 haviour of an external object. If this is the case the 
 action is sensori-motor.^ With regard to higher animals 
 that follow the turnings and twistings of a prey, or, 
 if themselves dogged, the rapidly changing movements of 
 an enemy, the case admits of no doubt. Mechanism may 
 be wholly hereditary or may be improved by experience 
 as the case may be, but the combination and adjustment 
 from moment to moment require the combination of 
 many co-present elements, and the only question which 
 we shall have to raise later on will be whether we must 
 not carry some of these actions a grade higher and 
 frankly regard them as purposive. 
 
 ' To go a little higher in the animal scale we may usefully compare 
 the behaviour of a starfish that has been placed on its back. First of all 
 it moves its tube feet about and twists the tubes so that some are directed 
 downwards. In this way one or more find the bottom. " They begin to 
 pull on the arm to which they belong, turning it further over, and bring 
 other tube feet into contact with the bottom. These now assist in the 
 process. If two or three adjacent rays become thus attached, the other 
 rays cease their searching, twisting movements and allow themselves to 
 be turned over "... If two or more opposite rays become attached, " one 
 releases its hold." The righting reaction is by no means performed 
 always in the same manner but is various and flexible (Jennings, p. 239). 
 I do not know whether the righting reaction should be classed as 
 sensori-motor directed to the ground as an object, or as a selective 
 adaptation. It is certainly an interesting instance of the determination 
 of a series of acts by reference to the immediate requirements of the 
 animal. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 INSTINCT^ 
 
 I . We were taught in our childhood that man had reason, 
 while animals had instinct. What instinct precisely was, 
 was not, so far as my own memory goes, made particularly 
 clear. But it was generally understood to be a somewhat 
 mysterious power, the limits of which were exceedingly 
 ill-defined, while its workings were undoubtedly a con- 
 spicuous instance of that Providential ordering of things 
 whereby the fly is endowed with wings to escape the spider, 
 and the spider with jaws to devour the fly. I cannot find 
 a better statement of the traditional, popular, and, one 
 may say, pious conception of instinct than that given by 
 Captain Marryat's Masterman Ready — a work written 
 for edification. 
 
 " ' Instinct in animals, William,' continued Mr. Seagrave, ' is 
 a feeling which compels them to perform certain acts without 
 previous thought or reflection ; this instinct is in full force at the 
 moment of their birth ; it is the guidance of the Almighty's hand 
 unseen j it was therefore perfect in the beginning, and has never 
 varied. The swallow built her nest, the spider its web, the bee 
 formed its comb, precisely in the same way four thousand years 
 ago as they do now.' " 
 
 It may be said to be the breakdown of this conception 
 which made animal psychology possible as a science. As 
 
 1 The following chapter was written before seeing Mr. Lloyd Morgan's 
 final expression of his views in Animal Behaviour, with which I am glad 
 to find myself in close agreement. My debt to him, however, is none the 
 less, since the chapter is largely based upon his earlier work. 
 
 66 
 
CHAP. VI INSTINCT 67 
 
 soon as it was seen that instinct, like other animal functions, 
 rested upon conditions many of which can be assigned, that 
 it does not spring into existence all at once in full per- 
 fection, but is subject, like other features of organic life, 
 to growth and change and possibly to decay, that it is not 
 always perfect or unerring, that no impassable gulf severs 
 it from intelligence, but rather that intelligence first arises 
 within the sphere of instinct — when instinct was thus 
 brought into relation with more commonplace facts, the 
 awe and mystery surrounding it were dissolved, and the 
 central feature of animal psychology became susceptible of 
 scientific treatment. No one supposes that all instincts 
 are explained, or are easy to understand in the present 
 state of our knowledge. The central conception of instinct 
 itself is not as clearly defined as might be desired. But 
 instinct Is no longer a mysterious faculty which may at 
 once be set down as a sufficient explanation of anything In 
 the behaviour of animals that we do not understand. 
 Instinct cannot do anything and everything. It has limits 
 even if we have difficulties in drawing them with precision. 
 And secondly, Its territory is not apart, but strictly con- 
 tinuous with other powers of organised beings. Instinct - 
 In short is a product of evolution. It presides at a certain 
 phase, and has, all In due order. Its beginning, its rise, its 
 culmination, and Its decline. 
 
 To give the full proof of what I have said would be 
 merely to repeat or summarise the works of authors far 
 more competent to deal with the matter than myself. I 
 may merely advert briefly to the abundant evidence showing 
 that Instinct is not always perfect in its working ; that it 
 does not proceed on an unchangeable model ; that It is on 
 occasion applied mistakenly, uselessly and Injuriously ; that 
 It is often Incomplete at birth, and requires development ; 
 and that, at any rate among the higher animals, it is so 
 Interwoven with Intelligence that the two factors become 
 exceedingly difficult to disentangle. 
 
 Nothing seems more instinctive than the impulse of the 
 young mammal to suck its mother's breast. Undoubtedly 
 there is an innate tendency to suck, and an impulse to suck 
 the breast. But there Is no unerring inward guide leading 
 
 F 2 
 
68 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 it to obtain its needed nourishment. On the contrary, good 
 observers state that many young pigs, puppies, and kittens 
 would fail to find the teat altogether unless helped by 
 the mother, while of the lamb Mr. Hudson says : — 
 
 " It does not know what to suck. It will take into its mouth 
 whatever comes near, in most cases a tuft of wool on its dam's 
 neck, and at this it will continue sucking for an indefinite time." 
 
 It is, he thinks, the strong smelling secretion of the udder 
 that at length attracts the lamb.^ 
 
 Heredity is the main guide in the matter and manner 
 of eating and drinking, but the young bird, however much 
 in need of drink, gives no response to the presence or 
 even to the touch of water till it has once got it inside 
 its bill by a more or less accidental peck.^ 
 
 There is no more wonderful operation of " instinct " 
 than the nest of the bird, or the web of the spider. But 
 neither of these is in all cases immutable in type nor perfect 
 from birth. DahP found with one species of spider, which 
 makes a web with one section omitted and the space 
 occupied by a single thread, that the first web spun is of a 
 more primitive type. It is made complete, like an ordinary 
 web. The more developed form is found sometimes in 
 the second web, sometimes after several repetitions. One 
 individual combined the single thread with the perfect web. 
 The nest-building of birds is unquestionably instinctive, but 
 as unquestionably it is an art which different individuals 
 of the same species possess in different degrees of perfec- 
 tion,* and which is modifiable in many different ways, as 
 circumstances suggest or require.^ 
 
 Few instincts seem more mysterious than those which 
 lead insects to choose for depositing their eggs precisely 
 those places which are best adapted for hatching out the 
 larva. Yet the flesh fly has been known to deposit its 
 
 1 Lloyd Morgan, Habit and Instinct^ pp. 114-116. Cf. Prayer, I. 
 pp. 138-140, and Wesley Mills, pp. 118, 119. 
 
 2 See Craig, Observations on Doves Learning to Drink, J. A. B. 1912, 
 pp. 273-279, and Lloyd Morgan, Habit and Instinct, pp. 44-46, there 
 cited. ^ Dahl, p. 168. 
 
 * See Lloyd Morgan, Habit and Instinct, p. 234 et seq. 
 ^ For abundant evidence, see Romanes, M.E.A. p. 209 ff. and Wallace, 
 Natural Selection, p. 110 et seq. 
 
VI 
 
 INSTINCT 69 
 
 eggs in the flowers of the carrion plant, the smell of which 
 resembles that of putrid meat.^ No case of this kind is 
 more wonderful than that of the Sitaris beetle/ the larva 
 of which begins life by attaching itself to a bee which has 
 afterwards to provide for it. Does one ask how the larva 
 knows the bee ? The reply is, it does not. 
 
 " Although they are close to the abodes of the bees they do 
 not enter them, but seek to attach themselves to any hairy object 
 that may come near them, and thus a certain number of them 
 get on to the bodies of the AnthopKora and are carried to its nest. 
 They attach themselves with equal readiness to any other hairy 
 insect, and it is probable that very large numbers perish in con- 
 sequence of attaching themselves to the wrong insects." * 
 
 These and similar instances go to show that what guides 
 the larva or the fly is no unerring internal or external 
 guide, but the contact of the hairs, the smell of the meat. 
 The mechanism of the instinct consists in this : that at the 
 time when the fly is ready to lay the eggs, the smell (or 
 the diffused chemical stimulus which, for us, is a smell) 
 attracts the fly, and contact with the smelling substance 
 gives the final touch which sets the process of laying to 
 work. Similarly the cuttlefish at the due season has the 
 impulse to embrace its mate. Here the stimulus appears 
 to be the shape of the mate, for a piece of wood appro- 
 priately shaped will be so violently and persistently 
 embraced that it can be used as a bait with success.* A 
 tame dove will give the instinctive sex reactions to the 
 most inappropriate object, bowing and cooing ludicrously 
 to a shoe or to the hand of the owner, behaving in per- 
 fectly characteristic fashion, but with complete ineptitude.** 
 Similarly a young hawk strikes a harmless piece of meat 
 with ruffled feathers, spread wings, and savage thrust of 
 beak and claw, in fine with all the instinctive adaptations 
 and expressions appropriate to the pounce on living prey, 
 in response to some stimulus of odour or touch, but 
 quite fruitlessly for the purpose in hand.° 
 
 ^ Romanes, M.E.A. p. 167. Cf. Schneider, Der thierische Wille, 
 p. 268. 2 Lloyd Morgan, Habit and Instinct, pp. 15, 304. 
 
 ' The Camhidge Natural History, VI. p. 272. 
 
 * Schneider, Der thierische Wille, p. i y;^. 
 
 ^ Craig, Male Doves reared in Isolation, J.A B. 1914, pp. 123, 132, &c. 
 
 * Haggerty, A Case of Instinct, J. A.B.' \()ii, p. 79. 
 
70 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 These few instances will serve to show that instinct is 
 not the mysteriously unerring guide that tradition has 
 made of it. It is not invariably perfect from birth ; it 
 often needs and undergoes development in the lifetime of 
 the individual ; it often misleads its possessor, and, as we 
 shall show later, it is, at any rate in its higher forms, 
 capable of well-directed modifications. 
 
 2. Indeed, instinctive action of the more plastic kind 
 bears at first sight all the signs and tokens of deliberate 
 purpose — and deliberate purpose implies intelligence. Can 
 we then regard instinct as a form of intelligence .'' The 
 question would hardly be entertained by any psychologist, 
 but it may be well to assign briefly some of the reasons 
 for dismissing it. If we impute intelligence to an animal, 
 we do so on the same ground ultimately as that which 
 justifies us in imputing intelligence to another man. We 
 reason outwards to other men from ourselves, and similarly 
 we reason outwards to animals from men. And the test 
 of our reasonings is in the end the same — corroboration of 
 our results by inferences proceeding from different data 
 and along different lines. Bearing these principles in 
 mind, we observe : — 
 
 a. Instinctive and intelligent actions are opposed in 
 their genesis. 
 
 To grasp fully the nature of what he is doing, a man 
 must have some experience of it. Instinct, on the other 
 hand, is often almost perfect, and sometimes quite perfect, 
 without any experience at all. At that stage its action is, 
 even in an otherwise intelligent being, carried on without 
 consciousness of its end or its nature. Thus when an 
 otherwise intelligent youth falls in love for the first time, 
 he has little or no conception of what has befallen him, 
 until little by little he begins to compare his experiences 
 with what he has seen and heard and read. Then he 
 knows. To assume that a canary bred in captivity has a 
 conception of the nest which she builds is to suppose 
 something utterly opposed to that human experience which 
 is the real basis of the original assumption. Men do not 
 evolve conceptions out of nothing, "in the way which the 
 canary would, according to the assumption, have to do. 
 
VI INSTINCT 
 
 71 
 
 On the other hand, men do perform actions without know- 
 ing the reason why, and come at the reason afterwards by 
 reflection. In short, instinct is a "vera causa." We know 
 it among ourselves. Innate conception is not a "vera 
 causa." To impute it to an animal is to infer, on the 
 ground of actions similar to those of man, an intellectual 
 method opposed to those of man. 
 
 y8. Instinct and Intelligence are opposed in the nature 
 of their contents. 
 
 If we were to regard as the work of thought actions 
 which we usually attribute to instinct, we should have to 
 impute to the animals which perform them a marvellous 
 capacity for intricate scheming and planning. A single 
 instance will be a sufficient illustration. 
 
 " The caterpillar of the emperor moth spins at the upper 
 extremity of its cocoon a double arch of stiff bristles, held together 
 above only by a few fine threads. The cocoon, i.e., opens at the 
 very least pressure from within, but is able to resist quite strong 
 pressure from without. Autenrieth writes of this in his Ansichten 
 iiber Natur- und Seelenleben : ' If the caterpillar acted from reflec- 
 tion and with understanding, it must, on human analogy, have 
 pursued the following train of thought : that it had reached its 
 chrysalis stage, and would therefore be at the mercy of any un- 
 lucky accident, without possibility of escape, unless it took certain 
 precautionary measures in advance ; that it would have to issue 
 from its cocoon as imago without having organs or strength for 
 breaking through the cover it had spun as caterpillar, and without 
 possessing any secretion, like other insects, which would, if 
 emitted, eat through the threads of silk ; and that consequently, 
 unless it took care to provide as caterpillar a convenient exit from 
 its cocoon, it must certainly come to a premature end in im- 
 prisonment. On the other hand, it must have clearly recognised 
 during its work upon the cocoon that, in order to have free egress 
 as imago, it would only be necessary to construct an arch which 
 could resist attacks from without while opening easily from 
 within ; and that these conditions would be fulfilled if the arch 
 were made of stiff threads, inclined together in the median line, 
 ahd with their ends left free. At the same time it must have 
 rtealised that the plan could be carried out if the silk employed for 
 the construction of the other parts of the cocoon were employed 
 with special care and skill at the upper end. Yet it could have 
 learnt nothing of all this from its parents.' " ^ . . . 
 
 1 Wundt, Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, pp. 391-392- 
 
72 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 It is out of keeping with anything that we know of 
 Thought to suppose that it could reach such a pitch of 
 perfection in relation to a single series of acts, and not 
 show itself in aQV other way. But it is quite in keeping 
 with the nature of heredity to suppose that in a species to 
 which a certain method of protection has become important, 
 that method should go on under the influence of natural 
 selection, becoming more and more perfect in its mechanical 
 precision. And that instincts no less complex are of this 
 mechanical character is proved by instances which we have 
 already quoted, and to which we might add indefinitely. 
 The truth is, that it is precisely the highly complex 
 development of apparent purpose in certain relations, 
 combined with entire absence of any corresponding mani- 
 festation of intelligence in other respects, that forces us to 
 recognise the purposiveness as only apparent. One has seen 
 incautious writers attributing high unselfishness to an in- 
 sect because it sacrifices itself for young whom it will never 
 see. It is precisely this apparent refinement which removes 
 the action out of the moral category altogether, by making 
 it impossible for the insect to know what it is about. 
 
 3. Instinct and heredity. 
 
 The explanation of instinct by intelligence does not 
 accord with the facts. If the intelligence is regarded as a 
 sort of providential guidance of the animal, the explana- 
 tion founders on the mistakes of instinct and its varia- 
 bility. If it is the animal's own intelligence that is called 
 in, we have seen that it must be an intelligence opposed in 
 the method of its growth and its structure when grown to 
 any sort of intelligence of which we have clear knowledge. 
 These explanations have accordingly given way to the 
 biological theory which explains Instinct by heredity. If 
 a structure can arise through heredity under the influence 
 of natural selection, so also can the function which such a 
 structure performs, and instinct, upon this view, is nothing 
 but the specific function of a definite inherited structure. 
 The evolution of wings is not a separate process from the 
 evolution of flying. The growth of claws and teeth 
 implies the development of a particular habit of fighting 
 and obtaining food. These broad correlations of structure 
 
VI INSTINCT 73 
 
 and functions are everyday matters too familiar to strike 
 us. The observant naturalist can carry this correspondence 
 further into detail, as when Dr. A. R. Wallace shows that 
 the absence of nests among the Megapodidae is correlated 
 with the large size of their eggs. This involves an 
 interval of ten or twelve days between the maturation of 
 each egg, and makes it impossible that all should be 
 hatched together.^ But to complete the account of the 
 relation between structure and function, we should require 
 a knowledge of the molecular structure of the nervous 
 system of which we are as yet only at the beginning. 
 The reason why the bird uses its wings, or the tiger its 
 claws, is not merely that they possess wings and claws, but 
 that the muscles of wings and claws are connected through 
 a ramification of nerve fibres with their sense organs. If 
 we could trace out these ramifications in detail, we should 
 be able to specify the actual hereditary structures on 
 which the flying of the bird or the crouch and spring of 
 the tiger depend. We are only on the threshold of the 
 investigations necessary for such a purpose.^ But we have 
 no reason to doubt that as in general so in detail we should 
 find a close correspondence between inherited structure and 
 inherited mode of action, which would justify us in 
 regarding the latter as the response made by the former to 
 accustomed stimulus. 
 
 4. Treating instinct, then, as the response of inherited 
 structure to stimulus, comparative psychology at one time 
 inclined to regard it as closely related to reflex action. 
 The smell of putrid meat attracts the gravid carrion fly. 
 That is, it sets up motions of the wings which bring the 
 fly to it, and the fly having arrived, the smell and the 
 contact combined stimulate the functions of oviposition. 
 
 ' Malay Arcihpelago, Vol. I. p. 418. 
 
 ^ Here and there by good fortune we come upon a progressive series 
 showing the stages by which evolution tnay have gone forward. " The 
 Synagris are a genus of Eumenidae ... 5. calida . . . stocks the cells 
 with caterpillars, lays an i:^^ in each, seals the cells and takes no more 
 notice of them. S. sicheUana . . . places in each (cell) enough cater- 
 pillars to last the larva a little more than one day, and replenishes the 
 store daily." S. cornuta completes one cell, lays an egg in it, does not 
 store it but feeds the hatched larva till it is full-grown, when the wasp 
 seals the cell and constructs another." E. Roubaud as summarised 
 J.A.B. igi2, p. 391. 
 
^ 
 
 74 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 The sight of appropriate food stimulates the chick to 
 peck, just as the contact of the food with the interior of 
 the bill stimulates the swallowing reflexes. And just as 
 the sight of food stimulates the chick to peck, so the 
 sight of the chick stimulates the hen to cluck, or to scratch 
 for food, or to protect it against danger, and so forth. 
 
 But the last instance shows us that if we actually 
 identify instinctive with reflex action, we shall be running 
 into paradox. In the maternal care exercised by the hen 
 many reflexes are involved as constituent elements. No 
 doubt a certain optical stimulus may by a purely reflex 
 process make the hen utter the " danger cluck " ; the 
 sound of which in the same way induces the chicks to 
 hide. As they run to her she spreads out her wings to 
 receive them and so forth. Each particular act may be 
 described without obvious violence as reflex, but the 
 whole is an adaptive combination of reflexes in which the 
 combination is as important as each separate act. That is 
 to say it is of sensori-motor type. Nor is this all. The 
 sensori-motor act is only one incident in what may be a 
 long and complex series all of which tend to one result, 
 the production and safe rearing of the chicks. Through- 
 out this series there appears to be in the hen at least 
 some permanent state corresponding to what we call 
 maternalfeelingjor theparental instinct, which dominates her 
 actions throughout, and without which the various reflexes 
 would not be discharged by their appropriate stimuli nor 
 the perceived situations have their eff^ect in combining 
 reflexes suitably. If she had no chickens to think of, 
 the hen would pick up the food which she finds, and 
 would seek her own safety when frightened. 
 
 To this it may be replied that the adaptive combination 
 of the reflexes is itself a part of the mechanism provided 
 by heredity for the maintenance of the species. Those 
 who hold with Mr. Herbert Spencer that instinct is merely 
 compound reflex action, will point out that each action 
 that we have mentioned naturally calls for the next until 
 the chain is complete. This concatenation is no doubt 
 adaptive, but it is also mechanical, and to impute to the 
 hen maternal feeling unless we can show that this feeling 
 
VI INSTINCT 
 
 75 
 
 has some outward efFect in modifying her actions, is a 
 piece of pure anthropomorphic imagery. Upon its own 
 conditions, this argument is sound. In comparative 
 psychology the legal maxim must hold, that the thing 
 which does not at some point or other appear in action 
 must be treated as non-existent. And it may freely be 
 admitted that in many actions we ordinarily class as 
 instincts, instances of rigid adherence to type-action may be 
 found. But alongside of these, often intertwined with them 
 in the very same series of acts, will be found adaptive 
 modifications, combinations, inhibitions. Some of these 
 are sensori-motor, some of higher type, but they agree in 
 this that they are adapted to the changing and even the 
 unique and therefore they fall outside our definition of the 
 mechanical. Instincts present such modifications in very 
 various character and degree. In proportion as an instinct 
 is poor in them and therefore rigid in its execution it 
 approaches the compound reflex type, but at the limit 
 where plasticity disappears we should as a matter of 
 terminology say that the sphere of instinct is left behind 
 and reflex mechanism reigns in its stead. 
 
 The true compound reflex is of two kinds. In the first, 
 a single stimulus sets in motion a co-ordinated series of 
 muscular contractions. Thus the contact of a foreign 
 substance with the interior of the windpipe produces the 
 series of contractions which we call a fit of coughing. 
 Here the whole machinery must be prearranged. There ' 
 are in the arrangements of muscles, nerves, and nerve 
 centres certain lines of communication as complex but also 
 as definitely and rigidly fixed as those of a telephone when 
 the connection is made. The impulse having once set the 
 wave of excitement in motion, the wave travels along the 
 ordained channel till the end is reached, and organic 
 equilibrium is again restored. In the second and more 
 complex case, there is a series of stimuli as well as a series ' 
 of actions, the actions being so adjusted as to bring the 
 new stimuli into play. This arrangement may be wholly 
 internal, the stimuli themselves being changes within 
 the organism, as in the case of respiration. But this is 
 not essential. Under ordinary circumstances walking — the 
 
76 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 act of walking as distinct from the purpose with which we 
 set out — is for every one but an infant a true compound 
 reflex. The contact of the foot with the ground sets in 
 motion a number of waves of excitement directed in part 
 to maintaining the balance, in part to the onward move- 
 ment. The resulting contractions bring the other foot 
 forward, and the result is a fresh contact, setting similar 
 contractions to work, and so forth.^ 
 
 This familiar instance may serve to illustrate the general 
 plan of a compound reflex, and to show that there is 
 nothing to prevent a train of action of considerable com- 
 plexity being carried on through a succession of responses 
 each following with rigid and predetermined uniformity 
 upon its proper stimulus. Where an " instinct " is of this 
 character, it may be made to betray itself by some slight 
 variation in the circumstances which render the action 
 useless or injurious. When we apply this test we get 
 some very strange results, and what at one moment we 
 take for instinctive behaviour of a high order seems at 
 another to sink to mechanical action of a rigid type. A 
 well-known observation by M. Fabre will illustrate my 
 point.^ 
 
 ..." A solitary wasp, Sphex flavipennis^ which provisions its 
 nest with small grasshoppers, when it returns to the cell, leaves 
 the victim outside, and goes down for a moment to see that all is 
 right. During her absence M. Fabre moved the grasshopper a 
 little. Out came the Sphex, soon found her victim, dragged it to 
 the mouth of the cell, and left it as before. Again and again 
 M. Fabre moved the grasshopper, but every time the Sphex did 
 exactly the same thing, until M. Fabre was tired out." ^ 
 
 1 Walking is subject to the permanent disposition to go forward. In 
 purposive acts such a disposition exerts a controlling influence from the 
 background which' is roughly parallel to that exerted by the permanent 
 condition in the instinctive series. But subject to this condition the acts 
 involved in walking as long as everything is straightforward are, I think, 
 reflex. The slightest obstacle, of course, brings consciousness into play. 
 
 In low organisms movements of the whole body may be analysed into 
 chain reflexes in which the activity of one part stimulated from without 
 is itself the stimulus to the appropriate act of the next part, and so on. 
 (S. J. Holmes, Phototaxis in the Sea-urchin, J.A.B. p. 135.) 
 
 ^ Lubbock, Senses of Animals, p. 245. 
 
 ^ It does not follow that the wasp was destitute of intelligence, or that 
 it is not under any circumstances able to bring intelligence to bear on the 
 action. Indeed, a subsequent experiment of Fabre's on another individual 
 
VI INSTINCT 
 
 77 
 
 Equally well known is the same observer's experiment 
 on the larva of Chalicodoma. 
 
 " This genus is enclosed in an earthen cell, through which at 
 maturity the young insect eats its way. M. Fabre found that 
 if he pasted a piece of paper round the cell the insect had no 
 difficulty in eating through it, but if he enclosed the cell in a 
 paper case, so that there was a space even of only a few lines 
 between the cell and the paper, in that case the paper formed an 
 effectual prison. The instinct of the insect taught it to bite 
 through one enclosure, but it had not wit enough to do so a 
 second time.''^ 
 
 What seems like unremitting maternal love is suddenly 
 shown in quite a different light by a slight alteration of 
 the conditions. The Bembex carefully feeds her grub, and 
 never makes a mistake in finding her way to her cell, 
 although it is covered with sand and is then undistinguish- 
 able to us from the surroundings, but when M. Fabre 
 removed the earth and exposed the cell, the Bembex did 
 not appear to recognise the young that she had so carefully 
 tended.^ One is driven to infer a very different mental 
 process from that of the bird, which will follow her young 
 if taken from her, or even from that of the perch, that will 
 remove a nest that has once been disturbed.^ 
 
 Traces of this mechanical method of response are found 
 side by side or blended with intelligence in the higher 
 animals. Mr. Lloyd Morgan quotes an amusing story of 
 a tame squirrel which would " bury " a nut in the floor of 
 a room. 
 
 " He would press the nut down on the carpet, and then go 
 through all the motions of patting the earth over it, after which 
 he went about his business as if that nut were safely buried." * 
 
 The dog's habit of turning round before going to sleep 
 
 is of a similar character, and so are numberless little 
 
 irrational habits of which we are aware in our friends.^ A 
 
 proves the contrary. See also Peckham, Solitary Wasps, p. 39. Many 
 human actions are performed mechanically day by day, but a sufficiently 
 strong stimulus directs attention to them, and brings intelligence to bear. 
 
 1 M.E.A. p. 166. ^ Lubbock, loc. cit. p. 254. 
 
 2 Romanes, p. 251. Cf. Schneider. * Habit and Instinct, p. 123. 
 
 ' Habit and Instinct, though of different origin, have so many points of 
 resemblance that we may be allowed sometimes to illustrate the one by an 
 example from the other. 
 
78 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 man likes to adhere to his particular way of doing a thing, 
 even though a better way be shown him. In proportion 
 as they exhibit this fixed and unadaptable uniformity of 
 response, instincts approach the compound reflex limit and 
 deserve to be called relatively mechanical. 
 
 5. Instincts recede from this type in proportion as the 
 persistent internal disposition^ influences the response. We 
 may illustrate the influence of" such a condition from human 
 actions, where not heredity but an acquired habit is the 
 basis of co-ordination. As I walk down the street, I avoid 
 obstacles without thinking about them. The sight of each 
 passer by, of the lamp post or an approaching cab dis- 
 charges suitable movements of my legs without — unless the 
 danger is sudden or unusual — distracting my thoughts from 
 the conversation which 1 am carrying on. The process is 
 reflex. If, instead of walking, I am bicycling, I avoid the 
 perils of 'bus or cab no less " instinctively," that is, auto- 
 matically. But here quite a different set of muscles are 
 called into play. I steer not by my feet but by my hands 
 and the swinging of my body. If a cart suddenly stops in 
 front of me, I grasp the brake. If I were briskly walk- 
 ing, I should pull up quite differently, with one foot out, 
 and knee bent but tense. In a word, the reflexes excited 
 by the same objects or circumstances differ according to 
 the pursuit in which I am for the time engaged. While 
 that pursuit continues the reflexes are set to play a 
 particular tune as each is touched. In this instance, the 
 setting is fixed by habit, but the effect is the same where 
 it is inherited. But it is not only reflexes that are so 
 determined but sensori-motor actions as well. The 
 clutching of the bicycle brake in the presence of an 
 obstacle may be mechanical, but if a child runs out into 
 the road, the cyclist executes a swift but graceful curve 
 and avoids it. The act may be unreflective but it needs 
 that element of judgment, of grasping several distinct 
 sensory data in relation which distinguishes the sensori- 
 motor from the reflex act. Now the sensori-motor act 
 
 * The German Stimmung used by Prayer (I. p. 197) in this connection 
 expresses my meaning better. Mr Lloyd Morgan calls the internal factor 
 a craving {Animal Behaviour, p. 102). 
 
VI INSTINCT 
 
 79 
 
 involves, we saw, attentive concentrated perception. In 
 us this is a consciousness. In the animal under the same 
 circumstances we see all the corresponding outward signs, 
 the pricked ear, the sniffing nose, the fixed eyeball, the 
 tense musculature ; we have also corresponding ante- 
 cedents and corresponding consequences. There must, 
 therefore, be some state of the animal's organism corres- 
 ponding in causes, expression, and functions to our 
 attentive perception, and though that state cannot be 
 more directly known to us, we describe it in accordance 
 with our avowed method by the same name. Now we 
 have to ask what determines attentive perception, and 
 what causes it to discharge actions of a particular kind. 
 The answer in our case is that (apart from the intensity 
 or other peculiarity of some external stimulus) there is 
 some interest which directs perception, is served by the 
 response which the perception discharges, and is in fact 
 the motive force behind the perception. This interest 
 does not necessarily form an independent state of con- 
 sciousness, but it qualifies our consciousness as long as it 
 lasts, giving our conscious perception an emotional 
 tinge and impregnating it with the sense of elFort and 
 excitement. Now such an interest may be connected 
 with a conscious purpose and may arise out of experience. 
 But there is no difficulty in conceiving a similar interest 
 as an innate or hereditary disposition brought into action 
 by an appropriate situation as stimulus or possibly even 
 in the course of the purely internal changes of the 
 organism. Precisely such a state so arising, so enduring 
 till its function is performed, and so directing the series 
 of constituent actions is what we find in Instinct. 
 
 To this direction Instinct mainly owes it plasticity of 
 adjustment. As we ascend the scale this feature develops 
 and the divergence from the reflex type becomes more 
 pronounced. Alternative methods of action are used and 
 used appropriately. Different kinds of reaction are 
 combined in ways that must vary, more or less, from 
 case to case. Lastly within certain limits special obstacles 
 or deviations from the normal course of events seem to 
 call up special reactions fitted to dealwith them. This 
 
8o MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 plasticity is partly a matter of degree, partly of the pro- 
 cesses at the disposal of the instinct. At one end of the 
 scale we have mechanical sequences approximating to the 
 reflex type. Moving upwards from these we have 
 adaptations, at first slight and afterwards important. 
 The simplest of these may be explained as sensori- 
 motor acts, where the instinctive interest determines the 
 manner in which sense data are combined so as to yield 
 an appropriate response, but, still within the sphere of 
 instinct, we reach a point where the new combinations 
 effected in surmounting obstacles or in dealing with 
 difficult situations must be referred to intelligence. The 
 criteria of intelligence will be dealt with separately. We 
 cannot in all cases decide with certainty whether it is a 
 factor, but it is impossible to deal with the higher instincts 
 at all without admitting its possibility. 
 
 Whether intelligence is present in the following case must 
 be left to the judgment of the reader, but it will suflfice to 
 illustrate the manner in which actions are combined and 
 adjusted under the instinctive interest. A sandhopper is 
 feeding amongst seaweed and a crab^ approaches behind a 
 clump of weed, which he uses as " cover." There was a 
 distance of about eight inches between the two animals, 
 which the crab had to cross without alarming his victim. 
 Presently he left his cover, and, crouching down, crept 
 towards the sandhopper. When he had got about half 
 way, the sandhopper stopped eating, and turned towards 
 the crab, which immediately disappeared in the sand. 
 Presently the sand rose nearer the sandhopper, the 
 crab reappeared, took a stealthy step or two towards 
 the victim, and then sprang upon him. There are 
 here a succession of acts of diverse character — 
 watching, stealthy creeping, hiding, and pouncing, all 
 brought into operation as the case requires. The whole 
 series turns upon a fixed point — the seizure of the prey ; 
 and each of the varied set of acts is adopted in accordance 
 with the varying actions of the prey, or the varying re- 
 lations between it and the hunter. If we try to regard 
 
 ' Dr. Oscar Schmidt in Brehm's Thierleben, as quoted by Schneider, 
 p. 324- 
 
VI INSTINCT 8 1 
 
 each several movement as a reflex, we should find at once 
 that it was a reflex in which the response instead of 
 varying uniformly with the stimulus, varied in accordance 
 with circumstances. The sight of the prey at a certain 
 distance, and with its back turned, induces stealthy 
 approach ; at close quarters a sudden leap. The turning 
 of the sandhopper's head sets in motion the responses. 
 This is a complex series involved in burrowing under the 
 sand. Everything varies according to the position and 
 movements of the animal pursued, that is to say, the 
 action is sensori-motor, and indeed there is a series of 
 sensori-motor acts adjusted from moment to moment, not 
 to a series of simple sense stimuli, but to the changing 
 phases of a complex situation. 
 
 By the " situation " here is meant those objects and 
 changes in the immediate surroundings that have a bearing 
 on the attainment of a particular end, and operate on the 
 sense organs of an animal. The influence which we have 
 to ascribe to the situation implies the existence of an 
 abiding internal state of the organism which deals with it, 
 adjusting action to its changing phases in the way 
 described. Just as the reflex excitability is the correlative of 
 the sense-stimulus, so this relatively permanent state, which 
 dominates many reflexes, is the correlative of a combination 
 of circumstances, or a " situation." To mate and breed 
 the female dove requires not only the male but facilities 
 for nesting, courting, and generally a suitable environ- 
 ment — " no one factor determines it." The transform- 
 ation of the dove's attitude is " determined by the entire 
 social situation." ^ It is this relatively permanent state, 
 
 ^ The Stimulation and the Inhibition of Ovulation in Birds and 
 Mammals, Wallace Ctz\%, J.A.B. 1913, pp. 214-221. Conversely, when 
 the brooding instinct is once aroused the appropriate stimuli act almost 
 as reflexes. " Contact with the nest under appropriate conditions excites 
 a powerful suggestion or an almost hypnotic influence upon the bird, 
 which somehow involves the ovaries. This attitude leads her to work 
 further upon the nest. Such work causes the stimulus from the nest to be 
 repeated. Thus the circular activity goes on and on." Of the influence 
 of the male on laying, the writer said earlier that it was a psychological 
 influence. In this passage he withdraws the term in favour of the 
 reflex, but he adds : " It is not a simple reflex. It is a reflex which is set 
 working, not by any one sense stimulus, but by the total situation, 
 including both the totality of present sense stimuli and also memory 
 factors" (p. 217). 
 
82 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 directing a series of actions towards a definite result, that 
 forms the basis of Instinct. The construction of a 
 cocoon by a caterpillar, or a tube by a worm, may be 
 quite mechanical, but there is evidence of something not 
 quite mechanical in the power of repairing the things con- 
 structed, or of dealing with any special obstacle to con- 
 struction in a suitable way. The Ant Lion, according to 
 writers quoted by Romanes,^ has some capacity of this kind, 
 and even among worms we find traces of adaptation. Thus, 
 the Terebella builds its tube by selecting grains of sand — 
 in captivity it is less dainty, but generally rejects glass — 
 seizing them with its feelers, drawing them in, and, after 
 secreting a certain cement upon them, protruding its head 
 and depositing them where required. It not only repairs 
 holes, but if a piece does not stick at first, it repeats the 
 process of cementing, while if the object is too big to be 
 drawn in, it protrudes its forepart to the entrance of the 
 tube, and cements it on the spot.^ Caterpillars show a 
 certain power of adaptation in repairing injuries to their 
 cocoons, and the methods used by different individuals are 
 not necessarily the same. Thus, according to Kirby and 
 Spence, Bonnet 
 
 . . . . " having opened several cocoons of a moth (Noctua 
 verbasci), which are composed of a mixture of grains of earth and 
 silk, just after being finished, the larvas did not repair the injury 
 in the same manner. Some employed both earth and silk ; others 
 contented themselves with spinning a silken veil before the 
 opening." ^ 
 
 Mr. Romanes also quotes an instructive observation of 
 Reaumur on the larva of the Tinea moth, which eats out 
 the parenchyma of the elm leaf, preserving the outer mem- 
 brane as a coat, and being careful not to separate them at 
 the outer edge where they unite. This edge becomes one 
 of the seams of its coat. The other seam the larva makes 
 for itself. " Reaumur cut off the edge of a newly-finished 
 coat, so as to expose the body of the larva at that point." 
 
 ' Romanes, p. 235. 
 
 2 Brehm, ThieUben, Vol. X. pp. 127, 128. 
 
 ' Quoted by Romanes, p. 236. * lb. p. 237. 
 
VI INSTINCT 83 
 
 It thereupon 
 
 " sewed up the rent ; and not only so, but ' the scissors having 
 cut off one of the projections intended to enter into the con- 
 struction of the triangular end of the case, it entirely changed the 
 original plan, and made that end the head which had been first 
 designed for the tail.' " ^ 
 
 Lastly, according to Dahl,^ a spider will not only repair 
 an injury to its web if sufficiently serious, but if it finds 
 that a thread which it has spun does not fit the rest of 
 the network, it will reject that thread and substitute 
 another. 
 
 The converse case to the repair of damage is the 
 utilisation of a special opportunity so as to dispense with 
 unnecessary labour. Thus we find, again, according to 
 Kirby and Spence, that the 
 
 " common cabbage caterpillar, which, when building web 
 under stone or wooden surfaces, previously covers a space with a 
 web to form a base for supporting its dependent pupa ; when 
 building a web beneath a muslin surface dispenses with this 
 base altogether. It perceives that the woven texture of the 
 muslin forms facilities for attaching the threads of the cocoon 
 securely enough to support the weight of the cocoon without 
 the necessity of making the usual square inch or so of basal 
 support." ^ 
 
 This instance* is thrown into relief by the conduct of 
 Ruber's caterpillar, which has been already referred to. 
 
 ..." P. Huber has described a caterpillar which makes, by 
 a succession of processes, a very complicated hammock for its 
 
 ^ An entomological friend remarks on this story that the caterpillar 
 would probably (as in the previous example) merely set about to spin a 
 piece of web where it was exposed, and this would have the efiect, not 
 planned by the insect, of " sewing " the edges together. If so, both this 
 and the previous example show how an adaptive modification would 
 result from the persistence with which the instinct operates until it is 
 satisfied. 
 
 ^ Dahl, p. 166 ff. 3 Romanes, p. 237. 
 
 * A parallel is the action of the dung beetle, which normally makes 
 pellets for its eggs, but utilises any that it finds ready made. (Quoted 
 from Kirby and Spence by Romanes, M.E.A. p. 244). Mr. Romanes 
 goes much too far in calling this an " intelligent adaptation." On the face 
 of it, it is merely an instance where an appropriate object calls out the 
 instinctive reactions, that part of the normal instinctive operation which is 
 rendered unnecessary remaining suppressed. 
 
 G 2 
 
84 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 metamorphosis ; and he found that if he took a caterpillar which 
 had completed its hammock up to, say, the sixth stage of con- 
 struction, and put it into a hammock completed up only to the 
 third stage, the caterpillar did not seem puzzled, but repeated the 
 fourth, fifth, and sixth stages of construction. If, however, a 
 caterpillar was taken out of a hammock made up, for instance, to 
 the third stage, and put into one finished to the ninth stage, so 
 that much of its work was done for it, far from feeling the benefit 
 of this, it was much embarrassed, and even foi'ced to go over the 
 already finished work, starting from the third stage which it had 
 left off before it could complete its hammock. So, again, the hive- 
 bee in the construction of its comb seems compelled to follow an 
 invariable order of work." ^ 
 
 We have here a case of the mechanical type approaching 
 if it does not touch the boundary of the compound reflex, 
 while in the other illustrations from caterpillar life we had 
 instances of the adaptive, plastic type. 
 
 The power of overcoming obstacles, and also the 
 limitation of that power as long as we move in the region 
 of pure instinct, is well illustrated by another " caterpillar 
 story " communicated to Mr. Romanes by Mr. G. B. 
 Buckton : 
 
 " Many caterpillars of Pieris rapes have, during this autumn, 
 fed below my windows. On searching for suitable positions for 
 passing into chrysalides, some eight or ten individuals, in their 
 direct march upwards, encountered the plate-glass panes of my 
 windows ; on these they appeared to be unable to stand. Accord- 
 ingly in every case they made silken ladders, some of them five 
 feet long, each ladder being formed of a single continuous thread 
 woven in elegant loops from side to side. . . . The reasoning, 
 however, seems to be but narrow, for one ladder was constructed 
 parallel to the window-frame for nearly three feet, on which 
 secure footing could be had by simply diverting the track two 
 inches." ^ 
 
 The larva has, it would seem, a definite method of deal- 
 ing with the particular difficulty of a smooth surface. It 
 does not matter that a much simpler method is at hand. 
 The caterpillar acts more majorum, and would doubtless be 
 shocked at the suggestion that it should depart from 
 tradition. This suggestion, however, its perceptions are 
 incapable of making to it. Lastly, we may take a case 
 ' ME.A. p. 179. 2 Romanes, p. 236. 
 
VI INSTINCT 
 
 i5- 
 
 where simple patience is the method prescribed for over- 
 coming an obstacle : 
 
 "Very young hermit-crabs, not long after leaving the egg, 
 rush with extraordinary animation for suitable shells that are 
 given to them in the water. They examine the. opening at the 
 mouth, and take up their quarters inside with remarkable alacrity. 
 But, if it chances that the shells are still occupied by molluscs, 
 then they stay close by the opening, and wait till the snail 
 dies, which generally occurs soon after the beginning of the 
 imprisonment and the strict watch. Upon this the small crab 
 pulls out the carcass, devours it, and moves into the lodging 
 himself." 1 
 
 On this Preyer remarks : 
 
 " What foresight ! On account of the preference of the empty 
 shells, the whole proceeding cannot be hereditary. But the 
 young animals are not instructed. They were from the begin- 
 ning separated from their parents, and had no time or opportunity 
 for experiences of their own. They must, therefore, have in- 
 herited their practice of waiting from their ancestors, as a rule of 
 conduct for the case where the shell is occupied, and they can at 
 once distinguish such a one from an empty one." ^ 
 
 The element that is not hereditary seems to be supplied 
 by perception. The empty shell invites immediate entry. 
 The full one sets in motion a different train of actions, 
 equally hereditary, and also adapted in the end to give 
 possession of the shell. 
 
 In the last illustration given, and in some of the others, 
 it will be seen that instinct overcomes its obstacle by 
 bringing up as it were a reserve method not ordinarily 
 employed. It has alternative methods. We may say if 
 we please that the reserve method is merely a response to 
 a special stimulus, but we must keep in mind that the 
 speciality of the stimulus lies precisely in this, that the 
 success of the instinct cannot be compassed by ordinary 
 means. The cat-like patience of the hermit-crab is only 
 called forth by the necessity of getting into a shell, and by 
 its finding the shell occupied. The same general explanation 
 would apply to the action of the vine weevil, which makes 
 a nest for its eggs by rolling up a young vine leaf. If 
 
 ' Preyer, p. 240. ^ lb. p. 241. 
 
86 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 the tender young leaf fails it, it shaves off one membrane 
 of an old leaf, and uses that.' More remarkable, if 
 correctly reported, is the account given by Romanes of a 
 spider which, being so injured that it could not spin 
 effectually, took to stalking its prey.^ Not only will a 
 hungry wolf attack a man from whom he would otherwise 
 fly, but according to Dahl,^ a fasting spider, which was 
 normally shy of dangerous insects, fought fiercely with a 
 wasp. The contrast between the ordinary gentleness of 
 the female of many mammalia and her fierceness and 
 bravery in defence of her young is in reality another case 
 in point. An example both of persistence in overcoming 
 obstacles and of variation in method is supplied by the 
 larva of Cecidipta excoecaria. 
 
 " The female moth lays an egg on a gall, and the resulting 
 larva bores into the gall and nourishes itself on the interior till 
 all is eaten except a thin external coat ; the caterpillar then 
 pupates in this chamber. The galls vary in size and shape, and 
 the larva displays much constructive ability in adapting its home 
 to its needs by the addition of tubes of silk or by other modes. 
 Sometimes the amount of food furnished by the interior of the 
 gall is not sufficient ; the larva, in such cases, resorts to the leaves 
 of the plant for a supplement, but does not eat them in the usual 
 manner of a caterpillar ; it cuts oiF and carries a leaf to the en- 
 trance of its abode, fastens the leaf there with silk, and then itself 
 entering, feeds, from the interior, on the food it has thus 
 acquired." * 
 
 Lastly, the behaviour of crabs in finding means of 
 concealment gives examples both of the " mechanical " 
 and of the more adaptive type. Many crabs have the 
 habit of covering themselves with seaweed or other readily 
 adherent objects, the utility of the action lying in the 
 disguise. In one case, that of Dorippe, the habit appears 
 to have degenerated into a merely mechanical reflex, the 
 crab, as described by Schneider, constantly taking up bits 
 of stone, sponge, or anything else of suitable size and 
 shape, and fixing them on to itself. As it tears away one 
 
 1 Schneider, p. 271. He notes it as a rare instance of an insect 
 altering a custom on encountering an obstacle, and thinks it implies a 
 certain degree of reflection. 
 
 2 M.E.A. p. 209. 3 op. cit. p. 178. 
 * Cambridge Natural History, VI. p. 424. 
 
VI INSTINCT 87 
 
 bit to make room for another, it will often use the same 
 object a second or third time over, while it will throw 
 away objects much better suited for its "purpose," in 
 favour of bits of glass which do not conceal it at all.^ 
 On the other hand, a crab described by Mr. Bateson^ 
 shows more capacity for adjustment. It takes the weed 
 in its chelae, tears it across, puts one end in its mouth and 
 chews it, and finally rubs it on its head and legs until it 
 is caught by the hairs. If however the hairs do not catch 
 the piece, the crab puts it back into its mouth and chews 
 it up again. Here the non-fulfilment of the function 
 has a direct influence. The crab persists or repeats the 
 necessary steps. Whether this implies intelligence or not is 
 a question on which opinions may differ. We may content 
 ourselves with noting the fact that, whatever the means 
 employed, special actions are brought to bear by which the 
 ends of the instinct are achieved. Still more instructive 
 is Schneider's^ experiment on some " sea-spiders " to 
 which he gave pieces of paper and. linen as well as bits of 
 algae, which they generally use. The paper and linen 
 were at first utterly neglected, but when Schneider removed 
 the algae, a divergence appeared. Of the five crabs, three 
 grubbed in the sand, and so covered their backs with bits 
 of shell and pebble, while the other two betook them- 
 selves to the paper and the linen. In the former case, a 
 second kind of habitual reaction is evoked. In the latter, 
 one object is substituted for another. The paper does not, 
 as long as algae are present, excite the crab to seize it ; 
 but the algae being gone, the paper steps into their place 
 so that the instinct may still be fulfilled. The instinct is 
 thus in part independent of stimulus. It needs objects in 
 order to work itself out, but it is not entirely set in 
 motion by the influence of those objects. 
 
 7. At this point it may be asked how far we are justified 
 in referring well-devised adaptations of hereditary methods 
 to mere instinct. An alternative explanation suggests 
 itself. It is possible that within the sphere of instinct, 
 intelligence plays a certain subordinate part. Though the 
 
 ' Op. cit. p. 210. 2 Journal of Marine Biology, 1889-go, p. 213. 
 
 3 Op. cit.^. 318. 
 
88 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 impulse to a particular course of action is hereditary, there 
 may be sufficient intelligence, not indeed to devise thewhole 
 plan upon which the animal proceeds, but to carry out 
 those minor modifications which peculiar circumstances 
 demand. This would be an intelligence operating within 
 the sphere of instinct. But there are many modifications 
 which do not seem to require this explanation, and may be 
 ascribed to what we will call pure instinct ; i.e., instinct 
 operating without intelligence. Thus, to begin with, some 
 of the examples of variation adduced above are, as has been 
 already suggested, to be put down to the existence of more 
 than one hereditary reflex mechanism subserving the same 
 end. A normal stimulus a excites the reflex a ; a less 
 frequent stimulus b excites /3 ; the reaction of a to a and 
 /3 to B giving essentially the same result. Thus one sort 
 of danger may cause a creature to run away ; another may 
 prompt it to hide, or perhaps to stay quite still (to " sham 
 dead "). Here we clearly have to deal with hereditary 
 methods of reaction, though they are different methods. 
 But there is a more complex case. Though the whole 
 mechanism employed may be hereditary, and so in a sense 
 reflex, each reflex element may be suitably modified and 
 adj usted by the pressure of the totality of conditions. We 
 have seen already that in some degree this applies to 
 reflexes from an early stage. The replete child does not 
 suck. That is, the reflex excitability depends on certain 
 relevant organic conditions.^ In a more general way we 
 can now understand how an adjustment, and seemingly a 
 very intelligent adjustment, may be eff^ected to diflferent 
 circumstances through the influence that different stimuli 
 have in counterworking one another. Mr. Romanes tells 
 on the authority of Mr. E. L. Layard a " snake story " 
 which may perhaps be explained in this fashion. 
 
 1 Another excellent illustration of the variation of response according 
 to the general state and requirements of the organism is seen in Prof. 
 Whitman's observations on the leech Clepsine, quoted in Mr. Lloyd 
 M.oxgsia!s Animal Behaviour, pp. 159, 160. This leech has two distinct 
 methods of behaviour in danger. One is to hug the surface on which it 
 is resting, flattening the body and stiffening the flesh. The other is to 
 roll itself up into a ball, free to roll away in any direction. " If by chance 
 the animal has eggs, it will not desert them to escape in this way " — 
 otherwise it may adopt either mode of defence. 
 
VI INSTINCT 89 
 
 " I once watched one (/.?., a cobra) which had thrust its head 
 through a narrow aperture and swallowed one {i.e., a toad). 
 With this encumbrance he could not withdraw himself. Finding 
 this, he reluctantly disgorged the precious morsel, which began to 
 move off. This was too much for snake philosophy to bear, and 
 the toad was again seized ; and again, after violent efforts to 
 escape, was the snake compelled to part with it. This time, 
 however, a lesson had been learnt, and the toad was seized by one 
 leg, withdrawn, and then swallowed in triumph." ^ 
 
 Here there appears a sort of conflict between the impulse 
 to seize, and the necessity of withdrawing the head. The 
 result is a kind of compromise which happens to suit the 
 case well. The toad is seized, but the swallowing reflex 
 is kept in abeyance till the withdrawal is performed. 
 Without dogmatising about this particular instance, one 
 sees how the conflict of impulses may work out to a 
 harmony : how different stimuli, each severally exciting an 
 unsuitable reflex, may act upon and so modify one another 
 as to produce the required adjustment. Where each 
 stimulus acts alone, we get the pure reflex. Where they 
 act together we may get merely an adjustment produced 
 by mutual modification, but where their action is not once 
 nor twice but frequently so combined as to adjust itself to 
 the peculiarities of an outer object, we have sensori-motor 
 action. Where sensori-motors and reflexes are combined 
 in series so as to lead to a definite result, though this 
 result is not foreseen, we have instinct. Where, finally, 
 it is impossible to explain the act except as determined by 
 relation to an end beyond the compass of sensori-motor 
 response, we must impute intelligence. Now the basis of 
 instinct is heredity, but in sensori-motor action we have 
 a factor which is not purely hereditary, namely, the com- 
 bination of data by present consciousness. We shall use 
 the term "pure instinct" for all behaviour that depends 
 upon these elements alone, and shall contrast them with 
 instincts that involve intelligence, meaning by intelligence 
 processes which the individual devises for himself upon 
 the basis of his own experience. Of intelligence operating 
 within the sphere of instinct there is ample evidence. There 
 are modifications of instinctive action directly traceable 
 ' Romanes, p. 262. 
 
90 MIND JN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 to experience. There are adaptations which cannot be 
 explained by any interaction of purely hereditary tendencies, 
 and there are cases in which the whole structure of the 
 instinct is profoundly modified by the experience of the 
 individual. 
 
 The habits of solitary wasps have lately been the sub- 
 ject of a charming monograph by two very careful 
 observers, who have corrected the somewhat startling con- 
 clusions of earlier naturalists, and have made a notable 
 contribution to the whole question of Instinct.^ I may 
 quote some of their observations : 
 
 " When the provisioning is completed the time arrives for the 
 final closing of the nest, and in this, as in all the processes of 
 Ammophila, the character of the work differs with the individual. 
 For example, of two wasps that we saw close their nests on the 
 same day, one wedged two or three pellets into the top of the 
 hole, kicked in a little dust and then smoothed the surface over, 
 finishing it all within five minutes. This one seemed possessed 
 by a spirit of hurry and bustle, and did not believe in spending 
 time on non-essentials. The other, on the contrary, was an 
 artist, an idealist. She worked for an hour, first filling the neck 
 of the burrow with fine earth which was jammed down with 
 much energy, this part of the work being accompanied by a loud 
 and cheerful humming, and next arranging the surface of the 
 ground with scrupulous care, and sweeping every particle of dust 
 to a distance. Even then she was not satisfied, but went 
 scampering around hunting for some fitting object to crown the 
 whole. First she tried to drag a withered leaf to the spot, but 
 the long stem stuck in the ground and embarrassed her. Relin- 
 quishing this, she ran along a branch of the plant under which 
 she was working, and leaning over, picked up from the ground 
 below a good sized stone, but the effort was too much for her, 
 and she turned a somersault on to the ground. She then started 
 to bring a large lump of earth, but this evidently did not come up 
 to her ideal, for she dropped it after a moment, and seizing an- 
 other dry leaf carried it successfully to the spot and placed it 
 directly over the nest." ^ 
 
 We find here, first, variation as between individuals, so 
 marked that we can hardly suppose heredity alone to 
 account for the details of each method. Secondly, what 
 
 1 Instincts and Habits of Solitary Wasps, by Mr. and Mrs. Peckham ; 
 Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey, Bulletin No. 2. 
 
 2 P. 21. 
 
VI INSTINCT 
 
 91 
 
 is more important, we find in the later case a series of 
 trials by which, after one or two failures, a satisfactory- 
 result is obtained. We cannot describe this second wasp 
 as responding in a reflex manner to a particular kind of 
 object. We can only say of her that she has an impulse to 
 bring something suitable to cover her hole. A leaf, a stone, a 
 lump of earth, and again a leaf, are tried in succession until 
 one suits. The objects used differ greatly, the muscular re- 
 actions differ materially. What is constant is merely the 
 end to be achieved, and in some sense or other we must 
 regard the wasp as determined by this end, that is to say, 
 as acting with purpose. 
 
 The writers give several instances of the dexterity with 
 which wasps get spiders into their holes. In one case the wasp 
 
 " was holding it by the under side of the body, the venter 
 being toward the hole, and the legs spread out and stopped its 
 entrance. A moment's tugging convinced her that this would 
 not do, and she then turned the spider over, holding it by the 
 back, whereupon the legs at once folded themselves across the 
 underside of the thorax and the spider was drawn out of 
 sight." 1 
 
 Writing of the same species {Pompilus fuscipennis'), they 
 say: — 
 
 " The spider never wrent in easily, always requiring to be 
 shifted and turned and tugged at. There vv^as an especial tend- 
 ency to bite at the legs at this point of time, when the wasp, 
 standing within the tunnel, was trying to drag the spider down. 
 In one instance she managed to get it past the entrance, but it 
 stuck in the gallery, and after working at it in that position for a 
 time she brought it out, subjected the legs to a severe squeezing, 
 and tried again. It was still a very bad fit, but by turning it 
 about and pulling at it she succeeded in getting it in." ^ 
 
 Another individual, of P. marginatus, stored her prey in 
 a hole from which she had to remove it. 
 
 " The task, however, was not an easy one. She exerted all 
 her strength, so that we expected to see the poor victim dis- 
 membered before our eyes, and still it did not come. At last 
 she seemed to realise that there was more than one way to accom- 
 plish her end, and turned her attention to cutting away the earth 
 to make the opening larger. After a few moments' work she 
 1 P. 141. 2 p. 143. 
 
92 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 tried again, and although the passage was still much too small for 
 convenience, the spider was at length dragged forth, looking 
 much the worse for wear." ^ 
 
 Lastly, they thjnk that a P. scelestus actually compared 
 spider and hole before attempting to get the prey in. 
 
 "Presently she went to look at her nest and seemed to be 
 struck with a thought that had already occurred to us — that it 
 was decidedly too small to hold the spider. Back she went for 
 another survey of her bulky victim, measured it with her eye, 
 without touching it, drew her conclusions, and at once returned 
 to the nest and began to make it larger. We have several times 
 seen wasps enlarge their holes when a trial had demonstrated 
 that the spider would not go in, but this seemed a remarkably 
 intelligent use of the comparative faculty." ^ 
 
 Whatever the correct interpretation of this last obser- 
 vation, enough has been said to show that these wasps 
 adapt means to ends in a way suited to the individual 
 occasion. They are by no means confined to a Series of 
 reactions evoked with mechanical uniformity by a uniform 
 stimulus. On the contrary, they are able to deal within 
 limits with each emergency presented by the individual 
 differences of the prey they have captured. Once again, 
 we cannot say that, given a spider and the hole, the 
 "dragging reflex" is excited. What is excited is the 
 impulse to get it in, and this is accomplished, by dragging, 
 biting, turning over, or enlarging the hole, as the case may 
 be. We are dealing not with reflex action but with the 
 impulse to achieve a particular object to which many 
 muscular actions are subordinated in ways that vary 
 according to the needs of each case. 
 
 Without multiplying instances unnecessarily, we may 
 quote one further statement showing that like birds^ and 
 
 1 P. 150. 2 p_ i58_ 
 
 5 A detailed account of nest building, describing in particular the 
 methods of overcoming obstacles is given by Mr. F. H. Herrick,/.^.^. 
 191 1, pp. 336-373. He describes a robin bringing strings to his nest, 
 which " brought him up to a short turn by catching on a stub. He at 
 first tried to release them by facing the nest and putting his whole force 
 into a lateral strain. Failing in this he faced around and pulled ; failing 
 again, he advanced and taking up a little of the slack pulled again. I 
 suppose no one would deny that intelligence was displayed in this act, 
 but it should also be noted that his intelligence did not carry him to the 
 
VI INSTINCT 
 
 93 
 
 ants, wasps and bees are capable of modifying their whole 
 method of nest-building in well directed adjustment to 
 novel circumstances. 
 
 " PelopceuSj instead of building in hollow trees or under shelv- 
 ing rocks, as was the ancient custom of the race, now nests in 
 chimneys, or under the eaves of buildings. We have found 
 T. rubrocinctum taking advantage of the face of a straw stack that 
 had been cut off smoothly as the cattle were fed through the 
 winter. The same power of adaptation is shown by Fabre's 
 experiment writh Osmia, in which he took two dozen nests in 
 shells from a quarry, vi^here the bees had been nesting for 
 centuries, and placed them in his study along with some empty 
 shells and some hollow stems. When the bees came out, in the 
 spring, nearly all of them selected the stalks to build in as being 
 better suited to their use than the shells." ^ 
 
 8. By extending the field it would be easy to multiply 
 indefinitely instances of what we may call provisionally the 
 play of intelligence within instinct. I have taken the 
 solitary wasps because their case is typical. There is no 
 doubt of the instinctive character of their plan of action. 
 They can have no " education " from parents, and prac- 
 tically none from one another. Moreover, in many 
 instances their action, otherwise so intelligent, becomes 
 strangely blind. Indeed, some of the strongest instances 
 of " mechanical " instinct may be drawn from this very 
 field. It is among the Hymenoptera, and especially among 
 bees and wasps, that we find instincts most wonderfully 
 plastic in their adaptability on one side, and most strangely 
 stupid in mechanical persistence on another. Some such 
 examples have already been quoted.^ Many may be added 
 from Mr.andMrs.Peckham'swork. Both among thewood- 
 boxing and mud-dauber wasps they find frequent cases of 
 
 point of going to the obstruction and actually freeing the thread. In this 
 instance the yarn was released, but in others it held fast and there 
 remained when the nest was completed" {J.A.B . p. 348). With this he 
 compares the behaviour of birds endeavouring to carry into their nest- 
 boxes straws or twigs which were too long — behaviour like that of a dog 
 trying to carry a stick through a fence, the object being shoved back- 
 wards and forwards in the mouth until held in a certain position when it 
 can be pushed through. In the case of a pair of house wrens the male 
 was an adept in slipping the bill to one end of the twigs and the mate 
 soon acquired the habit from him (p. 371). J P. 235. 
 
 2 Those of the Chalicodoma grub, pp. 55, 56, and the Bembex, p. 56. 
 
94 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 the nest being carefully made and sealed up — empty P A 
 single fact of this kind is enough to wreck the suggestion 
 that the nest-building of the wasp is a fully intelligent 
 process as we understand intelligence. If, again, a wasp 
 understood that her business was to store a nest with food, 
 she would hardly reject a suitable insect when she finds one 
 ready to hand. Butthere are manysuch instances. Having, 
 for example, dropped a beetle in her disturbance at being 
 watched, a wasp let It lie for three days close by her web 
 without picking it up again.^ The behaviour of others 
 was still more irrational. 
 
 " While Cerceris was away hunting, some dry sand was thrown 
 into the nest and the entrance was then stopped with damp sand. 
 She returned laden with prey, and seeing herself forced to resume 
 the profession of a miner, abandoned her victim, cleared the en- 
 trance, penetrated within, came out again, and flew off in search 
 of new prey. After two successive trips she penetrated a third 
 time into her dwelling and began to reject the dry sand which 
 had been thrown in. In the midst of this sand was a bee. It 
 was evident that in one of the trips that we had seen her make 
 she could not reach directly to the cell which she was provision- 
 ing and dropped the victim at the place where she had to stop. 
 Presently the wasp flew away. The hours passed on, and she 
 returned without a bee, entered, and threw out the other one 
 which she now considered an encumbering object. Thus of two 
 victims which were procured with great trouble, one was aban- 
 doned on the threshold, and the other was dropped half way in — 
 neither served as food for larvae. What of that ? Cerceris had 
 given the sting — that was enough. 
 
 " At another time a nest, one of the cells of which was not 
 entirely provisioned, was destroyed at evening. On the next 
 morning Cerceris brought a newly stung bee and placed it in the 
 hole. On the following day she came again, charged with prey, 
 and dropped her bee, which rolled to the bottom of the excava- 
 tion. She had not brought the full number for provisioning the 
 nest. Instinct commanded her to bring them, and she obeyed, 
 but not knowing where to put them, let them fall." ^ 
 
 Such cases bring us back by a sharp turn to the con- 
 ception of instinct as a mechanism that must run down in 
 its own way. So does the following. A specimen of 
 P. marginatus is seen dragging a small spider along. 
 
 1 P. 84. 2 7^_p_ 114 3 p. 209. 
 
VI INSTINCT 
 
 95 
 
 "The spider was so small that she held it in her mandibles 
 well above the ground, and we only speak of her as dragging it 
 because she walked backward and acted as though she were 
 obliged to exert herself. Quite often the spiders taken by this 
 species are too large to be carried, and then it is necessary to drag 
 them, and this habit is so ingrained that, when it would be much 
 more convenient to go straight ahead, they stick to the ancient 
 custom, and seem unable to move in any other way." ^ 
 
 We may perhaps best understand this behaviour if we 
 compare it with our own little foibles. We all have our 
 own way of doing things, and though our reason may tell 
 us that somebody else's way is better, still we like our own. 
 The basis of this liking is a kind of structure — which we 
 may indifFerently call mental or cerebral — built up by past 
 actions. The structure once formed, we find satisfaction 
 in its exercise, and a certain dissatisfaction in anything 
 which excites the structure without bringing it into full 
 exercise, e.g., when we do the same thing, but are made to 
 do it in a different way. So it is with the wasp. It wants 
 to act in its own way, but we cannot infer that it is wholly 
 unaware of what it is doing, or in all respects incapable of 
 guiding its actions. 
 
 9. Still, this contrast of dull and often wholly irrational 
 uniformity with highly adaptive contrivances remains the 
 most remarkable feature of insect psychology. Is the dung- 
 beetle wonderfully intelligent, or crassly mechanical ? 
 Reading of its powers of co-operation — -how one beetle will 
 push another's ball for him and so on — one is ready to 
 exclaim in wonder at this high development alike of 
 intelligence and social feeling, Reading again of their 
 habit at breeding time of rolling any small balls, even if 
 made of wood or stone,^ one is ready to swing to the 
 opposite extreme, and to explain what before appeared as 
 co-operation as due to the lack of discrimination enough to 
 distinguish between one pellet and another. But then, 
 again, what is one to think when a good observer describes 
 such a beetle getting out of a difficulty in a manner one 
 can hardly conceive of as provided for by heredity ? Mr. 
 Lloyd Morgan tells us of a beetle getting his ball into a 
 
 1 P. 146. 2 Schneider, p. 187. 
 
96 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 hollow, and finding the sides too steep to roll it up, 
 whereupon 
 
 "leaving the ball he butted down the sand at one side of the 
 hollow so as to produce an inclined plane of much less angle." ^ 
 
 Once again, the beetle's nervous system seems to be 
 lifted out of the class of hereditary mechanisms. 
 
 Of the many contrasts that might be quoted from the 
 bee world 1 will give only one, where the power of adapta- 
 tion and the tendency to mechanical persistence are illus- 
 trated in a single case. 
 
 " Fritz MiJller has recorded a singular case bearing on the 
 instinct of these social Insects. He says that a nest of a small 
 Trigona was built in a hollow tree, and that as a consequence of 
 the irregularity of the hole the bees were obliged to give a very 
 irregular shape to their combs of honey. These bees were cap- 
 tured and put in a spacious box (presumably together with the 
 irregular comb, but this he unfortunately does not mention) : 
 after a year, ' when perhaps not a single bee survived of those 
 which had come from the canella tree,' they still continued to 
 build irregular combs, though quite regular combs were built by 
 several communities of the same species that he had kept." ^ 
 
 Though the bees are not so dominated by mechanism 
 but that they can, at need, adapt their building to the re- 
 quired space, the strength of inertia is still such that the 
 very modification once acquired tends to go on of itself. 
 
 Had we been concerned to disprove that wasps have an 
 intelligent conception of their whole plan of operations for 
 feeding their young, we might have quoted the numerous 
 cases in which they tolerate, or even feed, parasites, which 
 live upon the food which they store up for their own 
 grubs. But we m^y quote one even stronger case from 
 among ants, whose power of adaptive modification far ex- 
 ceeds that of any other insect. Every one knows the tender 
 care which ants bestow upon their larvae. Yet they freely 
 tolerate in their nest the Lomechusa beetle, the larva of 
 which eats their cherished young. It is as though we bred 
 and tended cattle which habitually devoured our children. 
 Does any one say that this proves the nursing of larvae to 
 
 ■ Animal Life and Intelligence, p. 368. 
 2 Cambridge Natural History, VI. p. 64. 
 
VI INSTINCT 
 
 97 
 
 be wholly blind ? If so, let him mark what follows. The 
 ants not merely tolerate the Lomechusa, but actively tend 
 its larvae, on the same methods by which they nurse their 
 own. Now, it happens the nursing suited to an ant larva 
 is fatal to a Lomechusa larva, and in course of time the 
 ants appear to find this out, and modify their whole system 
 of nursing.^ 
 
 Difficult as it is to conceive the psychological conditions 
 under which such contrasts are possible, we may still get 
 some help from the analogy of human action. When 
 comparative psychologists take occasional inconsistency as 
 proving the utter absence of intelligence they are using 
 an argument which would equally disprove the existence of 
 intelligence in man. After all, is an ant nourishing para- 
 sites that destroy its young guilty of a greater absurdity 
 than, say, a mother promoting her daughter's happiness by 
 selling her to a rich husband, or an inquisitor burning a 
 heretic in the name of Christian charity, or an Emperor 
 forbidding his troops to give quarter in the name of civili- 
 sation ? The mother really desires her daughter's happi- 
 ness, but her conception of the means thereto is confused, 
 and rendered self-contradictory by worldly ambitions. The 
 
 ^ Wasmann, S. d. A., pp. 125-8. He says that the modified system is 
 applied to the ant larvae as well, producing as a result many pseudo- 
 females instead of mere neuters. 
 
 Wasmann thinks the whole proceeding an insoluble problem for the 
 theory of animal intelligence and morality, and sees in it an illustration 
 of the Divine wisdom that maintains the equilibrium in nature. Whether 
 it is a conceivable attribute of a Divine wisdom so to make its creatures 
 that they can only be preserved by destroying each other is a problem 
 which Dr. Wasmann does not raise. One may ask whether such a 
 wisdom, though supposed to be infinite, is not more self-contradictory than 
 the limited intelligence that may be attributed to ants. That a limited 
 intelligence should exhibit contradictions in its different processes is not 
 surprising, and it is the chief defect of Dr. Wasmann's book that he over- 
 looks this point. In the present case, for example, he attributes the 
 modification of nursing methods by the ants to " sense knowledge," but 
 refuses the name of intelligence, because Intelligence, he says, would 
 teach the ants that the better they nurse the Lomechusa;, the more 
 certainly their nest will perish. That depends on the degree of intelli- 
 gence. There may be intelligence enough to grasp simple and immediate 
 results that does not extend to wider or more remote results. Be that as 
 it may, the intelligence of the ants appears equal, on Wasmann's own 
 showing, to defeating the manoeuvres of the " Divine wisdom." The 
 truth is that the whole proceeding illustrates, not merely limitation of 
 intelligence, but, still more, perversion of instinct, disregard for the 
 young, otherwise so carefully tended. 
 
98 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 inquisitor's conception of Christian charity is similarly cor- 
 rupted by the subtle corporate egoism of a Church and the 
 cruel pedantry of bad theology. Even the Emperor has 
 some conception of civilisation, but it is the civilisation of 
 militarism. In all cases there impinge on the avowed plan 
 of action conflicting impulses of a kind not to stop the 
 course of action, but to merge in it and distort it. Speak- 
 ing generally, man is only in part conscious of his own 
 purposes in their real meaning and value. It is his own 
 nature — of which, after all, he only knows the surface — 
 which sets him his purpose, and impels him to carry it out. 
 Hence, between the course in which his own character is 
 driving him and the end which he recognises and formu- 
 lates to himself, there is room for wide discrepancy. Now, 
 if we imagine this original structure more elaborately 
 worked out in its details, so as to dominate action more 
 completely, and the sphere of intelligence reduced, so as to 
 grasp ends less adequately, we seem to approach a condition 
 realised in those instincts which admit some play of in- 
 telligence within their sphere. To reach " pure instinct " 
 we have only to conceive the sphere of intelligence gradu- 
 ally reduced to zero, while the original mechanism is further 
 elaborated so as to provide for each separate response to 
 each new phase of a normal situation. 
 
 There is a further point. The psychologist is apt to 
 characterise an instinct by what he knows of its function 
 in the life of the species, and either to attribute to the 
 animal the purpose of fulfilling that function or to deny 
 it all intelligent purpose whatever. Thus, at first blush, 
 the neglect of parasites by the wasp, or the sealing of an 
 empty nest, seems to reduce all the other care and trouble 
 which the insect shows to a piece of meaningless stupidity, 
 which we can only explain by referring it to an elaborate 
 but blindly working mechanism. But here, again, the 
 human parallel should help us. To the evolutionist, the 
 youth courting the maid is merely obeying an impulse 
 cunningly contrived by Nature for the preservation of the 
 species. But suppose the courting fails, and in the end the 
 youth dies an old bachelor for the sake of his only love, 
 what become's of Nature's cunning contrivance .'' The 
 youth, so far as his conscious interests go, has nothing to 
 
VI INSTINCT 99 
 
 do with Nature's purposes. Her plans are not his. Yet 
 he has plans and purposes of his own, none the less intelli- 
 gent because they do not wholly fit in with what Nature, 
 with the approval of the evolutionist, has planned for him. 
 The relation is rather that our personified Nature has a 
 plan into which she inveigles the youth. He never sees 
 more than the next step, but the plan is so cunningly con- 
 trived that, as he takes that step, the next again comes 
 into view, and he feels himself attracted or, it may be, 
 driven towards it. So it is also with the solitary wasp. 
 We cannot, for reasons given, attribute to her true under- 
 standing of her performances as the evolutionist understands 
 them, but we must think of her as led on by her impulses 
 and the stimulus of outer things, to dig a hole, to catch and 
 sting caterpillars and spiders, to drag them to her hole, to 
 store it, lay her egg, seal it up, depart and begin 
 anew. Each stage, we may think, is to her as attractive 
 or inevitable as the course of courtship and marriage to 
 the youth. 
 
 lo. The difference would seem to be this. A well 
 developed instinct determines a long course of action. 
 The more it becomes suffused with intelligence, the 
 greater the proportion of the whole course which may be 
 grasped as a conscious purpose. In " pure " instinct, each 
 stage by passing brings on the next, and the instinct must 
 run through its course by a prescribed series of stages or 
 not at all.^ It cannot, outside narrow limits, adopt 
 alternatives. Intelligence, on the other hand, grasping the 
 ultimate aim, is indifferent as to the method by which it is 
 reached. Thus as intelligence rises, the fixed processes of 
 instinct dissolve. But intelligence does not spring into 
 being fully armed from the head of Zeus. It is born 
 within the sphere of instinct, and at first grasps only a 
 little bit of what instinct prompts. It apprehends, say, 
 the next stage, and, ordinary means failing, guides some 
 special effort to reach that stage, the next stage, not the 
 ultimate end, being the purpose understood and realised by 
 the animal. It is easy to see how from this point it may 
 develop, taking remoter stages or ends into account, until 
 
 ^ This is to be read with the qualifications given above as distinguishing 
 pure instinct from the compound reflex. 
 
 H 2 
 
loo MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 it grasps the final purpose and meaning of conduct. 
 Clearly also, as this development proceeds, the need for 
 detailed determination of response by heredity disappears. 
 
 We may perhaps make the matter clearer by symbolis- 
 ing the whole process somewhat in this fashion. Let a 
 be the beginning and z the final purpose of a life process. 
 Pure instinct proceeds from a to z through a uniform 
 series of stages b, c, d, &c. If the conditions for any 
 one of these fail, the instinct is wrecked. Fully adequate 
 intelligence makes z its goal from the beginning, and is 
 indifferent whether it reaches it through b, c, d, or 
 through any other intermediaries, b, c, d, /8, 7, B. Nascent 
 intelligence acting " within the instinct " grasps a proximate 
 end — e.g., at the stage a it aims at c, and if the conditions 
 leading to b are not present, may substitute j8 ; or, it may 
 be, the stage b, except as a means to c, drops out 
 altogether. As intelligence develops, remoter stages 
 become direct objects of action, the means cease to be 
 prescribed by hereditary tendency, and instead are chosen 
 with increasing freedom from the possibilities present.' 
 
 At this stage the impulse to do a certain thing is fixed 
 by heredity, but the means of doing it are not so fixed, 
 but are in part or altogether left to the individual to find 
 out for himself. On this basis it appears at once that the 
 conception of instinct becomes very elastic. The thing 
 to be done may be something which only requires one 
 step to effect it. If so, it is but one degree removed from 
 the reflex response. Or it may be very remote, and a 
 number of steps must be devised to work it out. Or, 
 lastly, it may be of a general character, and then the 
 circumstances of the individual may not only determine 
 the means, but may give its whole concrete filling to the 
 end itself. Thus in man the desire to marry is based on 
 an instinct, but the love of one woman is based on 
 
 ' To put the same idea in more popular fashion, we may say that the 
 youth's consciousness when he first goes courting, is to be expressed, not 
 in the form, " I want a wife and family," but in the words, " I must just 
 see her to-day." Similarly, attributing language to the wasp struggling 
 with the spider, we must suppose her to say to herself, not " If I don't 
 give it this spider my grub when it hatches will starve," but, " I must get 
 this spider into this hole"; and if you asked her why, the mere gift of 
 language alone would not enable her to tell you. 
 
VI INSTINCT 
 
 lOI 
 
 circumstances peculiar to the individual. Broadly speak- 
 ing, it is in the last two forms that instinct remains 
 important in the life of man, as laying down a scheme of 
 life to which experience supplies the concrete filling, and 
 as positing ends to which intelligence supplies the series of 
 intermediate steps. 
 
 To sum up. There may be much plasticity of instinct 
 without intelligence, but the fact that instinct is an 
 abiding state of the organism related to an end that may 
 be remote, and that the behaviour which it dictates is 
 from the first determined by complex conditions, and not 
 by a single stimulus, makes possible those more individual 
 and original adjustments of means to ends which we call 
 Intelligent. Intelligence, if this view is correct, arises 
 within the sphere of instinct ; indeed, we can draw no 
 sharp and certain line between them in nature. Yet in 
 idea they are quite distinct. In so far as an act is 
 instinctive, it is not intelligent, and conversely. We will 
 not here try to determine the point at which intelligence 
 first arises in the animal world, but we may say that so far 
 as action is based upon hereditaryjmgd.es__of..xesp.o,nse,„or 
 the composition of such responses, it remains pure instinct. 
 When, on the other hand, means are devised by the 
 individual on the basis of its own experience for com- 
 passing the ultimate or proximate ends to which it is 
 impelled, a new principle appears which we identify pro- 
 visionally with intelligence. At first narrowly limited in 
 scope, intelligence deals with proximate ends. As it 
 expands, it comes to embrace the remoter and at length 
 the ultimate end to which action is directed. Along with 
 this advance the power of choosing the means best suited 
 to the purpose expands, and the determination of successive 
 stages of action by hereditary structure simultaneously 
 disappears. Thus, whether involving intelligence or not, 
 instinct is the abiding state directing action to the attain- 
 ment of certain results, but if it is pure instinct the 
 actions are all reflex or sensori-motor. They are modified 
 and directed without prevision of results by the interest 
 which forms the abiding state. Modification of hereditary 
 action not thus explicable must be referred to the assist- 
 
I02 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 ance given to instinct by a nascent intelligence. Where 
 there is no prevision of the end we must suppose the 
 interest to shift as the instinct proceeds through its stages. 
 While the wasp is boring her hole she is wound up to 
 bore. She will get over obstacles in the boring process, 
 but nothing else will interest her. When she has finished, 
 the egg-laying impulse supervenes, and when that has 
 done its work, there follows, we may suppose, the impulse 
 to fly out and explore. Exploring she sees a caterpillar 
 and there follows the interest in stinging, seizing, bearing 
 it back, and finally getting it into the hole. This con- 
 catenation of inward states, not wholly self-determined 
 but related also to the outward and in particular to what 
 has already been done, is a special characteristic of the 
 more elaborate instincts and distinguishes them from the 
 simple sensori-motor act, for in the sensori-motor act 
 there is an adjustment which relieves the tension of the 
 moment, but in the instinct there is this further adjust- 
 ment that the only thing which will relieve the tension at 
 any given moment is the act which, under the circum- 
 stances, is required to serve the ultimate result. The 
 study of instincts reveals that a complex adjustment of 
 this sort is possible without foresight of the ultimate end. 
 Where there is such foresight, the tension involved in 
 purposive effort itself secures the corresponding adjust- 
 ment of interest and conation at every stage. 
 
 1 1 . Human Instinct and the hereditary element. 
 
 Instinct, as involving sensori-motor action as a 
 unit, lies within the limits in which we use the term 
 consciousness. This alone differentiates it fundamentally 
 from the reflex which does not involve consciousness. 
 It is true that reflexes may supply a sensation to con- 
 sciousness, as in the case of coughing, but the sensation 
 is in no way essential to their performance. Of many 
 reflexes or internally determined acts such as breathing 
 we are not normally aware. If consciousness interferes 
 with them at all it is more likely to be for the inhibition 
 of the reflex than for any other purpose. But though 
 reflex behaviour thus stands outside consciousness, there are 
 elements of consciousness which themselves almost appear 
 
VI INSTINCT 
 
 103 
 
 as reflex states. The sudden anger which one feels on 
 being thwarted arises without reflection or any complexity 
 of adjustment. It is a response which though conscious 
 seems to come about mechanically. In popular language 
 we use the term instinctive to describe it, but I am 
 not sure that we do not pay it too much honour. I 
 doubt if it reaches the instinctive level. Nor are 
 emotional impulses the only acts of this class. On the 
 contrary, all sensation is the conscious accompaniment 
 of a response to stimulus by the nerve structure. I see, 
 not merely because the image of an object is cast upon 
 my retina, but because optic nerve and brain react to that 
 stimulus in a particular way. Experience, of course, 
 rapidly acquires a share in modelling sensation, but 
 there seems no reason to deny that "crude sensations," 
 representing the reaction of the inherited structure as 
 such to the appropriate excitement, contribute at 
 least one element to our complex consciousness. 
 
 We find, then, a certain raw material of our conscious 
 life, which arises in direct and uncomplicated response, 
 determined by the hereditary structure, to outward 
 objects, or from physical changes of the internal structure. 
 Furthermore, heredity lays the foundation of our entire 
 mental life. We inherit not only capacities for sensation 
 and emotion, but also capacities for distinguishing, analys- 
 ing and combining them. We have opposed intelligence 
 as the work of the individual to instinct as the product of 
 heredity, but intelligence as a capacity is also hereditary. 
 The propensity to inquire, and the methods of analysing 
 and comparing used in inquiry, all have a foundation in 
 the hereditary structure. It is what we do with these 
 materials and these tools that is our own. It is the pro- 
 duct that is the work of the individual, not the means by 
 which he makes it. He may, indeed, in the course of the 
 operation, deal with the means themselves, polishing the 
 instruments with which nature furnished him, or even 
 combining them to build up some more subtle organ. 
 But throughout he is working upon and with the here- 
 ditary endowment. We cannot, therefore, in classifying 
 the works of the mind place heredity and acquirement in 
 
I04 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 two perfectly separate portions. Our division is analytical. 
 It is a separation of functions which in working are com- 
 bined, and an attempt in resolving a joint product to 
 assign to each what is its due. This must be borne in 
 mind in any attempt to estimate the part played by 
 instinct in human life. The older psychology expressed 
 the contrast between the human and the animal mind in 
 terms of the opposition between intelligence and instinct. 
 Recent psychology has emphasised the part of instinct in 
 human nature. But to begin with, it must be clear that 
 in human nature there is very little that is pure instinct. 
 Man is always capable of reflection. Even if instinct sets 
 him the aim he can appreciate it, distinguish what is 
 essential from what is indifferent, and vary the means that 
 he uses indefinitely. Nor is this all. As a rational being 
 he is capable of criticising the instinctive interest, if such 
 we are to call it, itself. He brings it in relation to his 
 life as a whole and to the lives of other people. It is 
 modified by the social atmosphere in which he grows up. 
 It takes its particular shape from the traditions of his society, 
 his class, his school, his family. It never governs him as 
 long as he remains mentally and morally sane, but is 
 merged in that moral organism of many inter-acting parts 
 which Is called the self. Not only the separate parts but 
 the characteristic unity of each individual — what used to be 
 called the temperament — that by which the several 
 elements are interfused — is part of the hereditary structure, 
 though, like everything else that is inherited, it grows 
 under the plastic hand of experience. Nor is the behaviour 
 determined by the kind of interests popularly called 
 instinctive specifically defined and fixed, prior to ex- 
 perience, apart from a few exceptional elements. The 
 range of behaviour determined by what is loosely called 
 the sexual instinct, for example, is of extreme width. It 
 may be said to cover the frenzy of physical passion, the 
 romantic devotion which would lead a man to risk his 
 neck for a girl, equally with the expansion or possibly the 
 reserve provoked by contact with the other sex, or the 
 deference and attention which social tradition, acting upon 
 some innate tendency, has developed. In relation to 
 
VI INSTINCT 
 
 105 
 
 behaviour, not only in externals but even in such funda- 
 mental matters as the occasions for jealousy, the role of 
 social tradition is a preponderant influence. A savage 
 who would kill his wife for unpermitted license will lend 
 her cheerfully to a guest. We cannot attribute to the 
 uniform operation of an instinct conduct which may vary 
 from the extreme of licentiousness to the pattern of faithful 
 continence, or from the extravagance of devotion to a girl 
 to the courtesy which leads a man to open the door for 
 her grandmother. We have here human nature acting as 
 a whole in all its varied capacities, that run the gamut 
 from the bestial to the heroic. What is hereditary in 
 man is capacity, propensity, disposition,'' but the capacities 
 are filled in, the propensities encouraged or checked, the 
 dispositions inhibited or developed by mutual inter- 
 actions and the pervading influence of the circumambient 
 atmosphere. Elements of true instinct remain, but in a 
 state of dilapidation. Heredity does not operate by itself 
 in human nature, but everywhere in interaction with 
 capacity to assimilate, to foresee, and to control.^ 
 
 To sum up, instinct is an enduring interest determined 
 by heredity and directing action to results of importance to 
 
 ' This term has been suggested by Mr. Graham Wallas in " The Great 
 Society." 
 
 ^ In particular I see no reason for identifying instinct as it exists in man 
 with certain primary emotions. To begin with, I am by no means clear 
 that emotion is at the root of all conation. On the contrary, emotion 
 appears to me to be that form of feeling which arises when conation is 
 obstructed or when there is an overplus of excitement which action does 
 not satisfy. Further, as Mr. Wallas has cogently argued, the intellectual 
 processes have quite as much title to be founded on instinct, if the term is 
 to be used of all inherited propensity, as any other. Thirdly, as indicated in 
 the text, the emotions belonging, say, to the sex instinct are not simple but 
 indefinitely various. And, lastly, I see no appropriateness in using the 
 term instinct, which in the animal world we apply to a definite train of 
 acts, in relation to a state of consciousness which does not necessarily 
 arise in response to a particular class of object, nor necessarily promote 
 any particular train of acts. But the main question is whether the 
 fundamental elements of human nature are of the nature of separate 
 units which inter-act like independent powers, or whether what is 
 inherited is an abstraction and what is acquired another abstraction, the 
 two together forming the concrete whole of actual behaviour. In the 
 main I believe the latter account to be true of human nature, the former 
 to be true of the lowest and partly true of the higher animals, and it is 
 this increasing unity of the organism as a whole which I take to be one 
 of the distinguishing marks of the human as compared with the animal 
 mind. 
 
io6 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap, vi 
 
 the organism without clear prevision of those results. 
 Pure instinct is an interest so controlling internally deter- 
 mined activities reflexes, and sensori-motor actions. A 
 single sensori-motor act would fall within the limits of the 
 definition only if the interest prompting it were hereditary 
 and enduring. In point of fact, all instincts of any high 
 degree of development involve a combination of many 
 such acts. Instincts may also be served by intelligence, 
 in which case we do not speak of them as pure, but at 
 the point at which intelligence is able to grasp the entire 
 trend of action, to foresee the end, and determine the 
 means freely without reference to any hereditary pro- 
 pensity to a specific form of approach, we pass out of the 
 region of instinct and enter that of intelligent purpose. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 ASSIMILATION AND READJUSTMENT^ 
 
 I. Under the names of reflex action and instinct we 
 have dealt with one method by which animal organisms 
 adjust their actions to suit their needs. This adjustment, 
 as we have seen, rests in a sense upon the correlation of the 
 experiences of the race. For if instinct is based upon 
 heredity, and heredity conditioned by natural selection, 
 the growth of an instinctive tendency is determined by the 
 aid which it gives in preserving the race. From the germ 
 of an instinct onward, those individuals in which it is more 
 vigorous or more advanced have an advantage in the 
 struggle for existence over others, and thus in accordance 
 with the current theories of the origin of species, an 
 instinct attains its perfect development. The same thing 
 may be said of reflex action, and of all that part of animal 
 behaviour which depends directly upon the response of 
 hereditary structure to stimulus. Thus by the action of 
 purely biological causes a correlation is effected between 
 the past experiences and the subsequent behaviour of a 
 species, whereby action is adapted to circumstances, as the 
 conditions of race-maintenance require. 
 
 But, as we saw in Chapter I., this is not the only nor 
 the most efficient form of correlation between experience 
 and action. Throughout the greater part if not the whole 
 
 1 In this chapter I am largely indebted to Dr. Ward's articles on 
 Assimilation and Association in Mind (2V.S., Vols. II. and III.). The 
 corresponding portions of Mr. Stout's Manual of Psychology, which 
 unfortunately I had not seen when the chapter was written, contain a 
 clear and cogent statement of views which are, in the main, the same 
 as those expressed below. 
 
 107 
 
io8 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 of the animal kingdom, the individual organism has a 
 certain power, greater or less as the case may be, of 
 effecting a similar correlation within its own lifetime. It 
 does not come into existence with all its actions prede- 
 termined in every detail by inherited structure, for we find 
 its behaviour modified as its life advances. We have seen 
 that a measure of such modification arises within the 
 sphere of " pure instinct." But to complete our account 
 of instinct we were forced to take notice of certain more 
 thorough-going modifications which could not be explained 
 in the same way. Such modifications we referred pro- 
 visionally to intelligence, meaning by intelligence the 
 power of an organism to adapt action to requirement 
 on the basis of its own experience. We have now to ask 
 what proof there is that any given adjustment is thus 
 discovered, so to say, by the individual, and is not merely 
 some subtler or less usual device of heredity. The broad 
 answer to this question is that modification in accordance 
 with the results of experience must be our main criterion. 
 When we find an animal, for example, first acting in one 
 way, and then, after experience of results, acting m 
 another, we must ascribe the change to the effect of its 
 experience. The modified action is not hereditary ; it 
 arises in and out of the experience of the animal, and 
 indicates that in some degree the animal can correlate its 
 own past experiences with its subsequent action. In this 
 correlation we have already found the generic essence of 
 intelligence, and our task will now be to describe the form 
 in which it first appears, and then to trace its further 
 evolution. In the growth of this power of correlation 
 J lies the evolution of Mind. 
 
 2. Experience and inference. 
 
 Physiologically considered, the effects of experience 
 upon behaviour form a special case of organic adaptability. 
 But it may be remarked here once for all that when we 
 speak of experience we shall mean a special kind of 
 experience and a special case of organic adaptability. 
 Wherever after a certain experience the organism adapts 
 itself better to a certain sort of stimulus, it has un- 
 doubtedly been modified by its experience, but it has not 
 
vn ASSIMILATION AND READJUSTMENT 109 
 
 necessarily learnt anything by experience of results. Thus 
 any organism, from Protozoa to man, is likely to tolerate 
 unusual heat or cold better after a certain amount of 
 exposure to it than at first.^ But we do not tolerate 
 extreme heat better because we have found its eiFects to 
 be beneficial. The exposure puts a certain strain on the 
 organism. If the organism responds to the strain, and 
 does not sink under it, it is able to bear a similar strain 
 better a second time. We are not, without further 
 evidence, warranted in attributing such a change to 
 experience of the results of such a response. For it is 
 part of the general law of organic adaptability that a thing 
 done once is more easily done a second time, and a thing 
 suffered once is, if recovery is complete, more easily 
 suffered a second time. So far as this law applies, the 
 organism is modified not by experience of the consequences 
 of what it does, but by the doing itself. Many of the 
 effects of practice and exercise seem to be referable to the 
 direct influence, as we may call it, of experience. Thus, 
 as we have seen, many reflexes are more or less imperfect 
 at birth, and are improved by practice. But it does not 
 follow that the improvement is due to experience of the 
 
 ■ results of the reflex. In any exercise involving strength 
 in a particular muscle we improve with practice because 
 the muscle itself grows stronger, and it grows stronger, 
 not because we find that it is better so, but through a 
 reflex arrangement by which exercise increases its blood 
 supply, that is to say, secures it more nourishment.^ In 
 the same way there is every probability that a reflex 
 mechanism improves not only through the confirmation of 
 well adapted actions and the inhibition of others, but also 
 because usage makes the different parts work better 
 together. In learning to ride a bicycle, we are told to 
 turn to the side towards which we are beginning to fall. 
 We do this at first consciously and awkwardly. By 
 degrees we respond at once more rapidly and more gently 
 
 ' For adaptation of this sort among Protozoa see Verworn, Prot. St.; 
 for Flagellata, p. 42 ; Stentor, p. 72, &c. 
 
 ^ This is, of course, a result of the exercise, but it is not through 
 learning that this result follows that we modify our use of the limb, but 
 the result itself is such as to give us an improved limb. 
 
no MIND .IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 to the stimulus, and in this way we soon, or late, learn 
 to balance without perceptible oscillation or conscious 
 effort. The improvement is, doubtless, largely due to the 
 confirmation of more and inhibition of less successful 
 responses. But it would seem that something must also 
 be set down to the readier appreciation and more perfect 
 conduction of the excitement by the nerves — their more 
 perfect control of the muscles. At any rate, this explana- 
 tion has to be taken into account wherever we have to deal 
 with an action which is the same in general character and 
 apparent purpose from the beginning, and merely improves 
 with practice in its execution. It probably explains the 
 slowly acquired mastery of its reflexes by a young child, 
 and the rapidly growing perfection of pecking by a newly 
 hatched chick.^ And I should be Inclined to apply it to 
 most of the many human accomplishments in which what 
 one is definitely taught bears but a small proportion to 
 what muscles, nerves, and nerve centres have to learn in 
 the way of execution. 
 
 But there are other cases in which action Is not merely 
 improved in execution, but profoundly modified In 
 character by experience. We may say that it is re- 
 directed. And in these cases we can point to the results 
 of the act as the operative cause. The burnt child that 
 dreads the fire does not grasp at the flame more efiiciently, 
 but refrains from grasping at all. The direction or aim of 
 the action is reversed, and reversed, as we know, in con- 
 sequence of its result when tried. It is because the child 
 has modified its behaviour in consequence of a relation 
 experienced between act and consequent, that its conduct 
 has been taken as the type of experience acting as the 
 basis of rational conduct. The unit of reasoning is a 
 relation of datum and consequence, whether the act of 
 reasoning be merely to apply the knowledge of the relation 
 in a fresh case, or to use It as a brick in building up some 
 more complex mental structure. There are vast difFer- 
 ences between the ways in which this relation is grasped 
 and used by minds of different order, but the relation 
 
 1 See Lloyd Morgan, Habit and Instinct, p. 36. See also Preyer, I. 
 p. 236, and Thorndike, Psych. Review, Vol. VI. pp. 284 et seq. 
 
VII ASSIMILATION AND READJUSTMENT in 
 
 itself seems to be the pivot of all inference. It is through 
 this relation that an object of experience points the mind 
 to something beyond itself. Hence any action resting 
 implicitly or explicitly on an experienced relation between 
 datum and consequence may be said to be of the inferential 
 type. Such a " relation " may be " experienced," as we 
 shall see, in very different forms and in very different degrees 
 of explicitness, but we ought not, as I think, to exclude 
 from the type any action based on an experience into 
 which, however inarticulately, such a relation enters as an 
 essential element. I should say, then, that when we 
 experience a certain result as flowing from a certain line of 
 conduct, and modify our behaviour accordingly, we are 
 drawing a simple inference. Action of this kind is of the 
 inferential type, and is in line with the general development 
 of intelligence. When, on the other hand, we bear heat 
 or pain better merely because we have borne a good deal 
 already, it is not our conscious intelligence that is directing 
 our conduct in accordance with experienced results, but the 
 heat or pain which have had a physical effect on us that 
 has left a permanent trace. When I speak of experience, 
 then, I mean experience of the kind on which inference is 
 founded, and that is, to speak generally, experience of 
 data in relation. 
 
 3. Primary Retentiveness. 
 
 When an Inference is based on a past experience it is 
 clear that the effects of that experience must In some way 
 or other endure, or. In the ordinary phrase, be retained by 
 the organism. Needless to say, it Is not the experience 
 Itself which is retained. That is a temporary state, an 
 event which happens once and passes. What is retained 
 is some result manifesting itself In the subsequent life of 
 the organism. Nor is this result necessarily a memory of 
 the past experience. Memory is a form of retentiveness, 
 but not all retentiveness Is memory. The result may 
 show itself simply In some modification of future be- 
 haviour, and among such modifications are inferences, or 
 modified responses which look like inferences, based on 
 results that have at some previous time been experienced. 
 But there are forms of retentiveness which neither Involve 
 
112 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 memory nor inference, but are even simpler and more 
 direct in their operation. When we look attentively at an 
 object — a flower, for example — several features emerge 
 successively into our consciousness — the shape, the colour, 
 the petals, and so on — and the result of each earlier stage 
 of perception endures, qualifying and enriching the latter 
 stages, so that at the end the whole character of the 
 object is more fully and clearly appreciated than at first. 
 The utterance of the concluding words of a verse carries 
 with it a penumbra of sound and meaning attaching to 
 the verse as a whole. This atmosphere that surrounds a 
 later perception has been termed its meaning, and, so far 
 as it is due to the result of earlier perceptions, has been 
 ascribed to primary retentiveness.^ In very simple forms 
 of behaviour this primary retentive ness persists beyond the 
 moment of sense perception, and has an eiFect in directing 
 and modifying instinctive response. For example, in the 
 case of the crab stalking the sandhopper, quoted above, 
 the hunting impulses of the crab are concentrated for the 
 moment upon this particular sandhopper. They persist 
 while the crab buries itself, and prompt its subsequent 
 approach and leap upon the prey. Schneider^ describes a 
 turtle hunting for a hermit crab, which had taken refuge 
 between some big stones, and regards this as proving the 
 existence of an idea of the crab in the mind of the turtle, 
 but all that the behaviour of the turtle actually implies is 
 that the perception of the prey maintains its influence 
 after it has passed. It causes the same sort of efforts to 
 get at the victim as would be put forward were the victim 
 still in sight. Similarly, the particular spot chosen as 
 a resting place or home must be admitted to influence the 
 animal which returns to it, although the home is no longer 
 in sight. The snail, after it has eaten and is well filled, 
 returns along its trail to rest in the corner that it has already 
 found secure and comfortable. The instinct to return 
 is of course directed by the particular place which serves 
 as home for the time being. These seem to be the most 
 elementary cases in which an experience has a certain after- 
 
 ' Stout, Manual of Psychology, Book I. chap. 3, pp. 169-184. 
 2 Tierische Wille, p. 312. 
 
VII ASSIMILATION AND READJUSTMENT 113 
 
 effect in directing or refining impulse. In some such cases 
 we may have to do with experience of results, but in the 
 main they appear to be instances of primary retentiveness. 
 
 4. /issimilation. 
 
 In human beings, the operation of experience in 
 simple form is seen when impulsive, reflex or random 
 actions are modified by the pleasure or pain immediately 
 resulting. But this operation of experience is, to all out- 
 ward appearance, as familiar among animals as among men. 
 The burnt puppy, as some one has said, dreads the fire as 
 much as the burnt child. Is it making an assumption to 
 say that both dread it for the same reason — namely, that 
 both feel } If it is an assumption, we must make it pro- 
 visionally, for the sake of compendiously describing the 
 simplest cases of the action of experience. After a pre- 
 liminary description, we may refer to our assumption again. 
 
 Experience does not, it must be remembered, arise in a 
 vacuum. The senses do not furnish a dark room. On the 
 contrary, experience begins to operate on organisms that 
 have already certain tendencies to act, and its first effect is 
 to modify those tendencies. We find this effect in two 
 related but still clearly distinguishable forms : 
 
 (a) Selective modification. 
 
 Animals of very low organisation possess, as we have 
 seen, certain type reactions, with which they often 
 appear to respond mechanically to a given stimulus. 
 But in certain instances it is found that they have more 
 than one type reaction to which the same stimulus may 
 give rise, and if one fails the other is tried until success 
 is obtained. Thus a stentor stimulated with carmine 
 will bend aside, and, if it does not succeed in ridding 
 itself of the annoyance, will reverse the movement of its 
 cilia. If this too fails it will contract strongly upon its 
 stalk, and finally uproot itself and swim away.^ This 
 is one of those cases of persistent effort to avoid dis- 
 comfort which have already been discussed. Some- 
 thing more than reflex action is in question here, because 
 different methods are tried until the result is secured, 
 but what follows is the point of importance for our 
 
 ' Jennings, p. 176. 
 
114 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 present purpose. When the stentor anchors itself again, 
 it has apparently learnt something, for if again touched 
 it does not bend aside, but at once contracts and finally 
 moves ofF. It prefers the remedy previously found 
 successful. The effect very soon wears ofF, but none 
 the less we see here, clearly marked, the germ of that 
 kind of retentiveness which brings the experience of past 
 results to bear upon present action, in such a way as to 
 secure similar results a second time. We should observe 
 exactly what is learnt. The stentor does not discover 
 that it should avoid some object or seek some object. 
 What it discovers is that one method of avoiding is 
 more fruitful than another. It learns to prefer the most 
 effective of three type reactions. Among ourselves selec- 
 tion of this type is prominent in the acquisition by prac- 
 tice of skill of all sorts, though not so much in the selec- 
 tion of one type of action in preference to another, as 
 rather in the precise adjustment of the magnitude and 
 direction of the method, which at first is made clumsily 
 and needs refining. As we learn to balance on a bicycle 
 or on skates, we begin with rough attempts under the 
 direction of a teacher. These are conscious and pur- 
 posive, but they land us continually in failures through 
 excess or defect. We swerve not enough, or too much, 
 and experience bumps on this side or on that in con- 
 sequence. These experiences have a gradual effect upon 
 our movements, checking the excess, and super-exciting 
 what is defective until we arrive at the mean. It is 
 to be noted, as bearing on the psychological factors 
 involved in acquisitions of this kind, that with us, 
 although the end itself is purposive, and the grosser 
 movements are clearly present to consciousness, the 
 method of adjustment escapes our consciousness. We 
 learn in the end without knowing how, and the processes 
 of inhibition and encouragement go on somehow below 
 the conscious level. 
 
 (^) Confirmation and inhibition. 
 
 So far we have had actions confirmed or inhibited ac- 
 cording as they succeeded or failed in securing a constant 
 result. We pass to cases in which the direction of the 
 
VII ASSIMILATION AND READJUSTMENT 115 
 
 response is itself modified by the result, in which, that is 
 to say, an object to which we begin by reacting in a certain 
 fashion, which we may call positive, yields some further 
 stimulus which checks that reaction, and in which this 
 effect persists so that we no longer react positively to an 
 object of the same kind. With these we may class, con- 
 versely, cases in which .an object, to which we are at first 
 indifferent, becomes, as the result of experience, a stimulus 
 to reaction, which is confirmed every time it is repeated. 
 This operation of experience, in its simplest and also its 
 completest form, is beautifully illustrated by Mr. Lloyd 
 Morgan's observations on young chickens. 
 
 "With regard to the objects at which domestic chicks peck, in 
 the absence of any parental guidance, one may say that they 
 strike at first with perfect impartiality at anything of suitable 
 size : grain, small stones, bread-crumbs, chopped-up wax matches, 
 currants, bits of paper, buttons, beads, cigarette-ash and ends, 
 their own toes and those of their companions, maggots, bits of 
 thread, specks on the floor, their neighbours' eyes — anything and 
 everything, not too large, that can or cannot be seized is pecked 
 at, and, if possible, tested in the bill. . . . There does not seem 
 to be any congenital discrimination between nutritious and in- 
 nutritious objects, or between those which are nice and those 
 which are nasty. This is a matter of individual acquisition. 
 They soon learn, however, what is good for eating, and what is 
 unpleasant, and rapidly associate the appearance with the taste. 
 A young chick two days old, for example, had learnt to pick out 
 pieces of yolk from others of white of egg. I cut little bits of 
 orange-peel of about the same size as the pieces of yolk, and one 
 of these was soon seized, but at once relinquished, the chick 
 shaking his head. Seizing another, he held it for a moment in 
 the bill, but then dropped it and scratched at the base of its beak. 
 That was enough ; he could not again be induced to seize a piece 
 of orange-peel. The obnoxious material was now removed, and 
 pieces of yolk of egg substituted, but they were left untouched, 
 being probably taken for orange-peel. Subsequently, he looked 
 at the yolk with hesitation, but presently pecked doubtfully, not 
 seizing, but merely touching. Then he pecked again, seized, 
 and swallowed. 
 
 " To some other chicks I threw cinnabar larvae, distasteful 
 caterpillars, conspicuous by alternate rings of black and golden- 
 yellow. They were seized at once, but dropped uninjured ; the 
 chicks wiped their bills — a sign of distaste — and seldom touched 
 the caterpillars a second time. The cinnabar larvae were then 
 
 I 2 
 
ii6 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 removed, and thrown in again towards the close of the day. 
 Some of the chicks tried them once, but they were soon left. 
 The next day the young birds were given brown loopers and 
 green cabbage-moth caterpillars. These were approached with 
 some suspicion, but presently one chick ran off with a looper, 
 and was followed by others, one of which stole and ate it. In a 
 few minutes all the caterpillars were cleared ofF. Later in the 
 day they were given some more of these edible caterpillars, which 
 were eaten freely ; and then some cinnabar larvas. One chick 
 ran, but checked himself, and, without touching the caterpillar, 
 wiped his bill — a memory of the nasty taste being apparently 
 suggested by association at sight of the yellow-and- black cater- 
 pillar. Another seized one, and dropped it at once. A third 
 subsequently approached a cinnabar as it crawled along, gave the 
 danger note, and ran off. Then I threw in more edible cater- 
 pillars, which again were eaten freely. The chicks had thus 
 learnt to descriminate by sight between the nice and the nasty 
 caterpillars." ^ 
 
 The inference from these observations seems clear 
 enough. The inherited tendency of the chicks is to peck 
 — to peck at " anything and everything, not too large." 
 But experience very rapidly teaches that it is pleasant to 
 peck at some things — such as yolk of egg or cabbage-moth 
 caterpillars — and very unpleasant to peck at others, such as 
 cinnabar caterpillars or bits of orange-peel. The tendency 
 to peck at the one sort of object is accordingly confirmed. 
 The tendency to peck at others is inhibited. And the 
 result is that pecking, from being an indiscriminate ten- 
 dency, becomes a definite mode of response to certain 
 objects. The instinctive tendency is regulated, narrowed, 
 and defined, as it becomes a habit in which experience has 
 played its part. 
 
 This form of the action of experience is very widely dif- 
 fused in the animal kingdom, and is too simple . to need 
 much further illustration. But I may note one or two cases 
 illustrating an important difference in one point. One in- 
 stance was sometimes enough to teach Mr. Lloyd Morgan's 
 sharp little chicks. But the effect of the experience tends 
 to wear off with time. The chick that had learnt to re- 
 ject the cinnabar larva at one hour would perhaps try it 
 
 ' Lloyd Morgan, Habit and Instinct, pp. 40-43. 
 
VII ASSIMILATION AND READJUSTMENT 117 
 
 again later in the day, or perhaps he would make a move- 
 ment to try it, and then, as we should say of a human 
 being, recollect himself. More marked cases of this gradual 
 growth and equally gradual obliteration of the effects of 
 experience may be seen in other animals. Thus DahP 
 gave a spider a fly dipped in turpentine. The spider 
 sprang upon it three times, and, disliking the turpentine, 
 withdrew on each occasion. After the third attempt it 
 turned aside when the fly came in sight. Three instances 
 sufficed to inhibit the impulse to spring. Nor would the 
 spider for some hours attack a fly of the same species that 
 was innocent of turpentine. The next day the spider 
 attacked the fly in turpentine again, but once only. 
 
 Here three experiences were necessary to establish the 
 result in the first instance, and on the following day the 
 effect was partially obliterated, so that one instance was 
 needed to renew it. Every one is familiar with similar 
 points in the working of human memory — the " fixing " of 
 a verse by repetition, its fading with time, and its revival 
 by perhaps a single reading. 
 
 It may be worth while to place in contrast with the in- 
 stances given above a case of extreme stupidity in this 
 respect. vSpeaking of a number of fish in an aquarium, 
 Mr. Bateson says : — 
 
 " None of the fish seem to get any lasting appreciation of the 
 nature of the plate glass wall of the tank. The same fish will 
 again and again knock its head against the glass in trying to 
 seize objects moving on the other side." 
 
 A dangling button, or even a curl of smoke, may attract 
 them. After repeated attempts they will desist, but some 
 of the oldest inhabitants, which have been living in the 
 aquarium about a year, will try again next time. This 
 failure is no doubt partly due to dullness of sense per- 
 ception, but, considering the length of time allowed for 
 learning, it implies a surprising incapacity for turning ex- 
 periences to account — a stupidity surpassing even that of 
 Mebius's pike, which, after dashing itself for three months 
 against a glass partition in the attempt to get at some 
 minnows, became at last so firmly persuaded of the danger 
 ' Op. cit. p. 173. 
 
ii8 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 of attacking them that, when the partition was removed, 
 it left them quite unmolested. 
 
 The cases which have been quoted, and which might be 
 indefinitely multiplied, admit of a simple general descrip- 
 tion. A certain stimulus, in the case of the chick some 
 small object within striking distance, evokes a reaction — in 
 this case pecking. This reaction has a certain result, con- 
 nected in this case with the swallowing or tasting of the 
 object, and in future the same stimulus evokes a modified 
 reaction. The modification may be in either of two direc- 
 tions. The " result " — the tasting or swallowing — may be 
 to confirm the original mode of reaction, so that in one 
 instance that sort of object is in future preferred for peck- 
 ing at and swallowing to others. This was the case with 
 the yolk of egg and the green caterpillars. Or it may be 
 to prevent or inhibit the reaction, as in the case of the 
 orange-peel or the cinnabar larvae. In either case, we have 
 a sequence of facts which we may symbolise thus : — 
 
 Stimulus Reaction Consequence 
 s r p 
 
 followed by 
 
 s p IT 
 
 In this sequence, all the links mentioned but one are 
 matters of direct observation. That one is the consequence 
 which I have called p. Now, in our human experience, we 
 have also direct knowledge of p. It is in such simple 
 cases as those described a feeling, and if its action is con- 
 firmatory of the reaction which caused it, it is a pleasant 
 feeling ; if inhibitory, a painful feeling. We need not 
 labour this point. The burnt child dreads the fire because 
 it hurts, and continues to steal the sugar with increasing 
 avidity because it is sweet. In the case of the chick we 
 cannot directly observe the feeling. We can, however, 
 be sure that something happens in the place where we 
 have put p, otherwise there would be no cause to account 
 for the subsequent change — and the action of this some- 
 thing is precisely analogous to the action of pleasure and 
 pain in human experience.-' 
 
 1 We feel sure about the child, first, because we know our own feelings, 
 and it is so like ourselves ; and secondly, because it expresses itself in 
 yvays which we understand. The chick is not quite so like ourselves. 
 
VII ASSIMILATION AND READJUSTMENT 119 
 
 The analogy may be carried a little further. Confining 
 ourselves for the moment to the action of pain and the 
 case in which a mode of reaction is inhibited, we have to 
 remark that the act of inhibition is of a twofold character. 
 We have spoken already of the subsequent and more or 
 less permanent effect of the painful experience, but this is 
 only a sort of repetition of its immediate effect. If there 
 is time, pain inhibits or arrests the particular action that 
 is causing it. A nasty morsel is spat out from the mouth ; 
 the hot potato is dropped before it is well seized. It is the 
 same with the chicks. The orange-peel, the very first 
 time it is seized, is " at once relinquished, the chick 
 shaking his head." Another is held for a moment, and then 
 dropped, the chick scratching "at the base of his beak" — 
 to rub away the taste, as a child would explain. Significant 
 in this relation is the behaviour of another chick, which had 
 already had experience of cinnabar larvae. When, later in 
 the day, more were given him, he "ran but checked him- 
 self, and without touching the caterpillar, wiped his bill." 
 Mr. Lloyd Morgan explains this as due to " a memory of 
 the nasty taste " being " suggested by association at sight 
 
 and we do not understand all its expressions so readily. Still, the 
 inference is at bottom the same, and the attribution of feeling to the 
 chick is in conformity with the general principles of method laid down 
 in Chapter II. 
 
 Here and elsewhere I use the term " feeling " as the generic expression 
 for every state in so far as it interests the agent. Of such interest two 
 things seem universally true. It is not a detached, so to say self-subsistent, 
 state, but adheres to or inheres in some object, or if the term be preferred, 
 some content. Thus in sensory feeling it is an object of sense which is 
 felt as pleasant or painful. In some experiences, e.g., in internal pain, it 
 is true that the feeling is itself the predominant factor, but even here 
 there is some more or less definite recognisable quality, e.g., a diffused 
 ache or pressure, or a sharp sting which so to say is the subject carrying 
 the pain as predicate, and we approach rather than reach the limit of 
 pure feeling without sensory content. Secondly, feeling is the basis of 
 conation but not the same thing as conation. In the, simplest forms the 
 two tend to identity — simple sensory pain, e.g., involving either flinching 
 or efforts of rejection as part of itself, but the feeling as such is not the 
 act as such. It is its immediate basis. Pain, moreover, as I use the 
 term, is always (in the absence of inhibition) the basis of a negative 
 conation. Apparent exceptions arise from the fact that intensity is an 
 essential element in feeling, whence it comes about that some sensations, 
 e.g., those of a prick or a slap, while normally painful may be indifferent 
 or even in certain states of organic tension pleasurable in low degrees of 
 intensity. In these cases the sensory experience has acquired the name of a 
 " pain," and so we hear of pains in which there may be a certain pleasure. 
 
120 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 of the yellow and black caterpillar." We may be content 
 to point out that a movement of rejection, a movement 
 adapted to getting rid of a nasty taste, is evoked by the 
 sight of the caterpillar just as it was in the original ex- 
 perience by its presence in the chick's mouth. In the same 
 way, to swallow very disagreeable food may produce in us 
 retching or actual sickness, and if the impression is very 
 strong, the mere sight or even the bare idea of such food 
 may subsequently produce a certain feeling of nausea, or 
 perhaps evoke gestures expressing violent rejection. 
 
 The upshot of these considerations is that the pain felt 
 in such cases,^ is the expression in consciousness^ of inhibi- 
 tory movement — withdrawal, shrinking, flight, rejection, 
 whatever it may be that is best adapted to cutting short 
 the effect of some stimulus, or some reaction which one 
 has incautiously made. Conversely, pleasure is the ex- 
 pression of confirmatory movement tending to prolong the 
 reaction, or carry it out strenuously to its final develop- 
 ment — to swallow with gusto, or to expose more and more 
 -oi the surface to the pleasing contact. 
 
 5. From this slight account, we can gather a certain 
 conception, however inadequate, of the nature of the change 
 whereby experience modifies a reaction. The first point 
 which emerges clearly is that the inhibitory movement, 
 which on a supgrficial view may seem to appear for the 
 first time after the organism has once had a "painful" 
 experience, really first appears in the first experience itself, 
 and is merely repeated under somewhat modified con- 
 ditions, and accordingly with different results, in the later 
 experiences. Let us analyse this modified repetition. 
 The sight of the cinnabar caterpillar was at first a stimulus 
 to pecking. The result of the peck was the taste,^ and 
 the taste involved the movement of rejection. But the 
 taste also of course involved contact of the food with the 
 
 1 I am far from saying that there is no other source of feeling than the 
 motor reaction to sense stimulus. 
 
 2 The term " expression " is meant to convey a concomitance of the 
 intimate nature of which we are ignorant, though we know it must be 
 something other than bare concomitance. 
 
 5 The word is used, of course, with the provisions and on the grounds 
 explained above (Chapter II). 
 
VII ASSIMILATION AND READJUSTMENT 121 
 
 tongue or palate, and if we divide these two stages of the 
 consequence p of the reaction, we get altogether not three 
 stages, but four. 
 
 s — r — c — p 
 
 (the sight) (pecking) ("unpleasant" (movement of 
 
 taste) rejection). 
 
 Afterwards we have s followed at once by p 
 
 (the sight) (rejection). 
 
 Strictly, what is altered is not p, which came into exist- 
 ence, at any rate, in tendency and effect, in the first 
 experience, but the effect of s. s, which before called 
 forth r, now excites p, and the intervening stage c seems 
 to have nothing to do with the matter. How then is the 
 action of s modified ? 
 
 We can partly answer this by understanding accurately 
 how far it has been modified. In this way : that instead 
 of evoking as before a pecking movement, it either has no 
 outward result at all, or it evokes a contrary movement of 
 rejection or aversion, which movement is of the same 
 character as one that it previously excited through an 
 intermediary. This gives us the broad character of the 
 whole proceeding. The excitement aroused by a certain 
 stimulus has taken to itself or assimilated the character of 
 another excitement which it has previously brought about. 
 The excitement originally produced by the sight of the 
 orange-peel prompted pecking. Pecking produced a con- 
 tact with the inside of the bill, which in its turn produced 
 a violent movement of rejection. Now the first excitement 
 becomes clothed with the character of the second in greater 
 or less degree, so that either the two motor excitements 
 — the original and the acquired — cancel each other and 
 produce absolute indifference, or the acquired effect pre- 
 dominates, and there is a movement of disgust.^ 
 
 ' Mr. Stout, with whose very clear account of this process the above is, 
 generally speaking, in close agreement, passes one criticism on the alter- 
 nation theory which seems to go too far. This theory attributes to the 
 chick a " faintly revived sensation of disgust " accompanying the sight of 
 the caterpillar. Mr. Stout objects [Manual of Psychology, p. 88) that this 
 would lead to two movements which would interfere with one another 
 only so far as they are " mechanically incompatible." " One would expect 
 a nondescript blend of the two movements, or an alternation between 
 them." Mr. Stout seems to overlook the point that it would be two 
 divergent cerebral processes that would be set up, and that these might 
 fight it out within the brain and without appearing in outward action. 
 
122 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 There is a further point. In the instances taken, the 
 inhibitory movement in the first trial follows close upon 
 the heels of the Instinctive response. Now we know that 
 a wave of excitement once started in the nervous system 
 persists for a certain short time. Hence the inhibitory wave 
 arises before the original excitement has subsided, and as 
 we have seen, Impinges on and perhaps modifies or half 
 cancels It in the very first instance. And this modification 
 tends to persist, or at least leave a trace. For we find that 
 as painful experiences are repeated, the original Impulse is 
 not merely checked, but sooner or later dies away. This 
 part of the process of learning Is therefore suggestive of the 
 fusion of two Immediately consecutive waves of excite- 
 ment. If this is what actually occurs In the lowest forms 
 of learning, the element of time would be important, but 
 we may doubt whether it is merely the co-presence of two 
 waves of excitement that Is essential. The element of 
 unity we may conceive Is the conation which is excited by 
 the sensory stimulus and is inhibited by the painful, 
 insipid, or fruitless result. The effect of this Inhibition 
 persists. The special type of conative tendency that has 
 been frustrated, Is weakened, possibly cancelled, for a 
 shorter or longer period, while the reverse result happens 
 If the conation should succeed. It is the conation which 
 furnishes the unity to successive acts and explains how it 
 is that a result, supervening when sense excitement is 
 over, nevertheless appears to modify corresponding sense 
 excitements In the future. Be this as it may, in the 
 
 But, in point of fact, the two processes do at times (as some of the above 
 instances show) give evidence of themselves in action. We really get 
 occasionally something like a blend or an alternation. Mr. A. A. 
 Schaeffer has shown that with the frog avoiding habits might be formed 
 in both ways. In some instances a disagreeable object is first taken into 
 the mouth and then rejected. In other cases it is eaten without any 
 effort at rejection but subsequently refused (J. A. B., 191 1, p. 324). In an 
 experiment with newts described by Mr. A. M. Rees (J. A. B., 1912, p. 191) 
 we find various intermediate stages. One newt seized and half swallowed 
 a piece of filter paper but disgorged it. It then swallowed a piece of filter 
 paper soaked in meat juice, afterwards disgorging the paper. Two days 
 later it followed and snapped at a roll of yellow cloth, but after once seizing 
 it, refused to follow it again. It seized and immediately disgorged a piece 
 of black cotton, and then refused to follow a piece of white paraffin. 
 " Usually after snapping at the tasteless object a few times the animals 
 refuse to follow any longer, but in such cases they would nearly always 
 follow and try to seize a piece of raw meat of the same size." 
 
VII ASSIMILATION AND READJUSTMENT 123 
 
 instances taken the results which go to modify the effects 
 of an excitement are in point of fact based on a second 
 quality of the same object which by its first perceived 
 quality excites the reaction. Modifications of this type 
 are far more easily achieved than others by animals of low 
 intelligence. Thus, Professor Yerkes, testing frogs with 
 maze experiments, found that from 50 to 100 trials 
 were necessary to perfect the habit ; and in placing the 
 frogs in a box with a glass bottom, 20 to 30 experiments 
 did not suffice to teach them that the glass was to be 
 avoided. On the other hand SchaeiFer's frogs learnt to 
 avoid disagreeable earthworms after a number of trials 
 varying usually from 2 to 7, and in at least one case 
 on the basis of a single experiment.^ 
 
 These simple cases of Confirmation and Inhibition then 
 should apparently be grouped together as examples of a 
 specific and very primitive type of learning by experience. 
 The characteristic of this type is that the " experience " 
 which operates is an excitement resulting immediately from 
 the reaction of the organism to some prior excitement. 
 Very often it arises from a second property of the object to 
 which the first stimulus is due. This would for example 
 be true of the instances of tasting, burning, bruising, etc., 
 which we have used. But what seems essential is that 
 the result should follow immediately upon the first re- 
 action, and by " immediately " we mean closely enough 
 to impinge upon and so confirm or inhibit the*conational 
 impulse by which that reaction is initiated and sustained. 
 With this understanding we may briefly define this type 
 of learning by experience as consisting in the modification 
 of the reaction to some stimulus through the immediate 
 effects of that reaction. The process is a case of that 
 which we have called Assimilation, because by its means 
 the excitement to which a stimulus gives rise is merged 
 in the consequential excitement and (at least for purposes 
 of guiding action) takes on its character. It is assimila- 
 tion in what is certainly one of its simplest forms. We 
 can see, however, that the process is closely analogous to 
 that of Selective Modification described above, and 
 
 ^ SchaefFer, loc. cit., pp. 324-25. 
 
124 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap.^ 
 
 though the field of action is somewhat different we may 
 suppose it to rest on substantially the same psychological 
 and physiological conditions. In both cases it is the 
 satisfaction or dissatisfaction, to use terms derived from 
 our consciousness, the success or frustration of the cona- 
 tion, to use terms which are more objective, which 
 operates to confirm, modify, or inhibit subsequent cona- 
 tion under similar circumstances.^ 
 
 6. The effect of this kind of modifiability is best seen 
 by considering its bearing upon instinct. It acts upon a 
 certain sort of instinctive reaction, and tends, as Mr. Lloyd 
 Morgan has well said, to "define" the instinct. We have 
 seen that an instinct may be congenitally more or less 
 perfect, more or less definite, as the case may be. There 
 is nothing in the general nature of instinct to make it 
 inconceivable that a chick should be born with an inherited 
 tendency, working with certainty and precision from birth, 
 to peck at one sort of caterpillar and avoid another, just as 
 a certain fly passes over other places, and lays its eggs 
 where a horse will lick them, and so get them into its 
 alimentary canal where they are destined to be hatched. 
 But chicks are not born so. They peck at small things 
 indiscriminately at first, and experience cuts them off 
 certain things and concentrates them on others. Just as 
 the fly reacts to one particular very definite object so the 
 chick reacts to the very indefinite object " small thing 
 within reach." Experience circumscribes this object. It 
 excludes from it yellow and black striped caterpillars, bits- 
 of orange-peel, and so on, while It promotes green cater- 
 pillars or bits of egg to prominence within the class of 
 objects that remain. What is true of the chick is true in 
 
 1 The above description of the elementary workings of experience must 
 not be taken for an attempt at explanation. How a fleeting experience 
 can have a permanent effect is strictly a metaphysical rather than a 
 psychological question, and beyond saying that there must be something 
 permanent, whether we call it mind or brain, on which successive experi- 
 ences act, metaphysics can, I fear, do little to answer it. It may be well, 
 however, in view of certain misunderstandings which have arisen, to 
 remind the reader that the '• excitements," " feelings," &c., of which I 
 speak have no substantial existence, but are states of the permanent 
 subject, and that when we speak of their " interactions," the " effect of 
 one excitement on another," and so forth, we are merely using a familiar 
 form of speech to describe relations between different states, or the effects 
 of an experience on the permanent susceptibilities of its subject. 
 
VII ASSIMILATION AND READJUSTMENT 125 
 
 varying degree of numberless other birds and mammals in 
 instincts of various kinds. It is natural to look on the 
 aversion and terror manifested by a kitten when' it first 
 sees a dog as based on an instinctive dread and horror of 
 dogs as dogs. But in fact what is congenital appears to 
 be a reaction to the dog's smell,^ which can be inhibited, 
 moreover, by familiarity with friendly dogs. It is natural 
 to speak of a chick as instinctively dreading the cry of a 
 hawk, or as " knowing " its mother's warning cry or her 
 inviting cluck by instinct. But it appears truer to fact to 
 say that sounds of that quality affect the young bird, and 
 that the particular note to which it will respond by cower- 
 ing or coming forward will depend largely on the way in 
 which its hereditary tendencies have been modified by 
 experience. Similarly, one would say that a lamb instinc- 
 tively follows its mother. But it is truer to say that by 
 nature it has an inclination to follow any large animal, 
 and that experience teaches it to single out its mother as 
 the best animal to follow. Similarly, the young orang- 
 outang clings to its mother, but not because it is the 
 mother, but because it has a tendency to hang on by its 
 claws to something hairy — a tendency of which Dr. Wallace 
 availed himself to make a dummy mother for an orphan of 
 that species. 
 
 Summing up a mass of evidence upon this point, Mr. 
 Lloyd Morgan says, instincts 
 
 ..." are evoked by stimuli, the general type of which is 
 fairly definite, and may, in some cases, be in response to particular 
 objects. Of the latter possibility we have, however, but little 
 satisfactory evidence." ^ 
 
 And again, 
 
 " acquired definiteness is built, through association, on the 
 foundation of congenital responses, which are modified, under 
 experience, to meet new circumstances." ^ 
 
 Thus the general function of experience, so far, is greatly 
 
 to increase the plasticity whereby the instinctive reactions 
 
 of an individual can be adjusted to his circumstances. It 
 
 may be said to make possible the rise of instincts adjusted 
 
 ' Wesley Mills, pp. 176 and 177. 
 
 ^ Habit and Instinct, p. 99. ^ P. 100. 
 
126 MIND JN EVOLUTION chap.- 
 
 at birth to stimuli of a highly general instead of a defi- 
 nitely particularised character, and this is the first step in 
 the conversion of an instinct into a general tendency 
 capable of being directed by experience. The instinctive 
 tendency as such becomes more general, and experience 
 makes it definite. 
 
 7. Retrogressive Assimilation. 
 
 In the cases hitherto discussed, there was to begin with 
 a reaction, random or instinctive, to a certain stimulus, and 
 the effect of experience was to modify this reaction. We 
 pass now to cases in which a reaction is acquired to which 
 there is no initial tendency. In the former cases, the reaction 
 had to be modified ; in these it has to be as it were created. 
 
 The sight of a man or the sound of a human voice 
 cannot under ordinary circumstances stimulate a wild 
 animal that does not prey upon man to expect food or 
 prepare to receive it. But if the same animal is caught 
 and kept in captivity, it will soon " get to know " its 
 keeper and perhaps its feeding time. If it is an intelligent 
 animal it may itself be readily trained to make conventional 
 signs of its desire for food, as I have seen an elephant ring- 
 ing a bell and turning a rattle, while a smaller elephant in 
 the next stall would knock with its trunk against the sides 
 of its cage to win back to itself the attention and the buns 
 which were being unfairly attracted by its neighbour. But 
 in its simpler form, this operation of experience is seen 
 very much lower down in the intellectual scale. Fish, for 
 example, which are accustomed to be fed, will come to the 
 surface and be ready to snap as soon as any one approaches 
 their tank. Mr. Bateson^ describes a rockling which 
 under these circumstance would lift its head above water 
 and snap at the fingers. According to Brehm^ tortoises 
 and turtles in general become accustomed to men who 
 treat them well — though it is probably the human form or 
 voice to which they react, as it is elsewhere said that the 
 most easily tameable of Chelonia do not distinguish indi- 
 viduals.^ Watersnakes we learn on the same authority,* 
 get excited when the keeper bringing food opens the door 
 
 1 Journal of Marine Biolo^, p. 238. 
 
 2 Thierleben, VII. p. 547. ^ /^ p_ 552. « lb. p. 471. 
 
VII ASSIMILATION AND READJUSTMENT 127 
 
 (though they are often stupid enough to bite the tongs), 
 and similar facts are recorded of frogs andtoads.^ In fact, 
 this grade of intelligence is fairly well marked among 
 Fish, Reptiles, and Amphibia. Similar instances among 
 Birds are given by Mr. Lloyd Morgan.^ 
 
 " A moorhen chick, for whose benefit we had dug up worms 
 with a spade, and which, standing by, jumped on the first-turned 
 sod and seized every wriggHng speck which caught his keen eye, 
 would soon run from some distance to me as soon as I took hold 
 of the spade." 
 
 How are we to understand these cases .' 
 There are three possible explanations. 
 
 a. It may be that the animal is aware of the con- 
 nection between the object to which it is at first indifferent, 
 and the feeding or other experience, whatever it be, in 
 which it is interested — i.e.^ it observes and remembers that 
 the one leads to the other. 
 
 Without at all denying that this may be the true 
 account of the process in certain cases, we must notice that 
 there are two other possible explanations which do not 
 imply so much intelligence. 
 
 b. The originally " indifferent " object may be directly 
 associated with the object of interest. 
 
 The keeper brings the food, and the sight and smell 
 thereof, which stimulate the animal to come forward 
 eagerly and seize it, are intertwined in its perception with 
 the sight of the keeper. The spade turns up the worms, 
 and the moorhen picks them. The excitement of picking 
 is thus fused with the sight of spade and digging, and this 
 spectacle takes on permanently the character which belongs 
 to it in certain experiences. In other words, we have a 
 slightly modified case of assimilation. As before the sight 
 of the black and yellow striped grub took upon itself the 
 character of an object of aversion, so the spade or the 
 keeper becomes an object of attraction. This explanation 
 is at least possible wherever the perception of the object 
 which thus acquires a power of exciting the organism can 
 be reasonably supposed to have been, in an earlier ex- 
 
 ^ Thierleben, VII. pp. 667 and 700. Cf. Weir. Dawn of Reason, p. 72. 
 2 Habit and Instinct, p. 148. 
 
128 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 perience, an element in a state of excitement similar in its 
 tendency and character. 
 
 c. But it is also possible, and in some cases probable, 
 that more or less random movements of the animal itself 
 play a part. The fish that first happens to come near the 
 surface will get the pick of the crumbs, and this fact will 
 tend to confirm or " stamp in " the random mode of re- 
 action. In the instance quoted above from Preyer,^ irrita- 
 tion of the skin set up random reflexes, of which some 
 gave relief, and were accordingly preferred. Apart, how- 
 ever, from the simplest cases, in which the originally 
 random movement meets immediate " confirmation," there 
 remains for this explanation a certain difficulty which has 
 been very clearly pointed out by Mr. Thorndike,^ who has 
 made much more liberal use of the explanation than any 
 other writer. Except in these cases, the " confirmatory " 
 wave must come after the initial movements of the action 
 leading up to it are well over. How then can it help to 
 establish them .'' To this the first reply is. Can it do so ? 
 That is to say, apart from intelligence, is any complicated 
 or lengthy series of actions learnt in this way ^ If so — 
 which remains to be proved — I imagine that the "confirm- 
 atory wave " must be conceived^ as gradually spreading, as 
 it were, backward. We can imagine the delight of feeding 
 and the impulse to come to the best place for it attached, 
 first to the sight of the food itself, then to the keeper who 
 brings it, then to the sound of his approaching footsteps, 
 and finally, perhaps, to the click of a gate which he opens 
 on his way.* Remoter associations of this kind are un- 
 
 ' P. 42. ^ Animal Intelligence, pp. 103, 104. 
 
 ^ That is to say, if (i) we assume (as above, p. 122) that the primitive 
 form of assimilation rests on fusion of excitements through the medium of 
 a unitary conation, and (2) we treat these cases as mere extensions of the 
 primitive form. 
 
 * Thus, in a succession of experiments on the nymph of the mayfly, 
 Mr. J. E. Wodsedalek first of all by repeated efforts induced the nymph 
 to follow bits of food. This took several weeks. Gradually the insect 
 was brought to the part of the dish nearest to the operator, when it was 
 allowed to feed, and after about four weeks most of the specimens would 
 frequently swim after the food when brought near them, and would often 
 swim towards him when he made his experiments (J. A. B., 1912, pp. 12, 
 13). In organisms of very low type we can observe the spreading process 
 even in cases of reaction to simple sense stimuli. Messrs. Fleure and 
 Walton {Zoologischer Anzeiger, Band 31, 1907, p. 215) gave a sea 
 anemone scraps of filter paper, one every twenty-four hours, placing it on 
 
-<? 
 
 VII ASSIMILATION AND READJUSTMENT 129 
 
 doubtedly formed, and it would be interesting to get some 
 detailed account of the way in which they are formed, 
 particularly among animals of no very great intelligence. 
 I do not know of any decisive evidence on this point, and 
 I must, therefore, let this third explanation stand as a 
 possibility, even in the case of somewhat lengthy trains of 
 association.^ 
 
 8. Of the three explanations oflrered, the second and 
 third, though different in detail, are alike in principle. Both 
 dispense with any intelligent apprehension of the relation 
 between act and consequence, and trace the genesis of a 
 response to the power of an excitation to absorb into itself 
 or assimilate the motor tendencies or feelings with which 
 it is intimately associated. Since this simpler explanation 
 cbvers the facts, we have no right, on the strength of mere J^ 
 modification of response to stimulus alone, to impute the Ja 
 higher degree of intelligence suggested by the first expla- / 
 nation. It is no doubt natural to explain an alteration of "" 
 behaviour towards an object by saying that the animal re- ^ 
 members the results of previous action, and infers that ' 
 similar results will follow in a fresh case. It may seem a 
 still more modest assumption if we explain that the ideas of 
 two objects or two qualities — of keeper and food, or black 
 and yellow stripes and nasty taste — have become associated 
 in the animal's mind. But a little consideration of our 
 own human experience will show that even this explanation 
 goes further than is warranted by the facts. In ordinary 
 perception we are, as a rule, in direct contact through our 
 sense organs with only one or two qualities of the objects 
 
 the same tentacle each time. As a rule the fragment was carried to the 
 mouth, swallowed, and then ejected. "After a few days, the number 
 varying in different individuals from two to five days, the fragment is no 
 longer swallowed, and in about another two days the tentacles will no 
 longer take hold of it." Thus the inhibition first affects the mouth and 
 spreads from it to the tentacle. But, further, though the tentacle itself 
 with the part of the mouth attached has now learnt the lesson, other 
 tentacles on the opposite side can still be deceived once or twice, though 
 they learn more speedily on account of the education which the first 
 tentacles have received. Here then we have a case of a very simple 
 inhibition affecting diflferent parts of the organism by successive stages. 
 
 > It is an obvious corollary from the third explanation that the remoter 
 association can only be formed by slow degrees. This accords well with 
 the facts in the lower grades of intelligence. 
 
I30 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 about us. Experience has taught us their other qualities, 
 and we have always at hand, ready for immediate use, the 
 knowledge that we have gained. But in dealing with 
 familiar objects in practice, we seldom, unless the occasion 
 calls for reflection, stay to form any definite idea of the 
 unperceived qualities. We act first as we should act if we 
 reasoned from our idea of them, but without forming that 
 idea. The educated perception Itself discharges the appro- 
 priate reaction. Thus, the sight of a cab coming towards 
 me, as I cross the street, causes me to hurry out of its way. 
 The reason for hurrying may be formulated in the judg- 
 ment, "at the speed at which that cab is coming, it will 
 overtake me ; " but if I stayed to form the judgment 
 before beginning to quicken my pace, I should probably be 
 run over. What really happens Is that the sight of the 
 cab discharges the motion without the aid of any reflection. 
 And this is due to the action of previous experiences of 
 cabs and other moving bodies which have incorporated 
 themselves in the perception. The perception has assimi- 
 lated them. The experiences have endowed it with a 
 power of awaking reactions which they have shown to be 
 appropriate. 
 
 If it be replied that nevertheless ideas played their part 
 in this training of the perceptions, the rejoinder is that 
 the part played by ideas is seldom If ever exhaustive. 
 Mill's case of the dyer who could not communicate his art 
 is but one instance out of many. I remember an excellent 
 but uneducated Cornish cook who, if asked how much of 
 a given ingredient she had put into a successful dish, 
 would reply, " Well, as much as I thought." Her per- 
 ceptions had become insensibly adjusted to her require- 
 ments, her Ideas lagged far behind. Indeed, relatively to 
 perceptions, ideas are of a more reflective character, and 
 like air that is reflective, they follow and but imperfectly 
 interpret their material. 
 
 9. We have seen that in human psychology " crude " 
 sensation and feeling belong to the sphere of hereditary re- 
 sponse. That is, they may appear as the psychical side of 
 responses made by preformed structure to stimulus. The 
 account now given of the earliest operations of experience 
 
VII ASSIMILATION AND READJUSTMENT 131 
 
 seems to corroborate this view, inasmuch as itpostulates sen- 
 sation and feeling as the data on which it works. Its most 
 characteristic product in the human mind is the state often 
 familiarly described as an act of Recognition, though it 
 does not involve the presence of ideas. Now what is the 
 character of an act of " Recognition " not involving ideas .'' 
 The object " recognised " is something more for the mind 
 than that one of its qualities which happens to [be present 
 to sense. The orange is for the child more than;the colour 
 or the smell. In what way is it more ? If we attribute 
 to the child definitely formed ideas (as of "acid," "juicy," 
 &c.) then the orange is a possible subject for any of these 
 ideal qualities as predicates. But these are ideas, and lie 
 outside sense-perception. What is there then in " Recog- 
 nition " of this kind more than the sense-qualities and yet 
 less than these ideal qualities .'' The answer seems to be, 
 a character which association with the ideal qualities has 
 lent to the presented quality. In some cases this character 
 can be pointed out in the sense-content itself. Thus, we 
 " see " a thing at a distance at which without previous 
 experience we should not know it to be. The rumble that 
 comes in at the open window " sounds " far off. If I had 
 no experience of the effect of distance on sound, it would 
 presumably be indistinguishable from a low rumble near 
 by. In each instance the stimulus has " assimilated " a 
 character, such characters having been associated with 
 similar stimuli in past experience. In other cases we may 
 say that the character assimilated shows itself in action. 
 That the orange is more than a yellow ball to the child 
 appears in the fact that the child tries to suck it. The 
 coming tennis ball follows a path of which I have not time 
 to form an idea, but which guides me as I spring and 
 strike none the less. In short, in these cases of assimila- 
 tive recognition, the " crude " sensation has assimilated 
 certain characters which, if disentangled, form the contents 
 of ideas, but which are not disentangled as long as they are 
 assimilated. Prominent among these are motor impulses. 
 These differ from reflex or instinctive impulses in being 
 guided by present stimulus in accordance with the results 
 of previous experience. We may call them acquired 
 
 K 2 
 
132 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 sense-impulses, and lay down generally that assimilative 
 experience postulates sensations and feelings as its data, 
 and produces modified sense-feeling and acquired sense 
 impulse, passing into habit, as its result/ 
 
 lo. Thus through the agency of assimilation a mass of 
 grouped experiences — sensation, motor response, and 
 feelings, have an effect on the organisation of such a kind 
 that response is subsequently modified according to the 
 nature of the feeling. There is then a certain correlation 
 between a mass of related experiences and subsequent 
 reactions. To the observer it is clear that the basis of this 
 correlation is the relation of stimulus, reaction, and feeling 
 in the primary experience, and that in the subsequent 
 response the conation is correlated with, i.e., is executed 
 so as to produce the result. But in the type of action 
 before us the elements are not distinguished nor the 
 relations grasped by the agent as they are by the observer. 
 The action of the moment is related in one sense to the 
 past, in another to the future, but in both senses without 
 consciousness of the relation. At no point have we 
 successive elements of experience and action distinctly 
 grasped and articulately correlated. We have rather the 
 result of the earlier experiences as a whole determining 
 the result, i.e., the response, in the later experience. We 
 may describe this as a correlation of Empirical Results, or 
 negatively and cursorily as Inarticulate correlation. 
 
 Whether any animals other than man advance to a more 
 articulate correlation is a question depending on the 
 experimental application of delicate tests. To explain the 
 nature of articulate correlation, to describe the behaviour 
 tests from which it may be inferred, and to discuss whether 
 there are any species of animals to which it may be 
 attributed, will be the work of Chapters VIII-XII. 
 For the present we are content to note that there is 
 abundant evidence for the existence of the elementary kind 
 of correlation, on which human perceptions and perceptual 
 impulses are based, far down in the animal scale. Whether 
 
 1 Except in the use of certain terms, the above is in close accord with 
 Mr. Stout's lucid and forcible account of Acquirement of Meaning 
 {Manual, pp. 84-93). 
 
VII ASSIMILATION AND READJUSTMENT 133 
 
 we are to attribute sensation, feeling and perception to 
 animals as to man, may always be made a question, seeing 
 that the consciousness of another can never be a matter of 
 direct observation. But that animals do succeed in 
 correlating their experiences in the sense explained is not 
 a hypothesis, but a matter of observed fact. We regard 
 correlation as the precise work of intelligence, and we 
 therefore set down this elementary correlation as the first 
 stage beyond Instinct in the Evolution of Mind, whether 
 among animals or Man. Its operation is probably con- 
 fined principally to adjusting reactions suitably to their 
 immediate results. If more remote correlations are 
 effected, it must be by a very slow and gradual process. 
 The reactions effected are either those resulting from 
 instincts of a more or less indefinite character, or are such 
 as lead to the immediate gratification of instinctive needs. 
 In the first case, experience tends to define, limit, and 
 direct a more or less general instinct. In the second, it 
 assists in the satisfaction of instinct. In either case it 
 helps to increase the plasticity of instinct and the adapt- 
 ability of the organism, while in rendering it possible 
 for animals to thrive without highly definite instincts, it 
 helps to bring about the substitution of more or less 
 general tendencies and impulses for narrowly defined 
 methods of reaction. And this, to conclude, means the 
 rise of a fuller and more varied type, ready to respond to 
 its surroundings in more diverse ways. Specialisation in 
 nerve structure begins to give way to the general power of 
 adaptation and acquisition whereby in the course of a life- 
 time many diverse actions may become as perfect as the 
 two or three highly elaborated adjustments of the more 
 mechanical type. 
 
 1 1 . The diffusion of the lower form of Intelligence in the 
 animal world. 
 
 He would be a bold man who should undertake to say 
 where the capacity for learning by experience first appears 
 in the animal world, or where it first begins to develop 
 into a higher form than that described. There is, however, 
 some reason to think that this grade of intelligence is 
 typical of the lower classes of the animal kingdom, from 
 
134 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 many branches of which evidence, more or less abundant, 
 has been accumulated by careful experimenters in recent 
 years. To summarise the evidence, however imperfectly, 
 will perhaps help us a little further towards understanding 
 the general course of Mental Evolution.^ 
 
 We have already quoted instances showing that among 
 certain fish, at any rate in some individuals, the. modifying 
 influence of experience is at a minimum. Even the 
 simplest sort of modification, the inhibition of an impulse, 
 fails in certain cases, as in those quoted by Mr. Bateson, 
 where after twelve months' constant experience, fish per- 
 sisted in knocking their heads against the glass wall of their 
 tank. On the other hand, there is no doubt that certain 
 fish learn to come to the surface for food on the approach 
 of human beings, and perhaps at the sound of a voice or of 
 a bell. This is a simple case of an acquired reaction of 
 the sort described in this chapter. Somewhat more difficult 
 is the avoidance of baits. Romanes states generallythat there 
 is a marked increase of wariness in waters which are much 
 fished, and attributes the change to " observation," on the 
 ground that "youngtrout under such circumstances are less 
 wary than old ones." If the trout really draw an inference 
 from their observation of others being caught and dragged 
 to the surface, they are capable of a much more complex 
 
 1 It must be remembered that in the matter of inteUigence there is 
 perhaps even more difference between the individuals of a species, 
 the species of a genus, and even between the Orders of a Class, than 
 in the matter of physical structure. A classification of the animal 
 kingdom based on intelligence would probably cut right across the 
 classifications based on structure. It would probably associate the nest- 
 building stickleback with the lower birds ; it would class the Cephalopoda 
 with Fish and Reptiles rather than among the Molluscs ; and, whatever 
 it did with ants and bees, it would draw a well-marked line between them 
 and most of the insects. Intelligent acts are, above all others, "adaptive" 
 characters — characters taken up by the organism in immediate response 
 to its surroundings, and such characters as Darwin showed are the least 
 to be depended on as tests of genealogical affinity. Hence any general 
 statement as to the intelligence of, say, Fish or Birds, can only mean at 
 the utmost that the kind of intelligence in question is very widely diffused 
 among Fish or Birds — so widely, perhaps, that it may be regarded as 
 representing the mean level in the Class. Some species, and perhaps 
 whole Orders, may rise above or fall below it, while within each species 
 the individual differences will often be much greater than they are in 
 matters of visible structure. This qualification must be understood as 
 applying to any general statement in the text. 
 
VII ASSIMILATION AND READJUSTMENT 135 
 
 mental operation than those hitherto described. But in the 
 absence of details one would be inclined to think that in 
 such cases the older fish are of the more wary type which 
 under the circumstances has survived. Of each new gener- 
 ation, at least for a long period, a great number would 
 always be of the less wary type, and these would be caught. 
 The more waters are fished, the more the young are likely 
 to preponderate among those caught. For, taking any 
 single generation, the least wary will be most caught at 
 each fishing, so that the more wary will preponderate more 
 and more, whence, in subsequent fishings, that generation 
 will have an advantage over the younger ones. At the 
 same time fish show a good deal of " caution," i.e.^ they 
 examine strange objects and approach them tentatively. 
 Schneider notes this of the mullet and parrot-fish precisely 
 in relation to baits. There is therefore a certain basis for 
 experience to work upon. If, in the course of such inves- 
 tigation, a fish is frightened, say by the shadow of the 
 fisherman, it will be still more cautious next time. Thus 
 the increase of wariness may be due purely to the elimina- 
 tion of the unwary, or it may be assisted by frightening 
 experiences. But there seems no reason to attribute it to 
 an articulate, analogical inference. 
 
 Many fish are, however, capable of being guided by 
 experience in the elementary form described above (p. 
 Ill fF.). They have the sort of instincts that must be 
 concentrated on particular objects, and this implies that 
 their experience in relation to those objects has some more 
 or less persistent effect upon them. For example, they 
 have haunts, and in some cases homes. The shark haunts 
 places that it has found to be good hunting grounds.^ 
 The stickleback " knows the way " back to his nest, even 
 if he has been absent for some hours.^ Evidently we have 
 here the operation of experience in some form. What sort 
 of experience is it } Is it accurate to attribute to the fish 
 definite memory of the place and knowledge of its relations 
 in space .'' Or shall we be right in explaining its return to 
 its haunts as due to those workings of experience on per- 
 ception, and through perception on motor impulse, which 
 1 Brehm, VIII. p. 440. Cf. Schneider, p. 312. ^ /^. p. 171. 
 
136 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 have been described in this chapter ? The same question 
 may be asked about other members of the animal kingdom, 
 of the same or perhaps of lower grade. Thus many 
 Crustacea — prawns, for example' — have regular " homes " 
 or lurking places. Even limpets^ have been proved to have 
 fixed resting places to which they return, and the same is 
 true of snails.' A little reflection will show that the power 
 of " homing " does not amount to that general knowledge 
 of locality, involving many complex relations, which we shall 
 see reason to ascribe to some at least among the higher 
 vertebrates. It does not necessarily imply anything beyond 
 a tendency to go back along the trail, which may well be 
 heredity. If this is so, the fixing of a home or a haunt 
 is in such cases an instance of the defining of an instinct 
 by experience — an effect of primary retentiveness. The 
 homing tendency is fixed on a particular spot. In some 
 instances there is direct confirmatory evidence that 
 this is the true explanation. Snails leave a trail visible 
 to our eyes, and are known to follow it even when 
 it is irregular.* Even if there is no trail, if a fish, for 
 example, is guided by the objects near its haunt, we could 
 not safely assume a higher process than that of association 
 between perception and impulse. When the shark is 
 hungry the sight of the objects in the neighbourhood of 
 which it obtained prey attract it, and this influence might 
 spread to other objects on the way. There is nothing in a 
 monotonous out going or home coming that might not be 
 built up by habituation. 
 
 Just as in "homing" or in lurking experience affixes an 
 instinctive tendency to one object rather than another, so 
 in chasing prey, fighting a rival, defending eggs, it makes 
 a given object a permanent source of excitability. At this 
 stage of intelligence, a quarrel, for example, does not cease 
 
 > Bateson, op. cit. p. 211. 2 Romanes, pp. 28, 29. 
 
 ' Cambridge Natural History, Vol. III. p. 35. 
 
 * lb. According to Bethe {Ameisen, p. 9), limpets, if moved a little 
 from their path, are unable to find their way. This observation, 
 however, is difficult to reconcile with the results obtained by Mr. Lloyd 
 Morgan, who shows {Animal Behaviour, p. 156) that from short 
 distances (up to six inches) the majority of limpets find their way 
 back. The successes rapidly diminish as the distance is increased to 
 two feet. 
 
VII ASSIMILATION AND READJUSTMENT 137 
 
 when the enemy is out of sight. In Brehm's Thierleben ^ 
 there is a terrible account showing "furens quid femina 
 possit" even among fish. Rival female Paradise fishes 
 had to be separated by a glass partition. This would not 
 prevent them from futile attempts to injure each other, 
 and when a curtain was hung over the glass to hide the 
 hated rival charms from the sight of each, they glutted 
 their morbid feelings by getting round it so as to stare at 
 each other. Finally, one jumped clean over the partition 
 to resume the attack. Out of sight, it will be seen, is not 
 altogether out of mind among fish. The hereditary 
 tendencies to envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness 
 are definitely concentrated upon a certain object. It is 
 not merely the sight of that object that will arouse the 
 instinct. There is a state of permanent excitation or 
 excitability of which the object is the centre, and under 
 stress of which the hostile action may be continued or 
 renewed just as though the enemy were still in sight. Of 
 the difference between this permanence of excitability, 
 with its renewed discharges of nervous energy and true 
 recognition, a beautiful example is drawn from the obser- 
 vations of sticklebacks by Evers.^ Sticklebacks found 
 with their nests and transported into a tank neglected 
 them — the moving disturbed the habitual course of action. 
 But sticklebacks that had built in a tank would take care 
 of eggs collected in the open like their own. The sight of 
 the egg in the nest is enough to excite the parental 
 tendency. But what is most significant for our purpose 
 is the case of one stickleback in particular, which was 
 taken from his nest to another tank. The nest was put in 
 after him, and both he and his nest were attacked by 
 several females, so that it became necessary to cover the 
 nest with sand. After swimming about wildly for a time 
 he began to recover, and appeared to be searching, and 
 Evers, by way of helping him, brought some of the eggs 
 to the surface as he approached. Some of the females 
 
 1 lb. Vol. VIII. pp. 187, 188. 
 
 2 Brehm, VIII. pp. 171, 172. Evers justly remarks that it is impos- 
 sible to decide whether he recognised the nest as his own or not. Com- 
 parison with the other cases mentioned suggests the explanation offered 
 in the text. 
 
138 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 pounced on the eggs. The result was at once to reawaken 
 the father stickleback's protective instincts. He attacked 
 the females, and then undertook the defence of the nest as 
 before. The evidence when put together suggests that the 
 stickleback does not in our sense of the term recognise the 
 eggs as his own. The truer view is that at breeding time 
 his parental instincts are awakened by the perception of his 
 eggs. If the action of the instinct is broken off, the sight 
 of his own eggs may fail to renew it, while a chance 
 excitement may set the whole machinery in motion again. 
 The attachment of hereditary modes of action to certain 
 objects or individuals is certainly an efFect of experience. 
 But we cannot infer from it knowledge of those objects or 
 individuals as objects or individuals. It is rather a form 
 of the defining or particularising of instinct in which we 
 found the most elementary operations of experience. 
 
 According to the general account of the mental qualities 
 of Fish given in Brehm's Thierleben^ Fish have a certain 
 " understanding," but very little. They can distinguish 
 enemies from those who are not hostile. They become 
 wary of traps (Nachstellungen) and note places of safety. 
 They accustom themselves to a keeper, to feeding time, 
 and a signal like the sound of a bell that food is coming. 
 They choose suitable places for hunting, where they lie in 
 wait for their prey, learn to overcome obstacles, and with- 
 draw themselves from danger, form a more or less intimate 
 connection with their fellows, and hunt in co-operation. 
 In some cases they show a measure of care for their young. 
 Broadly speaking, this account seems to tally well with the 
 elementary form of intelligence which we have described. 
 Both among Reptiles and Amphibia a certain capacity for 
 training is verified by many examples. They " come to 
 know" their keepers, for example, in the sense of coming 
 at call or at sight of them,^ but in this case the knowledge 
 often has very marked limitations. It would seem, for 
 
 ' Brehm, VIII. p. 12. The account of reptile intelligence in the same 
 work (VII. pp. 24, 25) points to a similar type. 
 
 2 Brehm, VII. p. 547, for tortoises. The most intelligent and most 
 tameable kind, the fresh-water tortoises, however, do not distinguish 
 individuals (pp. 562, 563). For snakes, ib. p. 220 ; for lizards, pp. 34, 35 ; 
 crocodiles, p. 525 ; toads, p. 700. 
 
VII ASSIMILATION AND READJUSTMENT 139 
 
 example, that they have, for the most part, little capacity 
 for distinguishing individuals.^ Very similar facts are 
 established with regard to frogs and toads. Reptiles, like 
 fish, haunt definite places. Crocodiles, for instance, haunt 
 watering places^ where they pick up cattle or human beings, 
 and a tame yellow adder has been known, when let loose, 
 to return to his cage.^ After what has been said above, 
 Schneider's description of a turtle persistently chasing a 
 hermit crab will be readily understood as a cognate example 
 of intelligence. Of direct modification by experience, 
 the case of a Texan Snapping Turtle will serve as an 
 example.* Having been caught with a bait, and having 
 successfully resisted being dragged ashore, it afterwards 
 avoided both the bait and the place where it was 
 caught. 
 
 To pass to Invertebrates ; there is no doubt that in 
 some form or other the power of learning by experience 
 is to be found among many Insects, Spiders, and, I should 
 say, Crustacea. Of the Hymenoptera it is needless to 
 speak. Among insects other than the Hymenoptera, 
 which may be classed together for our purposes as the 
 Lower Insects, the evidence that I have seen for the power 
 of learning by experience is not extensive. As laboratory 
 evidence we have the case of the mayflies mentioned 
 above, and some experiments in which Szymanski suc- 
 ceeded in teaching cockroaches to conquer their desire for 
 darkness by administering electric shocks. The acquired 
 habit persisted only for a short time, varying from about 
 four to fifty-five minutes, but it could be re-learnt with a 
 large reduction in the number of shocks.' Romanes ' 
 quotes a story of a fly that became tame enough to 
 perch on its friend's thumb and eat sugar, but it is signi- 
 
 ^ Brehm, VII. p. 25. On the limits to the taming of snakes, see p. 220. 
 2 lb. p. 508. 3 lb. p. 297. 
 
 \ lb. pp. S5S, 556. 
 
 * J. A. B., 1912, p. 89 especially. 
 
 ° Pp. 231 and 229. The story of a beetle that fetched a companion to 
 move a cockchafer is beyond me. The apparent co-operation of dung 
 beetles in rolling their balls {ib. pp. 236-238) is probably to be explained 
 by the fact that to the beetle one ball is as good as another. Balls, as 
 such, provoke the beetle to roll — even if they are quite of the wrong kind. 
 (Schneider, p. 187.) 
 
HO MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 ficant that it finally met with its death by mistaking the 
 thumb. The same author tells a story of an earwig that 
 came regularly for its breakfast. 
 
 Among Cephalopoda there is good evidence of the effects 
 of experience in the form which we are examining. The 
 well-known story of the vengeance of an octopus on a 
 lobster is parallel with the rivalry of the female Paradise 
 fish showing a similar persistence of excitement.^ It 
 agrees with this that cephalopods should, like fish and 
 reptiles, "know" their keepers,^ and that they should learn 
 to avoid the stinging sea anemones on the shell of hermit- 
 crabs, and adopt a safer method of procuring them.' 
 When we descend from cephalopods to other molluscs 
 the evidence for any degree of learning from experience 
 becomes much more scanty. We have seen that snails 
 and limpets have the power of " homing ; " the former, 
 at least, are apparently guided by a trail. It is possible 
 under the circumstances that the whole process may be 
 instinctive. When sated with food, for example, the 
 mollusc may feel a blind impulse to retrace its steps along 
 its trail.* Dawson, however, found, among other evidences 
 of past experience, that a snail dropped into an aquarium 
 
 ' Romanes, p. 30 ; Schneider, p. 78. ^ Schneider, loc. cit. 
 
 ^ But cf. J. A. B., 191 1, p. 399, where some experiments by Polamanti 
 on the cephalopod Elebone Moschata are summarised, which give purely 
 negative resuhs. 
 
 ■• There is a story (which has crossed the Atlantic) of a snail which would 
 come at the call of a girl who had trained it to do so, while it shrank from 
 other voices. {Cambridge Natural History, Vol. III. p. 35.) That 
 oysters learn to keep their shells shut out of water for a longer and longer 
 time is well known, but it is not clear to me whether this is due to simple 
 practice — each time the thing is done making the next easier — or to ex- 
 perience of disagreeable results from opening (see Cambridge Natural 
 History, Vol. III. p. no). Mr. Lonsdale's story of the pair of snails 
 made famous by Darwin is, at least in the interpretation given it, quite 
 isolated. If the observation is correct, I should suppose that the 
 first snail, after feeding, had an impulse to return on its trail to its mate, 
 and that when they started again, the weaker mate being rested, and 
 being also hungrier, was impelled to follow. Of failure to learn on the 
 part of the snail, a good mstance is reported by Mobius. A snail 
 attempted to take a piece of meat from a polyp {Actinia mesembry- 
 anthemum), and coming into contact with the polyp's tentacles, shrank 
 together, and turned away. It returned to the charge, with the same 
 result. This was repeated several times over, till Mobius charitably gave 
 the snail another piece of meat. (Brehm, 2nd edition, X. p. 479. The 
 second half of the story is not given in Brehm's 3rd edition.) 
 
vn ASSIMILATION AND READJUSTMENT 141 
 
 where it had been previously kept crawled at once to the 
 surface, while snails freshly taken from the pond wandered 
 aimlessly.^ Professor Yerkes has definitely shown that 
 worms can learn a path, forming a habit as the result 
 of from twenty to one hundred experiences, and, what is 
 perhaps most remarkable, the habit is independent of the 
 so-called brain, that is the ganglia situated in the anterior 
 segments, since it persisted when these were removed.^ 
 Finally, with regard to protozoa, we have definite in- 
 stances of selective modification, e.g.^ the behaviour 
 of stentor quoted above (p. 114) has been sufficiently 
 described. For the direct reversal of a response, due 
 to the unsuitable character of the object, the evidence is 
 less clear. The most definite case recorded is an experi- 
 ment by Messrs. Hodge and Aiken, who gave some 
 Vorticellae, a "pure culture of yeast plants," in place 
 of their normal food. " This attempt," they say, " re- 
 sulted in an interesting demonstration of the educability 
 of vorticellae." They took greedily to the food at first, 
 then ejected it " with volcanic energy," and afterwards 
 " for several hours at least — how long the memory lasted 
 was not determined — the individual could not be induced 
 to repeat the experiment." ^ One would be glad to know 
 whether during the same time they took any other food. 
 It would seem possible that they were left in a state of 
 collapse. 
 
 Metalnikow adduces a series of experiments on 
 Paramecia, showing that at first these infusoria swallow 
 injurious substances in large quantities, but, at the end 
 of one or two days at most, they cease to do so while 
 still swallowing other substances. " It seems," he said, 
 " that the less nutritious the substance the more quickly 
 the distinction is learnt." But it is not clear that it was 
 the same Paramecia. Metalnikow's method of testing the 
 condition of the Paramecia was to take a drop from 
 the culture on successive occasions and kill the specimens, 
 
 ^ The Biology of Physa, summarised in J. A. B., 1912, p. 373. 
 
 2 R. M. Yerkes, The Intelligence of Earthwor?ns, J. A. B., 1912, 
 especially pp. 351-2. 
 
 3 Quoted by Mr. G. P. Watkins, " Psychical Life in Protozoa," American 
 Journal of Psychology, Jan. igoo, pp. 179, 180. 
 
142 MIND. IN EVOLUTION chap, vii 
 
 which he examined. Thus he was dealing on each occasion 
 with a different selection of individuals from the culture, 
 and it is possible that those that took the harmful 
 substance at first died of the effects, while only those 
 that avoided it or took it in smaller quantities survived.^ 
 In fact, Schaeffer, repeating these experiments, obtained 
 contrary results, and found no evidence that either 
 stentor or paramecium can learn by experience to improve 
 its selection of food.^ 
 
 Whether the confirmation or inhibition of an action 
 through experience of results is in reality a higher or 
 more difficult form of learning by experience than 
 selective modification is a question which I must leave 
 undetermined. I note only that for the lowest class 
 of organisms the former appears to be at present more 
 definitely established than the latter. But at any rate in 
 its most elementary forms we must apparently carry the 
 power of learning by experience down to the lowest types 
 of animal life. Just as we find no type of organism 
 whose actions are purely mechanical, so it now seems 
 probable we shall find none whose behaviour is entirely 
 fixed by heredity in relation to present stimulus. We 
 can at any rate say with certainty that the powers of 
 assimilating the direct results of conation are traceable 
 from a very low stage. 
 
 ' Comptes Rendus de la SocUti de Biologic, Vol. LXXIV. pp. 702, 705. 
 ^ Selection' of Food in Stentor Caeruleus, summarised in J. A. B., 191 1, 
 p. 400. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 CONCRETE EXPERIENCE AND THE PRACTICAL JUDGMENT 
 
 I. In the lowest grade of intelligence an animal learns 
 by experience, and the experience is in a sense experience 
 of a relation. There is a stimulus, a reaction, and a feeling, 
 and this sequence, repeated many times over, modifies the 
 reaction. For the observer it is clear that it is the relation 
 between stimulus and feeling which operates, but we saw 
 no reason to assume that the relation is grasped in the same 
 way by the organism on which it operates. The fish or 
 reptile may be excited by the approach of the keeper, and 
 stimulated to come forward for their food. But we can- 
 not infer that they correlate the perception of the keeper 
 with an idea of food, and choose to come forward as a 
 means towards securing that desirable end, the first and 
 best morsel. In the present chapter we advance to the stage 
 in which correlations of this sort are effected. We must 
 inquire, first, what precisely the nature of such correlation 
 is as compared with lower forms of mental adjustment ; 
 next, what kind of experience it implies, and what behaviour 
 can be built up by its means ; and lastly, whether there is 
 any evidence that this stage is reached below the level of 
 humanity. 
 
 I, General character of the Practical Judgment. 
 
 a. Judgment and Assimilation. 
 
 When we find that the burnt child dreads the fire, we 
 may explain the fact in either of two ways. It may be 
 that the child grasps and retains the relation between the 
 flame as a bright, shining, lambent object, attractive to its 
 
 143 
 
144 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 eyes, and the flame as a cruel burning heat, scorching its 
 little hand. If so, it has formed a judgment, which, when 
 it can speak, it will express in the proposition — " fire 
 burns," and an idea of fire as one thing with different 
 attributes. Its experience is a whole containing elements 
 which remain distinct. Both as such a whole, and as being 
 concerned with a particular object, we may call it a concrete 
 experience. Equally concrete is the idea or judgment 
 founded thereon. But if the child is incapable of so much 
 thought, it may still reach the same practical result by that 
 more direct method by which the fire from being an attrac- 
 tive becomes a repellent object. In the one case, two terms 
 are grasped in their relation. In the other, one term only 
 is present, but it has for practical purposes borrowed the 
 character of the other to which it stood related in past 
 experience.^ In the first case, there is judgment : in the 
 second, assimilation. 
 
 b. The Association of Ideas. 
 
 Assimilation, we have seen, does not necessarily involve 
 ideas at all. A perception which has "assimilated" the 
 motor character of some experience to which it is related, 
 has the power of shaping behaviour as though with a view 
 to the repetition of that experience, yet no idea of the 
 purpose of the adaptation comes before consciousness. In 
 
 ^ In ordinary phraseology the relation A — B, explicit in the one case, 
 acts implicitly in the other. It may be asked how we can distinguish 
 the two, when we are judging, not by our own consciousness, but by 
 inference from behaviour. A relation is explicit in consciousness if its 
 terms are united and yet distinct. It is implicit if it merely influences 
 consciousness, so as, for example, to affect the way in which one of its 
 terms is apprehended. Generalising this we may say that in conscious- 
 ness the explicit is present on its own account, while the implicit is that 
 which is present merely as qualifying or influencing something else. 
 Extending the distinction to cases where we can judge only by behaviour, 
 we may say that an element of experience is explicitly grasped by the 
 mind if a distinct function in the guidance of behaviour can be assigned 
 to it. It acts implicitly if, without having any distinctive effect of its own, 
 it is yet a necessary part of some experience which has a function as a 
 whole. Thus, in the case of assimilation, the experience A — B operates 
 as a whole, and its elements have an effect only as contributing to this 
 operation. In concrete experience, on the other hand, the relation A — B 
 has, for example, a distinct function from that of the term A, for the 
 reaction to A will differ according as B is or is not expected to follow. In 
 conceptual thought, again, the relation uniting A and B acquires a 
 function distinct from that of A and B themselves, since it may go to 
 build up concepts with which A and B having nothing to do. 
 
VIII PRACTICAL JUDGMENT 145 
 
 a Judgment, on the other hand, both of the related terms in 
 their relation are presented or represented. The case of the 
 Association of Ideas is intermediate. Here the perception 
 does call up an idea, or one idea calls up another, but, as 
 the associative process is generally conceived, the ideas 
 merely succeed one another. They are not held together 
 and formed into new judgments. It was the fundamental 
 error of Hume's psychology — an error which also vitiated 
 much of his logic and metaphysics — to treat associated 
 ideas, so conceived, as equivalent to a belief in the connec- 
 tion of their contents. To believe that b is the effect of 
 A is not at all the same thing as to have a lively idea of 
 B following upon an idea of a. On the contrary, it consists 
 in grasping the terms a and b together in a determinate 
 relation, and asserting that relation of reality. 
 
 It may be asked whether Association as distinguished 
 from Assimilation on the one hand and Judgment on the 
 other is a real process at all. Is there a stage or a state in 
 which ideas follow one another without being brought 
 into relation ? Thought is continuous — not, as the early 
 Associationists seemed to regard it, discrete. Perception 
 passes into idea, and for a space they dwell together. 
 Even in the most dreamy reverie, it may be said, continuity 
 and connection have more to do with the line of thought 
 than " contiguity." But this objection must not be pushed 
 too far. It is harder to keep in mind a jangle of nonsense 
 than a sentence with meaning in it, but it is by no means 
 impossible.^ The former presence of two elements in one 
 and the same whole of consciousness is often quite sufficient 
 to revive them in grotesque juxtaposition in a train of 
 thought. It is to this that we owe the Miss Bateses 
 and Mrs. Nicklebys of literature and of real life. 
 
 Ideas, then, may be associated without being logically 
 connected. Moreover, even if they were associated so that 
 a logician reflecting upon them could detect and expose the 
 relation, it does not follow that that relation is itself present 
 to the mind as the ideas float past. In a not uncommon 
 experience, the act of " putting two and two together " 
 follows quite clearly and distinctly as a separate act upon 
 
 > For some measure of the difference in labour, see below, p. 155. 
 
 L 
 
146 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 the passage of the two ideas so united before conscious- 
 ness. If it is argued, for contentious purposes, that mere 
 sequence of ideas in a continuous consciousness involves a 
 kind of relation, it must be replied that even so, this rela- 
 tion is not necessarily grasped by that consciousness. It 
 would be truer to the facts to urge that the relation between 
 juxtaposed elements of consciousness is apprehended with 
 varying degrees of distinctness, and if this view be adopted, 
 we may apply the term Associated ideas to the limiting 
 case in which this apprehension disappears, and the term 
 Judgment to the case where two or more elements are 
 definitely held together in some distinctive relation, making 
 of them a whole with a character of its own. 
 
 c. The Practical Judgment. 
 
 Except in one point, the Judgment as thus defined is 
 identical with the Judgment of Logic. In Logic, the term 
 is best reserved for such assertions as may be expressed 
 without modification in a proposition, that is, in words.-' 
 But, as we shall see more fully later, the rendering 
 of a synthesis in words is a distinct and separate 
 act from that of forming the synthesis itself. A child 
 may be aware that fire is a bright object that 
 burns, without being able to form or even to under- 
 stand the words. Just as I may feel or see without 
 naming, perhaps without being able to name what I was 
 feeling or seeing, so I may retain the memory of what I 
 have felt or seen without the aid of language, and the same 
 thing applies to the relation, say, of co-existence or sequence 
 between what I felt and saw. This relation is one thing, 
 its verbal expression another, involving, as we shall see 
 later, a distinct act of correlation. Concrete experience and 
 the practical thinking in which it is reproduced are so far 
 from being dependent on language that to the end they 
 cannot in all their individuality and detail be adequately 
 expressed in language. The proofs of this will, I hope, 
 accumulate as we go on. Meanwhile, we need a term to 
 
 * This, at least, seems to correspond best to general usage. See the 
 writer's Theory of Knowledge, p. 122. I need not here enter into the 
 question whether there is synthesis in every logical judgment — a point 
 which I have discussed in the same work, pp. 149-153. 
 
VIII PRACTICAL JUDGMENT 147 
 
 distinguish a synthesis of experiences in which language is 
 not used from the logical judgment. Such a synthesis will 
 deal with the particular objects and events of experience/ 
 and its purpose will be to guide action in relation thereto. 
 We may therefore call it Practical Judgment.^ 
 
 II. 'the Conditions of the Practical Judgment in Experience. 
 
 2. a. Concrete experience. 
 
 The character of the Practical Judgment depends in the 
 last resort upon the experience on which it rests. In the 
 lower stage of Intelligence the experience throughout was 
 of a sensori-motor character. There was a sense-excitement 
 ji giving rise to a reaction, followed by a feeling, and the 
 feeling in turn had a motor effect. What followed was a 
 modified reaction, explained in popular language as due 
 to a "revival" of the feeling, or, at least, of the motor 
 impulse belonging to it. Postponing for a moment further 
 analysis of this explanation, let us first observe that the 
 formation of j udgments rests on a more concrete or articu- 
 late form of experience. Suppose that we have an appre- 
 hension of concrete objects with their parts and qualities, 
 their actions and changes, and suppose this apprehension to 
 be " revived " (as the feeling impulse was revived), then 
 we have in our revived experiences wholes consisting of 
 distinguishable parts — that is, a synthesis of elements that 
 remain distinct — that is the content we require for our 
 " practical judgment." Perception as we know it in our- 
 selves is complex and continuous. As we look at a house, 
 walls, windows, and chimneys appear, forming distinct 
 elements which are yet united in one whole. As we attend 
 to a series of events, listen to a speech, or watch a cricket 
 match, a continuous stream of perceptions, distinct and yet 
 connected, passes through our consciousness. When we 
 bring analysis to bear on the total impression made in 
 
 * For if the elements of the synthesis are recognised as general, the 
 conditions of language are at once present. See below, Chap. XIV., 
 p. 321, etc. 
 
 2 It should be noted that the limiting adjective, " practical," has been 
 applied to animal intelligence in a somewhat different sense by other 
 writers. Thus, the late Dr. Mivart {fln Truth, p. 345) speaks of animals 
 as drawing " practical inferences," and these appear to be identical with 
 his "sensuous inferences" (p. 145) which correspond rather with the 
 Association of Ideas than with the " Practical Judgment " of the text. 
 
 L 2 
 
148 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 either case, it reveals an order in the experience, a relation 
 between part and part, which contributes as much to the 
 total impression as the parts themselves. This relation 
 analysis can dissect out and in a sense treat as independent 
 of the terms which enter into it. But just because this is 
 the work of analysis, it leads to conception, not merely 
 to perception. What analysis reveals, however, is that, 
 without being dissected out, the relations go to constitute 
 perception, and are thus as truly parts of what is perceived 
 as the terms that they unite. What is perceived is a 
 complex of distinct but related parts. Such a complex is 
 what we call articulate, and the terms-in-relation which 
 it comprises may be called a perceptual relation, as 
 against the conceptual relation which is held apart from 
 its terms. 
 
 Let us now suppose a mind endowed with perceptions 
 of this concrete kind, and with the power of reproducing 
 them ideally in relation to a present perception. Thus, 
 seeing one side of the house, I can mentally affix the 
 unseen sides to that which I see, and recollecting, for 
 example, on which side the door is, can direct my steps 
 accordingly. Here the relations of unseen parts to one 
 another and to what is seen are grasped, as before in 
 perception, so now in idea, and this is what I mean by the 
 Practical Judgment. It is more than Assimilation, because 
 what is revived is an idea, a definite reference to something 
 unperceived. It is more than Association, because the 
 relation between the " revived " idea and the given per- 
 ception is an essential part of it, and it is less than analytic 
 thought, because the relations involved are not dissected 
 out as distinct elements in consciousness. 
 
 b. Revival. 
 
 But we cannot pass on without dwelling on the Law of 
 Revival (or Association, or Redintegration, as it is variously 
 called). The broad facts, whether in this or the lower 
 stage, are the same. There are certain experiences, a, b, c, 
 contemporaneous or following in continuity one upon the 
 other. Let a arise again, from whatever cause, and we 
 say that it tends to " revive " b and c. What is the 
 character of this revival .? Let us first remove a mis- 
 
VIII PRACTICAL JUDGMENT 149 
 
 understanding so gross that it should never have arisen. 
 Neither the a nor the b nor the c of the new case is 
 identical with the original a, b, and c. A state of 
 consciousness, having once been, is gone. It has no sub- 
 stantial existence, as it were underground, from which it 
 may be brought up again. When we speak of reviving b, 
 we mean at most a state Bg, similar to an original Bj. An 
 ordinary understanding of the English language ought to 
 prevent any mistakes on this head. 
 
 But now comes the real difficulty. What is revived is, 
 after all, not Bg — something exactly like b^ — but, say, b, 
 something partially like Bj, but modified in some respects. 
 What is the nature or the condition of this modification .? 
 In the lower stage, taking the simplest case where an 
 inhibitory movement p is revived, there is this important 
 difference from the original. In the first experience we 
 have s — r — p — p — sensation, reaction, pain, recoil. The 
 recoil or inhibitory movement is separated by two links 
 from the original stimulus. If when "revived" it remained 
 so separated, it would be too late to effect anything. In 
 being revived, it is also brought forward in time. At the 
 same time, the original tendency r begins to drop out. 
 Hence we really have not revival but modification. The 
 conative excitement originated by s, which gave us r, is 
 corrected, it may be reversed, into a different form of ex- 
 citement, giving us p. In our experience the modification 
 goes right back to the initial step of the process. The sight 
 which has disgusting associations becomes itself disgusting. 
 
 Now if we turn to the revival of concrete ex- 
 perience we shall again find that what appears to be 
 " revived " is really brought up in quite a new form. 
 After the experience of a — b — c, A may be said to 
 " revive " b and c, but this does not mean that the per- 
 ception of A revives the perception of b and c, but the 
 ideas of them. In many cases — and there is reason for 
 thinking that these cases are of the original type — a 
 excites an anticipation (or memory) of b and c. To 
 understand this, let us first remember that things and 
 events are not isolated, but connected, so that we should 
 symbolise the original experience not as a, b, c, but as 
 
I50 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 A — B — c. Let this whole be "revived" by a. Then, 
 on the face of it, what a revives is not b and c each 
 separately, but b following on a, and c on b. Certain 
 elements in relation to a are therefore excited. Now 
 let it be as before a condition that these elements should 
 be excited along with a — as parts of the same state of 
 consciousness. If they are brought before consciousness 
 as co-present with a, the revived state will conflict 
 with the original in which they were not co-present. 
 If this conflict is to be avoided, they must, as excited, 
 be elements belonging to a and yet, as "revived " from 
 the original, they are events following on a in a definite 
 relation. These conditions are satisfied by the trans- 
 formation of the percepts b and c into elements of 
 anticipation, which as elements we call ideas h and c. If 
 the anticipation is made quite explicit and holds in itself 
 several elements in definite relations, it is called a judg- 
 ment. It is then the belief in or expectation of the 
 sequence a — b — c. The unperceived elements in this 
 sequence are known as ideas b and c. The content of 
 these ideas and therefore of the whole judgment is 
 determined by the elements which have been given in 
 experience in their relation to a, and the ideas correspond 
 to these elements of experience. It is in this sense that the 
 whole process is one of revival, but the judgment itself 
 is something new. It is not a repetition of a series of 
 percepts. It is the repetition of a percept plus a reference 
 to things as yet unperceived. The formation of such a 
 judgment depends on the power of holding distinct 
 experiences in a single state of consciousness without 
 prejudice to their distinctness, and involves that distinct 
 reference of a state to something beyond itself which we 
 call an idea. 
 
 Experience then operates, whether in Assimilation or 
 Judgment, by the law, as we may call it, of modified 
 revival. The condition of revival in these cases appears 
 to be that the revived element must enter into the same 
 state of consciousness with that which revives it.^ And 
 
 ' A state of consciousness has duration, so that though revival takes 
 time, A persists while it is bringing b into consciousness, and so with b and 
 
VIII PRACTICAL JUDGMENT 151 
 
 this condition determines its change of character. The 
 Practical Judgment "revives" experience only in the same 
 loose sense in which it is revived in Assimilation. The 
 judgment which we refer to a past perception as its cause 
 is not itself a perception, but is an assertion about things 
 that are not perceived. In the case of the Practical 
 Judgment, it is an assertion of things that have been or 
 will be, an assertion bringing them into relation with what 
 is perceived. The experience on which this judgment is 
 founded differs from the experience of the lower stage. 
 For in the lower stage, Sensations (i) have no apparent 
 function unless they excite a motor reaction, and (2) 
 coalesce in subsequent experience with the feelings which 
 modify them. In the experiences underlying the practical 
 judgment, a sensation not itself moving a reaction may 
 have a function as initiating ideas, which perhaps at several 
 removes determine conduct. While secondly, it is the 
 main point on which we have insisted that each element 
 is kept distinct from the others that it calls up. In the 
 lower stage it is merely necessary that there should be 
 sense-experiences affecting the mind so as to dispose it to 
 action. In the higher stage, there is perception of the 
 surrounding world of objects in their manifold relations, 
 changes, etc. Lastly, it will readily appear that in this 
 concrete experience, any one element is a centre of many 
 relations. A perceived object is associated not merely 
 with some feeling, but with many other objects perceived 
 at the same time. Any one of these it may suggest, 
 according as a subsequent purpose marks out the lines of 
 interest, and hence, as we shall find, " revival " in this 
 stage is no longer necessarily dominated by association, 
 but is free to supply means to ends as circumstances 
 require. 
 
 3. c. Ideas. 
 
 The pivot upon which the practical judgment turns, as 
 our account has shown, is the formation of the idea. 
 
 c, but A may be gone before c has come. This, of course, occurs in any 
 long train of thought. Further, as experience grows more complex, and 
 its results frequently conflict, beliefs are often depressed into mere sug- 
 gestions or thoughts of reality. We then have " association of ideas " as 
 ordinarily conceived. 
 
152 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 Generically an idea is distinguished from all the modes of 
 consciousness which we have considered hitherto, by the 
 fact that in the scope of its reference it goes beyond what 
 is directly present to our senses. To put the matter in 
 its most general way, the mind, so far as it is active, 
 is either concerned with what is immediately present to 
 it, or is asserting, suggesting, wishing, commanding, etc., 
 something not present. In all these cases we may 
 distinguish the content of the act from the way in which 
 the content is entertained (i.e., by way of assertion, 
 command, etc.). The content has always a reference 
 beyond the present, and this is what we call an idea, [Even 
 where an idea is applied to a present object, as when we 
 name what we see before us, the use of the idea is either 
 to determine the unperceived qualities of the object, or to 
 class it, i.e., bring it into relation with some general 
 characteristic of reality.] Psychologically an idea may take 
 the form of an image, i.e., something actually like a percept, 
 but with less sensational vividness and detail.^ But we 
 must carefully distinguish in thought between the image 
 as something present to the mind — an object of internal 
 consciousness — and the idea as containing a reference 
 beyond itself. It is on this reference that the logical or 
 practical function of the idea depends. The image is, at 
 most, the form taken by the mental act in which that 
 function is carried out. 
 
 How ideas first arise is a question to which only a 
 tentative answer can be given, but in all probability their 
 original function is to direct effort, and they may be 
 supposed to arise in the process by which effort acquires; 
 definiteness of direction towards something unseen, un- 
 presented to the senses. We can observe in the lower 
 processes two elements which by their fusion would 
 produce this result. On the one hand, in sensori-motor 
 action we have response directed towards a given object, 
 and as soon as the organism possesses "distance receptors," 
 that is to say, the senses of sight, sound, and smell, the 
 objects to which it so reacts may be remote from itself 
 and definite in their place and motions. In the sensori- 
 ' On this see Stout, op. cit. pp. 396-413. 
 
VIII PRACTICAL JUDGMENT 153 
 
 motor visual response an animal directs its behaviour, not 
 to the position of the object actually seen but to one 
 toward which it is moving, but if the action is truly 
 sensori-motor this is an effect of what is seen, discharged 
 by pre-existing tendencies in the organism. Next, in the 
 case of assimilation, the organism reacts to some quality 
 of the object which is not presented to its sense, but 
 again its action is determined by the presented object 
 itself acting upon the structure formed by the previous 
 experience. Let us now suppose that what is retained 
 from a previous experience may be not a mere quality of 
 feeling attached to the object but, say, the path on which 
 it will move, and we then get an adjustment to this path, 
 or rather to the position which the object will take upon 
 it, based not on an innate tendency but on a previous 
 experience. We thus get action directed in consequence 
 of a past experience to something not given in the present, 
 and here we seem to have the germ of what may be called 
 a practical idea. The development of the idea would 
 then depend, on the one hand upon the power of per- 
 ceiving complex objects of distinct but yet related parts, 
 and on the other hand on the power of any part to revive, 
 not merely feelings or elements tending directly to affect 
 conation, but elements of a perceptual character belonging 
 to the original complex. 
 
 4. d. Concrete Experience and Memory. 
 
 The way in which a relation is originally experienced 
 appears to have an important influence on its chances of 
 revival. We all know that we can remember with more 
 or less of accuracy, and for a greater or less period, persons 
 or places seen only once. Similarly we remember events 
 as having happened once. In all these cases a single 
 experience is enough to form a basis for subsequent 
 revival. On the other hand, if we want to learn some- 
 thing by rote, we repeat it over and over again, and get it 
 perfect by degrees. In the first case the power of revival 
 appears to be perfected by a single experience. In the 
 second, it grows very gradually by frequent repetitions. 
 What Is the explanation of this contrast 1 
 
 In the, first place, we must beware of exaggerating it, 
 
154 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 Our memory of a person or place seen once is seldom 
 perfect. It fades with time, and is strengthened by renewal. 
 In these respects it clearly follows the same law as memory 
 due to repetition, and we may infer that there is no 
 fundamental difference. The real distinction lies in 
 connectedness of elements. If a — b — c form a rigidly 
 and necessarily connected whole for thought, to re- 
 member A would be to remember b and c as well. If 
 they are utterly disconnected, it requires three distinct 
 efforts to recall them. There is an intermediate case in 
 which they are apprehended in relation, though not in 
 necessary relation, so that the remembrance of one 
 naturally, though not inevitably, leads on to another. 
 Thus I may readily remember a connected conversation 
 or a well put argument, as each point leads naturally to 
 the next. So again the metre as well as the thought 
 help in the memory of verse, while in matters of simple 
 perception, to recall one part, for example, of a once 
 visited place is to have a beginning from which the space 
 relations themselves help one in reconstructing the rest. 
 In short, if instead of a, b, c, three quite separate data, we 
 have a — b — c so related that one passes into the other 
 or is continuous with it in perception, or leads up to it in 
 meaning, we have quite a different groundwork to go 
 upon. Our memory rests partly on the connection. In 
 the alternative case it rests on association, the bringing of 
 two things together in consciousness without any recognised 
 connection. The difference which is made by connected- 
 ness may be estimated by comparing the number of re- 
 petitions necessary for learning (i) a series of isolated 
 words or meaningless syllables, and (2) a connected piece 
 of writing. Comparing words and phrases, MM. Binet 
 and Henri estimate the advantage of phrases in one case as 
 25 to i.^ Comparing a series of meaningless syllables 
 with a stanza of Don Juan, Ebbinghaus^ found that 
 ten times as many repetitions were necessary in the former 
 case. 
 
 If we could say that association only acts by more or 
 less frequent repetition, the problem of determining what 
 1 Annh Psyckologique, 1894, p. 31. ^ Gedachtniss, p. 69. « 
 
vin PRACTICAL JUDGMENT 155 
 
 is due to connected experience, and what is not, would be 
 immensely simplified. But we cannot deny that a single 
 experience without any insight into relation may in some 
 cases form a basis for memory. Thus even a series of 
 meaningless syllables, if not too long, may be retained 
 perfectly for a few moments, after a single hearing.^ But 
 the effect very speedily lapses. After twenty-four hours, 
 the only result of a number of readings sufficient to get 
 the syllables by heart for the moment is a certain 
 diminution in the number required to get them perfect 
 again. To Illustrate the point, it will be enough to give one 
 series of Ebbinghaus's experiments with twelve syllables, 
 comparing it with his results for a stanza. The Roman 
 numerals indicate the successive days ; the Arabic figures, 
 the number of times necessary to get the repetition 
 perfect. 
 
 Days 
 
 I. 
 
 II. 
 
 III. 
 
 IV. 
 
 V. 
 
 VI. 
 
 12 syllables 
 
 i6-5 
 
 II 
 
 7-5 
 
 5 
 
 3 
 
 2-5 
 
 Stanza of Don Juan 
 
 775 
 
 375 
 
 175 
 
 ■5 
 
 
 
 2 
 
 I may subjoin a further table given by Mr. G. W. 
 Smith,^ showing the very slow improvement from repeti- 
 tion up to twelve times. Ten syllables were read and 
 repeated. The table shows the number correctly given, 
 and the number of mistakes after a given number of 
 readings. 
 
 Number of Number cor- 
 
 Readings. rectly given. 
 
 I 2-2 
 
 3 2-5 
 
 6 2-8 
 
 9 3"4 
 
 12 3-9 
 
 We may conclude that as we approximate to irrational 
 association in human experience, the number of repetitions 
 required to fix a sequence in memory for any length of 
 time becomes very large. Forty repetitions did not suffice 
 to fix twelve syllables in Ebbinghaus's memory perfectly 
 
 > Binet and Henri, loc. cit. p. 7. ^ Op. cit. p. 112. 
 
 3 Psychological Review, 1896, "The Place of Repetition in Memory." 
 
 Total Errors. 
 
 22-2 
 
 21-4 
 
 20-5 
 
 18-9 
 
 17-3 
 
156 MINI? IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 for twenty-four hours, while as many as twelve readings 
 fixed less than four syllables out of ten in Mr. G. W. 
 Smith's experiments.^ 
 
 ' The effective presentation of the problem of the rapidity of learning 
 has been the subject of several experimental studies, but the results are 
 not as yet as clear as might be desired. From what we know of the 
 definiteness of memory in the case of some particular event, we naturally 
 infer that a single instance should be decisive where there is a true 
 memory judgment. Conversely, from our common experience of the 
 gradualness in the formation of habit and the acquisition of skill, we 
 naturally take slowness of acquisition as evidence of the absence of the 
 true memory judgment. How far do these views stand the test of experi- 
 ment? With regard to skill, Mr. E. J. Swift, in a valuable article in the 
 American Journal of Psychology, 1903, on " Studies in the Psychology 
 and Physiology of Learning," shows that in the practice of passing and 
 catching balls, progress is at first slow, and then more rapid. Where 
 improvement is rapid in early stages it is in relation to things which have 
 symbols or other devices for handling and presenting ideas. This is 
 precisely the contrast which we should expect, and the convex curves 
 which Mr. Swift presents have exactly the anticipated contrast to the con- 
 cave curves, with steep descents at the beginning and very gradual sub- 
 sequent change, which belong to the memorising of something in which 
 we understand the connections. On the other hand, Mr. Hicks and 
 Professor Carr (" Human Reactions in a Maze," J. A. B. 1912, pp. 98-125) 
 have shown that the form of time curves, i.e., the rate of the diminution of 
 the time in which an animal performs a trick, is not to be taken as a 
 criterion of the intelligence applied, under penalty of making rats more 
 intelligent than human beings. Further, Shepard and Brede (J. A. B., 
 1913, pp. 274-285) have shown that the development of the pecking instinct 
 in chicks improves with great rapidity in the early stages, and then tails off 
 into a slow advance towards perfection. This is the opposite result to 
 those of Swift for the acquisition of skill. Again, Schaeffer, as noted 
 above, found inhibitions learnt by a frog in one or two instances alone, 
 and it would be very hard to attribute to a frog the higher order of 
 intelligence which we are now considering. Some other cases of inhibi- 
 tion by very few experiences, if not by one alone, have been recorded 
 among quite low animals. 
 
 I think we may find the key to these difficulties if we contrast the 
 rapidity with which the frog in Schaeffer's experiments learnt to reject 
 nauseous food with the slowness of its maze reactions as described 
 by Yerkes. We may suppose that the direct confirmation or inhibi- 
 tion of an instinctive response operates rapidly, while the building up 
 of habits that have no basis in instinct requires a large number of 
 experiments, accident probably playing a considerable part in the 
 process. The maturation of the pecking instinct would then follow the 
 law for the direct modification of response. It would advance rapidly 
 with the success of one type of movement and the failure of another, 
 and it is only the subtler adjustments which would require time. On 
 the other hand, the acquisition of something new, such as an acquired 
 art in the case of man, would be rapid only in those portions which 
 demand intelligence and definite memory, and would be slow on the 
 side of the sensori-motor adjustments. In the case of an animal learn- 
 ing a trick the rapid initial fall so frequently seen would probably be due 
 to the more intelligent elements in the process, and the slow later fall to 
 
VIII PRACTICAL JUDGMENT 157 
 
 There is, however, another cause of retention to be con- 
 sidered besides frequency, namely, the vividness of an 
 experience or the emotional interest attending it. In our 
 own experience, we know that strong emotion lends a 
 peculiar vividness to surrounding details so that very often 
 trivial things that happened in a moment of great stress 
 remain stamped in the memory for life. This vividness of 
 irrelevant detail may be used to express a feeling which 
 otherwise could not find utterance. 
 
 " All's over, then — does truth sound bitter 
 As one at first believes ? 
 Hark, 'tis the sparrows' goodnight twitter 
 About your cottage eaves ! 
 
 And the leafbuds on the vine are woolly, 
 
 I noticed that, to-day ; 
 One day more bursts them open fully : 
 
 You know the red turns grey." 
 
 But cases of deep emotion stand by themselves. In a 
 general way, it appears from a series of experiments con- 
 ducted by iVIiss M. W. Calkins, that frequency is more 
 powerful than vividness as a cause of association.^ It is 
 further clear that the influence of feeling, or other intense 
 experience, would only extend to experiences close to it in 
 time.^ 
 
 the part which intelligence does not grasp. I think therefore primA 
 facie we may use rapidity of initial learning as a test of the higher 
 processes except where we are dealing with feelings operating directly 
 upon response. 
 
 It may be added then if a habit involving a train of connected 
 elements is to be learnt by assimilation, numerous instances seem 
 necessary, since at least one is required for each step. Thus chickens 
 may respond with much excitement to the footsteps of the feeder. 
 The excitement must have attached itself presumably first to the grain, 
 then perhaps to the motions of scattering it, then to the feeder himself, 
 and then to his footstep. If a connection were established between 
 the first and last links in such a chain by a single experience it would, 
 I think, be very strong evidence of definite memory. 
 
 ' "Association" {Psych. Rev. Monograph Supplement), pp. 55, 56. 
 Miss Calkins points out correctly that the vividness procurable in an 
 experiment is not comparable to that of " richly emotional experiences." 
 
 ^ Two subordinate points of importance remain to be noticed. In a 
 series of associations, A, B, C, D, E, the natural tendency is for A to 
 excite B, B to excite C, and so forth. But a also acquires a certain 
 power of exciting C, or even D or E, without the intermediates. This 
 
158 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 To sum up. In the sphere of articulate experience, a 
 very few impressions, often a single impression, will suffice 
 to form a permanent basis for memory. Where the con- 
 nection of elements is not apprehended, memory rests 
 either (i) on frequent repetition, or (2) on the excitement 
 of strong feeling. This second influence can only extend 
 to experiences bordering closely in time upon the moment 
 of feeling. In association each link normally recalls that 
 which immediately follows, but it also has a weak tendency 
 to recall remoter experiences. To bear these points in 
 mind will give us some help in deciding how to class some 
 of the examples of the use of experience which we shall 
 meet. 
 
 III. The products and application of the Practical Judg- 
 ment. 
 
 4. a. Knowledge of objects.^ 
 
 From what has been said of concrete experience and its 
 revival, it follows that in this stage the mind may without 
 impropriety be said not merely to react appropriately to 
 objects, but to have a certain knowledge of them. This 
 knowledge must indeed fall short of the conceptual under- 
 standing whereby the characters of perceived objects fall 
 into their place in a system of thought. But still it may 
 be called knowledge of an object as a whole consisting of 
 distinct parts. Such knowledge is not yielded by Assimi- 
 lation alone, for here, beyond the quality perceived by the 
 
 power is, however, materially lower than that of normal association, 
 and it diminishes rapidly as the links omitted are increased. (For 
 the evidence see Ebbinghaus, op. cit. pp. 130, fF., and Miiller and 
 Schumann, p. 307.) It results that between experiences separated by an 
 interval of time the associational tie, if there is any, must be relatively 
 weak. 
 
 Lastly, reversed associations are not impossible. If a series of names 
 is learnt, we all know that we can with difficulty repeat them in reverse 
 order. The observations of Miiller and Schumann, however, suggest that 
 this can only happen where the previous name or syllable forms one 
 complex state of consciousness with the later one which " revives " it. If 
 two syllables were grouped, they formed a well-marked backward associa- 
 tion, but as between separate impressions they failed to establish the 
 process with certainty {j}p. cit. p. 308). It is safe to say that if association 
 in this form is possible without the aid of articulate recollection — i.e., 
 remembrance of relations between elements — its effect is relatively feeble. 
 
 ' The terra is here used not in the general sense of " object of thought 
 or of consciousness," but rather in the popular sense of a material thing 
 with a certain individuality. An animal would be an object in this sense. 
 
viii PRACTICAL JUDGMENT 159 
 
 sense organ, we have no definite reference to other 
 characters of the object. It is not yielded by the Asso- 
 ciation of ideas. To know an orange is not merely to 
 associate a certain colour with a certain shape, smell, 
 weight, softness, taste, and so forth. If we use the word 
 associate at all, we must qualify it by adding " in certain 
 defined relations to one another." To know that this is 
 an orange is to know that what I see before me will, 
 if I put it to my nose, emit a certain scent, if I 
 put my teeth into it as it is, will be unpleasantly bitter, 
 but if I first peel it, will reveal a pleasing juicy pulp, and 
 so forth. In other words, the common object, to become 
 known as an object, must be understood as a kind of 
 structure involving related elements. In the same way, 
 my knowledge of a house is not a mere association of one 
 room with another, but a knowledge of the relations of the 
 rooms, etc., in space. While even with regard to a series 
 of events, though association without synthesis ' might 
 reproduce the ideas in an order corresponding to that in 
 which the events occurred, my knowledge of the events as 
 a series must imply that two or more of them are held 
 together in their relations. 
 
 b. Memory and Anticipation. 
 
 It thus appears that knowledge of objects, and other 
 persons or animals, knowledge of localities, and knowledge 
 of occurrences depend on a more or less developed power 
 of grasping the elements of experience in their mutual 
 relations. From this again it will be seen that both 
 PZxpectation and Memory, in the stricter sense of those 
 terms, rest upon the same basis. In a loose sense the 
 term memory is often used to describe such permanent 
 influence of experience as is present in the lowest stages of 
 assimilation, but this is a misnomer which confuses things 
 essentially distinct. What operates in assimilation we 
 should call retentiveness, for something is, even in that 
 
 ' Such a synthesis, as I have argued elsewhere, may be given in appre- 
 hension in the simpler cases where it unites two immediately sensible 
 qualities through their coexistence in one point of space at one moment. 
 Beyond this, and thus in every case where the behaviour of an object at 
 different times enters into one conception of it, the synthesis acts by 
 bringing into relation contents of distinct perceptions. 
 
i6o MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 stage, retained, and revived in relation to the present. 
 But suppose that what is " retained " is a series of events 
 grasped as a series, and that this series is revived in relation 
 to present perception as its first step. We then have 
 anticipation or expectation of the coming events. If 
 again any connected series is grasped as a whole, there 
 may at the end be retention in idea of the earlier stages. 
 Such a mental reference to an experience that is past 
 constitutes the memory-judgment in its primitive form. 
 What is remembered or expected must be placed in 
 some more or less defined relation to ourselves at the 
 present moment, and conversely, where such an act of 
 mental reference to past or future is possible, there are the 
 conditions for the judgments of memory or expectation. 
 
 c. Purpose. 
 
 With the power of anticipation arises for the first time 
 the possibility of purposive action in the strict sense. The 
 paradox of organic action is that it carries out apparent 
 purposes without purposing to do so. That is to say, it is 
 adapted to the securing of results which we as spectators 
 recognise as valuable to the organism, and yet we do not 
 imagine it to be determined by any conception of those 
 results. Just as the general bodily structure of a plant or 
 an animal is adapted to meet the broad requirements of its 
 mode of life, so its hereditary modes of reaction are so 
 directed that while each is called up from hour to hour by 
 its appropriate stimulus, and only by that stimulus, the 
 result is to serve and to maintain the type of life peculiar 
 to the species. The ordinary healthy animal does not eat 
 in order to support life, but because it is hungry. It does 
 not seek its mate in order to propagate the species, but in 
 obedience to the sexual impulse. If the term "purposive" 
 is claimed for these impulses on the ground that they are 
 determined by the efforts which follow from them, the 
 reply is that this is not literally true. There is a relation, 
 but it is of a very indirect and circuitous kind. In the 
 individual animal, under the sway of instinct, the impulse 
 that appears purposive — say, the impulse to seize and 
 devour its prey — is determined not by prevision of 
 the beneficial effects of eating, but immediately by its 
 
VIII PRACTICAL JUDGMENT i6i 
 
 inherited structure, awakened as it is to activity by the 
 presence of the prey. This structure however has grown 
 up in the main because it did answer the requirements of 
 the animal's ancestors. Structures which answered those 
 needs less adequately have been eliminated, and through 
 the laws of inheritance the surviving structure has been 
 perfected. Thus, in an indirect and circuitous fashion, 
 the results of an action do go to determine what the action 
 shall be before the level of intelligent purpose is reached. 
 But this is true only in the sense that the generic results 
 of that sort of action have operated on the individual to 
 make him what he is. The particular results of this 
 particular action are not operative. The act is really the 
 result of a permanent structure acted upon by a stimulus. 
 It is adaptive, not purposive, its consequence in the 
 particular case is a result, not an end, and it should be 
 described as serving not a purpose but a function. 
 
 Since intelligence is above all things purposive in 
 character, the appearance of actions definitely directed to 
 and determined by the ends which they serve is perhaps 
 the most critical moment in the evolution of Mind. How 
 are we to understand this determination .'' Let us first be 
 clear that where there is purpose there we can say that 
 this particular action is determined by this particular end. 
 Where there is adaptation without purpose, any given 
 action is not determined by its own end, but by a structure 
 which has grown up by subserving results which were 
 " ends " only to the onlooker. The " mechanical " reflex 
 is a fixed type of reaction to a stimulus of a certain kind. 
 Given stimulus and organism, the reaction is always the 
 same. We move, so to say, in a region of universals, and 
 action apparently purposive is in reality blind. A fish will 
 dart at a wriggling worm. This satisfies a need. Is it done 
 in order to satisfy the need .'' It seems rather that the sight 
 of the wriggling object causes the dart, since wriggling things 
 that are not edible — a thread to which a button is hang- 
 ing, or a curl of cigarette smoke,^ will have the same effect. 
 A male frog at mating time is provided with a machinery 
 for grasping the female, but he will as readily grasp other 
 ' Bateson, loc. cit, 
 
 M 
 
1 62 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 objects of appropriate size. In the readjustments discussed 
 in the last chapter, we find these types of reaction changed 
 by experience of results, but they are changed for fresh 
 types, fresh niethods of reaction. The mind in that stage 
 acquires new habits, but habits they are still. Thus a 
 child is accustomed to drink from its special mug. 
 Another mug would do quite as well, but there is a 
 domestic storm because the proper mug cannot be found. 
 As long as habit is dominant, we cannot speak of purposive 
 action, action determined by an end, but must still call it 
 adaptive action, action issuing from a structure inherited or 
 acquired in response to a stimulus which calls it forth in 
 all circumstances until the structure is further modified. 
 Where, on the other hand, we have action not based on 
 habit, but on the relation between the thing done and the 
 result of doing it, there we have purpose. In acquired 
 adaptation, though the response produces a result suited to 
 the organism, it is performed, not because the result will 
 follow In this particular case, but, in the last analysis, 
 because similar results have followed in previous cases, and 
 they have fixed the habit. In purposive action, so far as 
 it is purposive, there is no habit fixed, but the response to 
 the surroundings is determined by the effect which it will 
 have In the particular case ; that is to say, by the relation 
 between act and consequence. Hence we do not respond 
 uniformly to similar surroundings, but take Into account 
 anything that, though outside the range of perception. Is 
 relevant to our object. Thus, I get up and leave the room 
 to fetch a book which I left upstairs, not because anything 
 which I see or feel moves me to rise and walk, but because 
 I wish to get the book ; and I direct my steps to the room 
 where I left It just now, and not to the bookshelf from 
 which I have fetched It a hundred times before.^ It is 
 clear that purposive action as thus defined will have a 
 much wider range and be capable of much more complex 
 and subtle application to varying circumstances than 
 adaptive action at Its best. We have already distinguished 
 
 • Unless, indeed, in a fit of absence, I relapse into a mechanical mode 
 of action, and then very probably my feet will carry me on the more 
 accustomed path. 
 
VIII PRACTICAL JUDGMENT 163 
 
 conation from mechanism on the ground that the conative 
 state is in some way determined by its relation to the 
 state that comes out of it. It is not till we come to the 
 level of purpose that the full meaning of this distinction 
 becomes clear. A purposive act or state is a cause of 
 events like other states of the organism, but it is a cause 
 which knows itself, that appreciates its own tendency, 
 direction, and probable effects. This knowledge is more- 
 over essential to its operation and guides it. Every act 
 which the purposive state of mind dictates is done because 
 of its causal relation to the final result. Indeed, the bare 
 existence of the purposive state itself is conditioned by 
 the foresight directing the impulse which it contains. It 
 is thus dependent for its being on its own tendency 
 to bring other things about. We may then define 
 purpose as a state which determines acts in accordance 
 with the results which they tend to produce. This it 
 effects in the human being through the medium of 
 anticipatory ideas, and we have to ask how far and with 
 what modifications the definition will apply to types 
 of conation from which ideas are excluded. Of these we 
 have seen two. Nearest to purpose stands sensori-motor 
 action, in which response is determined by the needs of the 
 occasion in relation to the complexity and varying move- 
 ments of unique surroundings. In leaping to catch a 
 ball the act certainly seems to be determined by what is 
 coming out of it, but if we resolutely exclude anticipatory 
 ideas we are denying that direct reference to the future 
 which such determination implies. If the response is 
 truly and exclusively sensory, we must suppose the state 
 of excitement to be one which favours and maintains 
 approach to the ball and suppresses adverse movements, 
 while in so doing it adapts itself continually to the 
 changing relations of the ball and the player. More 
 generally, in successful sensori-motor response that selec- 
 tion of type movements which in fact favours the 
 result will be maintained. If this is so the acts 
 will be determined by relation to their results but 
 indirectly, and this will be the point of distinction from 
 true purpose. 
 
 M 2 
 
164 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 Still more indirect is the relation in cases of the vague 
 motions maintained, varied, or repeated under the influence 
 of an uncomfortable situation or a persistent stimulus. 
 Here the tendency of movements to give relief is quite 
 general and uncertain, and the conative influence is seen 
 only in the double fact that some movement is maintained 
 while each particular movement that brings no relief is 
 discarded, modified, or reversed. The bearing of the 
 result upon the act is only definite so far as it is 
 negative. 
 
 Conation in general, we may conclude, is a state which 
 seeks to pass into some other — which is, in fact, conditioned 
 by its tendency to do so. This other may be quite in- 
 definite, and the acts to which the conation gives rise equally 
 undefined and inappropriate ; or it may be definite but, as 
 in sensori-motor action, not foreseen, so that it operates 
 on the action only through the sense of approximation, 
 which confirms what falls into line and eliminates the rest. 
 Lastly, in purpose it may come before the mind as an 
 idea, and each act and the entire movement are then 
 determined definitely by the contribution which they make 
 to the result. 
 
 d. Purpose and knowledge of relations. 
 
 Purpose, if the above account is correct, involves 
 an idea of the end. Action can be directly based on 
 a relation of end to means only if there is knowledge 
 of that relation. Such knowledge, however, is in itself 
 quite distinct from a habit of action, and is attained 
 in a different way. It may, for example, be derived 
 directly or indirectly from passive observation. Hence 
 a second characteristic of purposive action. It is based 
 on knowledge, not on habit, and conversely, if we 
 have evidence that an act is based on knowledge, we have 
 evidence that it is purposive. Such evidence, as has been 
 hinted, may be derived from the nature of the experience 
 antecedent to an action. Thus, in the example of the 
 book, my movements are based on the knowledge of 
 various relations derived from experience (of the house 
 and its parts, memory of where I left the book, and so on), 
 and in its determining factors there is nothing either in- 
 
VIII PRACTICAL JUDGMENT 165 
 
 stinctive or habitual.' The action may be so far novel that 
 I may never have left a book in this particular room before. 
 Experience gives knowledge of certain relations which are 
 utilised in action when they can be so applied to present 
 circumstances as to lead up to a desired end. The relations 
 may be first perceived in circumstances in which they are 
 indifferent, and give rise to no reaction. They are after- 
 wards applied in fresh circumstances, and so become a 
 guide to action. Clearly, in such instances, there is no 
 preformed habit. 
 
 As judged from outward action, then, the certain 
 signs of purposive action appear so far to be these two : 
 The relation upon which it is based may be experi- 
 enced without leading to the formation of a habit ; ^ 
 and again, may be applied in circumstances differing 
 from those in which it was originally perceived. Action 
 may often be purposive without possessing these marks, 
 but where we find these marks we may be sure that it 
 is purposive. 
 
 e. Idea and Desire. 
 
 The purposive act, not being guided by response to per- 
 ception, is determined by reference to an end. This act of 
 reference we know in the human consciousness as an idea. 
 We are thus brought to the primitive function that ideas 
 fulfil in conduct. As long as impulses are fixed in rela- 
 tion to stimulus, whether by heredity or habit, action 
 neither requires nor tolerates any further guide. But if 
 the ends of an impulse are to be served by actions varying 
 from case to case, a uniform reaction to uniform stimulus 
 will no longer do. Minor adjustments to perceived varia- 
 tions are effected by present consciousness in sensori- 
 motor action, but if behaviour is to be suitably adapted to 
 remote results something more is required, and the case 
 
 ' This statement applies only to the determining factors of the act, for, 
 just as the walking is a reflex, so my turning one way or another may be, 
 when once the general direction is fixed, carried out more or less 
 mechanically. Conscious adjustments constantly make use of subordinate 
 mechanical factors. 
 
 2 The clearest case of this is, of course, where the relation experienced 
 is not between the action of an organism and its effects, but between two 
 or more events or objects which it perceives. 
 
1 66 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 is met in the human world by a formulation of the end 
 to which one is impelled, along with its relation to the 
 surrounding circumstances. The formulation of the end 
 constitutes an Idea, and the impulse so qualified becomes 
 a Desire. In the animal world, though we know nothing 
 of what passes in an animal's consciousness, we must yet, 
 if we find action similarly determined, impute to the 
 animal something which, if not an idea, is capable of per- 
 forming an identical function. If ideas arise in this way 
 as a definition of impulse, it is easy to understand that 
 they carry a motor excitement with them. Action 
 would seem to be the primitive and natural accom- 
 paniment of an idea, and it is only in the course of 
 further evolution that ideas arise which do not prompt 
 to action. 
 
 5. /. Knowledge of Objects and Analogy. 
 
 Two further points remain in which the application of 
 concrete experience is contrasted with habituation. First, 
 since perception yields knowledge of objects as wholes 
 containing related elements, it makes possible inferences 
 concerning objects which are similar as wholes, that is in 
 the arrangement of their parts rather than in any special 
 sense-quality. Inferences of this character seem to underlie 
 much of our practical thinking about the common objects 
 of life. We may be at a loss to name any single important 
 sense-quality in which, say, two animals resemble each 
 other ; and yet we are sure that there is a real identity of 
 character which will make them for many purposes act 
 alike. Such an inference, drawn, as it continually is, with- 
 out any analytical reflection, is the rudest form of analogy, 
 being based on what are really similarities of relation. 
 Such similarities may appear as an influence in practical 
 inference as soon as wholes of related elements are dis- 
 tinctly experienced — that is to say, as soon as we attain to 
 knowledge of concrete objects ; and unless there is such 
 knowledge, it is hard to see on what such an inference 
 could rest. Hence, conversely, inference based on such a 
 similarity as distinguished from identity of sense-quality 
 may be taken as evidence that experience is of the concrete 
 type. 
 
VIII PRACTICAL JUDGMENT 167 
 
 g. Objects as centres of relations. 
 
 Secondly, since the relations in which objects stand are 
 manifold, concrete experience supplies the possibility of 
 reacting to an object in very different ways, according to 
 the purpose in hand. Hence the comparative elasticity of 
 the Practical Judgment in the choice of means, which we 
 have contrasted with the rigidity of habit. 
 
 Now Association is mental habit. If one learns a string 
 of words without meaning, like the Ena^ mena, mona, mite 
 of childhood, each word calls up the other, not through 
 any appropriateness of relation, but through the influence 
 of past sequences. In consequence association, like all other 
 generic bases of reaction, will often act inappropriately. If 
 a man has got into the habit of winding up his watch 
 mechanically when he takes off his waistcoat, he will occa- 
 sionally find himself doing it if he happens to change his 
 clothes at any unusual time in the day. Similarly, if a 
 verse is being repeated by rote, a casual association may 
 lead to the substitution of a word or line belonging to 
 another verse, and making nonsense. These aberrations 
 are, of course, checked in human experience by the fact 
 that nonsense or abnormality at once arrests attention and 
 brings in higher processes than those of association. 
 
 Association, then, tends to form a series in which a calls 
 up b^ b calls up c, and so forth.^ The idea which will 
 follow on a ox b is determinate, and the more so the 
 stronger the association. If there is a well-rooted associa- 
 tion between a and ^, b is the only possible follower of a. 
 The term a may stand in relation to very many other 
 terms, but by association it will preferably excite the idea 
 of one of them — that one with which it is most intimately 
 associated. If more than one association has been formed, 
 the weaker must either give way or serve merely to 
 distract and weaken attention unless consciousness is com- 
 prehensive enough to hold both ideas before it in their 
 distinctness. Here, then, association is at a disadvantage 
 
 1 It is true that earlier antecedents have their effect. In repeating a 
 verse by rote, it would hardly be accurate to think, for example, of each 
 word as the sole cause determining the reproduction of the word following 
 it. The general remembrance of the verse produces a mental atmosphere 
 which is, no doubt, an underlying condition of correct reproduction. 
 
1 68 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 as compared with the judgment. Concrete experience 
 yields us knowledge of objects which are the meeting 
 points of many relations. An object in space, for instance, 
 is related to an indefinite number of surrounding objects. 
 One of these related objects, and perhaps one only, is 
 relevant to the purpose of the moment. To this object, 
 whether it is that suggested by the dominant Association 
 or not, our purpose will direct our thoughts. On another 
 occasion, a quite different object may be the one relevant 
 to our purpose, and the direction of our thought is altered 
 accordingly. Thus, while association brings up the same 
 ideas with dull uniformity, the purposive judgment selects 
 from the material presented by experience the relation 
 which it requires.^ 
 
 IV. General Character of Concrete Experience and the 
 Practical Judgment. 
 
 6. Concrete Experience consists in the perception of 
 surrounding objects in their changes and relations. The 
 elements of a percept being connected, a single experience 
 may have a permanent effect, shown in its capacity for 
 being revived. Such revival in relation to a present per- 
 ception constitutes the Practical Judgment of which the 
 unperceived elements are concrete ideas. An impulse 
 directed by such an idea is purposive, and constitutes a 
 Desire. Such is broadly the group of related psychological 
 elements which characterise the stage of Concrete Experi- 
 ence and the Practical Judgment. 
 
 The use of experience in action has at this stage certain 
 distinctive features, through which it presents a well- 
 marked contrast with the work of Assimilation. 
 
 The basis of action consists of data of experience in 
 their relations. Of these data, we observe that : 
 
 (i) Only one experience is required as a basis of 
 future action. In the case of assimilation a single 
 experience may have an enduring though seldom a 
 permanent effect in directly checking or in forming a 
 conative tendency. In establishing any longer or more 
 
 ' I.e., so far as the purpose is dominant. In the concrete the stronger 
 association tends to conflict with the purpose, and may overwhelm it. I 
 am again contrasting limiting cases. 
 
viii PRACTICAL JUDGMENT 169 
 
 complex series of actions it is only the massive effect 
 of repeated experience that operates. 
 
 (2) The relations given in experience, and guiding 
 subsequent action, may be relations between any objects 
 of perception, and are not (as in the case of Assimilation) 
 confined to those between sensations and the motor 
 excitements immediately attendant on them. Hence, 
 further 
 
 a. Inferences may be based on a general similarity 
 
 (a similar relation of parts), and not merely on 
 similarity in a distinct sense-quality. 
 
 b. The same content may stand in several distinct 
 
 relations without confusion. In the case of 
 Assimilation (and Association) one content leads 
 uniformly to one other. 
 
 (3) The results of experience are applied to action in 
 a manner not determined by the experience itself. In the 
 case of Assimilation, the application of experience is not 
 distinct from its acquisition, the formation of a habit 
 being the formation of a tendency to act. 
 
 Thus, what is effected in this stage is a correlation 
 between complexes which themselves involve related 
 elements, i.e.^ between articulate complexes. On the 
 one side we have data perceived as distinct but related, 
 on the other means adopted in relation to distinct ends : 
 the correlation consisting in the process by which the 
 one complex gives rise to the other. Both complexes 
 belong to the perceptual order.^ 
 
 It will be seen that the unit of this process from first to 
 last is the complex of related terms whether given in percep- 
 tion or grasped in an idea starting from a perception. In 
 this complex the relation is not apprehended in abstraction 
 from the terms, but the terms in their relation constitute 
 an articulate whole.^ There are three stages in the ex- 
 
 • The act and its result may not in fact be perceived, but they are 
 particular events in time congruous with those which form the contents 
 of perception, i.e., they are of the perceptual order. 
 
 ^ In any articulate perception the relations contained contribute to the 
 character of the whole as much as the elements that are related, and in 
 that sense the relations must be said to be perceived. It does not follow 
 that the character of any of the relations concerned is analysed out and 
 
lyo MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 perience of relations which should be distinguished. In 
 the first, a relation between a and b affects the mind 
 though A and b are never apprehended as related. This 
 is the case of assimilation where, e.g., a feeling modifies 
 the effect of a sensation, though the sequence sensation- 
 feeling is never grasped. In the third and highest, the 
 relation a between the two terms a — b is distinguished, 
 named, and compared with others. Thus in the same 
 instance the relation is known as one of sequence, 
 perhaps as one of causation. Here there is knowledge 
 of the relation as such, and we are in the world of 
 " universals " or general conceptions. In the second 
 and intermediate stage the relation is not apprehended 
 as such, but the terms in their relation are grasped 
 together. The datum of experience is here the content 
 A — B. In our instance the whole proceeding, feeling- 
 foUowing-on-sensation, is apprehended, though the relation 
 of sequence is not dissected out and so prepared for 
 naming and comparison with others. This I call the 
 stage of Concrete Experience and the Practical Judgment, 
 and its unit is an articulate complex in the perceptual 
 order. 
 
 Apart from introspection, we may justly impute this 
 knowledge of objects in relation when we find action 
 based on the relation a — b as distinct from the contents 
 A, or B, alone. The marks distinguishing action of such 
 a character have been enumerated above. 
 
 V. The Practical Judgment as a stage in the Correlation 
 of Experiences. 
 
 7. It remains to characterise in general terms the 
 Method and Scope of the correlation effected in this stage, 
 
 distinguished from the terms which compose it. When I look at any 
 complex object, as, e.g., the front of a house, I am aware of a whole with 
 many distinct parts. These parts are in definite relations to one another. 
 I may concentrate attention on any pair ; e.g., a window to the right of the 
 door. I then not merely see the door and window, but see them in their 
 relation to one another. By an act of analysis I can go further, and 
 make of the relation a distinct object of thought, independent of the 
 terms which it connects in this particular case. But in so doing I pass 
 from perception to conception. When I speak of a relation as perceptual, 
 or even as " perceived," I mean that it is not thus distinguished, but is 
 an element in a perceived whole. 
 
VIII PRACTICAL JUDGMENT 171 
 
 and to contrast it with the work of the lower stage of 
 Assimilation. 
 
 As to scope, the first or lower stage is concerned with 
 the correlation of sense stimuli and resulting feelings, and 
 its function is to define and regulate instinctive and 
 random action. The second or higher stage deals with 
 concrete objects, and the adjustment of action to make or 
 meet changes in the physical surroundings. Its relation 
 to instinct will be discussed later. 
 
 As to method, we have found that the basis of the 
 whole process is a perceived relation — in itself a corre- 
 lation of distinct experiences. The terminus of the pro- 
 cess is again what we have called a practical relation : an 
 adjustment of means to ends ; once more an act of 
 correlation. Further, the second act of correlation is, as 
 we have seen, based upon the first ; and there is thus a 
 wider kind of correlation, including the two constituent 
 relations which form the starting point and the conclusion. 
 We have expressed this by describing this stage as a 
 correlation of articulate complexes. 
 
 If for the word correlation we substitute inference, the 
 process described shows a clear analogy to one familiar to 
 logicians. It resembles, in short, the inference from 
 particulars to particulars in which the implied universal is 
 not made explicit. That is to say, a particular relation 
 Aj — Bi is perceived ; and where in a second case Aj is given, 
 the correlate Bg is inferred. 
 
 This inference is equivalent to the passage in the 
 syllogism from the minor premiss (this is Aj) to the con- 
 clusion (it will be B2). What is called the inference from 
 particulars to particulars then may also be described as an 
 argument from minor to conclusion, founded on observed 
 parallels. 
 
 We must try to understand clearly how far inference at 
 this stage differs from the corresponding process In the 
 lower stage. 
 
 Consider the case of the chick which learns to peck at 
 yolk of egg. We may explain this as acquired habit 
 or as acquired knowledge. In the former case, a series of 
 experiences gradually^remodels action. In the latter, an ex- 
 
172 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 perienced relation is grasped and applied. If the latter 
 explanation is adopted, we naturally express it by saying 
 that the chick has learnt that yolk of egg is good, but it 
 is essential to note that to express the result in general 
 terms is precisely what the chick cannot do. The chick, 
 we are assuming, perceives the relation in each instance in 
 which it is given, and later on expects the coming result 
 before it is given. The man, observing the chick's action, 
 sees that it is working upon a principle that might be 
 stated in general terms ; but it is the man that states the 
 principle, not the chick. 
 
 If, to carry the matter a stage further, the man were 
 addicted to formal logic, he would express the whole 
 process, as it goes on in his own mind, in the well-known 
 scheme of induction and syllogism. Thus : 
 
 1. This, that, and the other yolk of egg is good. 
 
 2. Yolk of egg is good. 
 
 3. This is a piece of yolk. 
 
 4. This is good. 
 
 Now, if the chick's intelligence reaches the second stage, 
 but no higher, it grasps the relation expressed in (i), (3), 
 and (4) of these stages, but not that expressed in (2). At 
 each trial it has recognised the fact that " this piece of yolk 
 is good," and having grasped this it is at a later stage 
 capable of forming the judgment which combines (3) and 
 (4). That is to say, we may represent it as saying to 
 itself : " This is a piece of yolk : it will be good." In 
 other words, it has previously grasped the particular re- 
 lations upon which its subsequent inference rests, and the 
 inference itself consists in the grasping of a relation of 
 which only one term is perceived. This stage is then a 
 correlation of related elements, and if we compare it to 
 explicit inference as analysed in syllogism, we may say 
 that the concrete relations upon which the major premiss 
 is based are perceived, and the relation which leads from 
 minor to conclusion is judged, while the major premiss is 
 represented by the psychological result of the repeated 
 perceptions; a result shown in the power of judging the 
 relation in a fresh case when only one term is perceived. 
 
 If now again we reverse our supposition, and reduce the 
 
VIII PRACTICAL JUDGMENT 173 
 
 intelligence of the chick to the lower stage, we shall find 
 that much less is explicit, and much more psychological 
 process that we can only know by its results. We shall 
 now have to say that the relations known to the onlooker 
 are never perceived as such by the chick, but that each 
 trial of the yolk goes to build up a habit (which takes the 
 place of the major premiss), which on the perception of the 
 yolk, issues at once in pecking. The perception of the 
 yolk corresponds to the minor premiss, and the pecking 
 to the conclusion of this practical syllogism ; but the 
 chick does not, according to our analysis of this stage, 
 grasp the relation which unites them ; he merely passes 
 from the one to the others. In short, the minor premiss 
 is here replaced by a perception acting upon a preformed 
 disposition. We may express the contrast by saying that 
 in the lower stage, at the moment of action, the conclusion 
 alone is the explicit object of consciousness. "This is to 
 be pecked at " expresses the chick's consciousness ; that, 
 and no more. In the second and higher stage, the relation 
 of minor and conclusion is explicit, " This, being yolk of 
 egg, is to be pecked at." Thus in the lower stage, the 
 conclusion appears as an impulse, issuing from all that has 
 gone before as its psychological basis. There is correlation 
 between a set of experiences on the one side, and a mode 
 of reaction to stimulus on the other. The higher stage is 
 essentially a process of perception and judgment — a cor- 
 relation of articulate complexes each containing related 
 elements. 
 
 Finally, the transition from the lower to the higher stage 
 rests on the growth of experience in clearness and compre- 
 hensiveness. In the primitive experience, the feeling 
 modifies the sensation which it follows. Let the scope of 
 consciousness be extended so that sensation and feeling may 
 be apprehended together while yet remaining distinct, and 
 the content sensation-giving-place-to-feeling comes into 
 being. This is the germ of the higher stage. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 LEARNING AMONG THE HIGHER ANIMALS. THE METHOD 
 OF TRIAL AND ERROR 
 
 We have now to ask whether there is any evidence that 
 this stage of intelligence is attained by any animals other 
 than man. 
 
 I . Let us begin by considering a very simple instance of 
 the apparently purposive choice of means to an end. I 
 once had a cat which learnt to " knock at the door " by 
 lifting the mat outside and letting it fall.^ The common 
 account of this proceeding would be that the cat did it in 
 order to get in. It assumes the cat's action to be 
 determined by its end. Is the common account wrong ? 
 Let us test it by trying explanations founded on the more 
 primitive operations of experience. First, then, can we 
 explain the cat's action by the association of ideas .'' The 
 obvious difficulty here is to find the idea or perception 
 which sets the process going. The sight of a door or a 
 mat was not, so far as I am aware, associated in the cat's 
 experience with the action which it performed until it had 
 performed it. If there were association, it must be said to 
 work retrogressively. The cat associates the idea of getting 
 in with that of someone coming to the door, and this again 
 with the making of a sound to attract attention, and so 
 forth. Those who hold langua:ge of this kind are really 
 describing what I have called the Practical Judgment in 
 diiferent terms. Such a series of associations so well 
 adjusted means in reality a set of related elements grasped 
 
 ' The habit is, I believe, not uncommon among cats. 
 174 
 
CH.ix. LEARNING AMONG HIGHER ANIMALS 175 
 
 by the animal and used to determine its action. Ideas of 
 "persons," "opening doors," "attracting attention," and so 
 forth, would have no effect unless attached to the existing 
 circumstances. If the cat has such abstract ideas at all, 
 she must have something more — namely, the power of 
 applying them to present perception. The " ideas " of 
 calling attention and of dropping the mat must somehow 
 be brought together. Further, if the process is one of 
 association, it is a strange coincidence that the right asso- 
 ciates are chosen. If the cat began on a string of associations 
 starting from the people in the room, she might as easily 
 go on to dwell on the pleasures of getting in, of how she 
 would coax a morsel of fish from one or a saucerful of 
 cream from another, and so spend her time in idle reverie. 
 But she avoids these associations, and selects those suited 
 to her purpose. In short, we find signs on the one hand 
 of the application of ideas, on the other of selection. Both 
 of these features indicate a higher stage than that of sheer 
 association. This we shall always find, if we endeavour to 
 apply the association of ideas regressively as explaining 
 the apparent choice of means to a desired end. 
 
 But there is another possible line of explanation. Mr. 
 Lloyd Morgan's dog Tony learned to open a gate by lifting 
 the latch with his. head. I do not know how my cat 
 learnt to knock, but Mr. Lloyd Morgan tells us that Tony 
 
 " after looking out between the bars in a number of places in 
 the railings, at length chanced to gaze out under, and at the 
 same time inadvertently lift, the latch." [The dog then] " after 
 a while profited by the fortunate results of an originally fortuitous 
 experience, and now opens the gate whenever he wants to 
 do so." 1 
 
 Here, then, is a way back to association. It is of course 
 still possible on the facts before us that Tony grasped the 
 relation which he had once experienced — saw, however 
 vaguely, that pushing in his head at a particular point and 
 then lifting it would get the gate open, and that he after- 
 wards applied this knowledge. But it is also possible that 
 the pleasure of getting through became associated with 
 
 ^ Habit and Instinct, p. 154. 
 
176 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 that method of action and " stamped it in " — in other 
 words, that the action assimilated the character of its result 
 and became in itself attractive to the dog. 
 
 2. Mr. Thorndikes Experiments. 
 
 This method of explanation, which, it will be seen, 
 virtually dispenses not only with a knowledge of relations, 
 but with association of ideas, and carries us back to the 
 stage of assimilation,^ has been applied as a sort of universal 
 solvent by Mr. Thorndike.^ Mr. Thorndike's view, based 
 upon a number of ingenious experiments with cats, dogs, 
 and chicken, is, roughly, that the acquired actions of all 
 animals below the primates are to be explained upon that 
 principle of the selection of the successful act and elimina- 
 tion of failures which we applied in Chapter VII. to explain 
 retrogressive associations. Mr. Thorndike does not go 
 quite as far as to deny animals all images or ideas whatever, 
 but his general position and tendency are not unfairly 
 represented by the following passage. 
 
 " 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 there- 
 fore, and therefore only, a certain situation brings forth a certain 
 act." 3 
 
 In any case, he seems pretty clear that the association of 
 ideas is not the important point, but rather the impulse- 
 feeling association. 
 
 " The groundwork of animal associations is not the association 
 of ideas., but the association of idea or sense-impression with 
 impulsed * 
 
 The general conception of the life of the higher animals 
 that results is so interesting as to deserve quotation in full. 
 
 " One who had 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 
 
 ^ This method of learning, depending on repeated blundering efforts 
 with fortuitous successes that are gradually selected, has been called by 
 Mr. Lloyd Morgan the Method of Trial and Error. 
 
 2 "Animal Intelligence," Psych. Rev. Mon. Supp., Vol. II. No. 4. 
 
 3 P. 73- * P- 71- 
 
IX LEARNING AMONG HIGHER ANIMALS 177 
 
 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 in- 
 tention, so to speak, when we feel our own body, and the im- 
 pulses 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 aesthetic 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. 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 of 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." ^ 
 
 It would be out of place to examine Mr. Thorndike's 
 interesting paper in full detail, but we may consider 
 
 1 Pp. 83, 84. 
 
 N 
 
1 78 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 the main reasons which lead him to this remarkable 
 conclusion. 
 
 Mr. Thorndike's principal experiments consisted in 
 placing cats, dogs, and chickens in a variety of cages so 
 contrived that they could be opened by means well within 
 the animal's physical powers, yet quite outside the range 
 of its ordinary experience. Thus clawing at a string, de- 
 pressing a lever, pushing aside a swing door and so forth en- 
 abled the prisoner to escape. It was found that the cat or 
 dog — we may confine our attention to them — at first clawed 
 and scratched more or less indiscriminately ; in so doing 
 it would in course of time give, by accident, the required 
 push or pull, and so obtain its freedom. After a certain 
 number of repetitions, the animal would acquire the power 
 of doing what was needed more and more quickly, until 
 at last the trick was properly learnt. The right action was 
 " stamped in " by success, while the indiscriminate pawing 
 was stamped out. As a measure of the perfection of the 
 habit, the time required to achieve freedom is taken 
 practically as the sole test. The results are exhibited 
 graphically in " time curves," falling with more or less 
 marked fluctuations from the maximum point of several 
 minutes, to the minimum of a few seconds. Some of the 
 tricks, it may be mentioned, were decidedly complex. One 
 was a "thumb latch" complicated by the fact that after 
 the latch was lifted the door still required a force of 400 
 grammes to open it, and still more by the fact that the 
 latch would "fall back into place again unless the door 
 were pushed out at least a little." Another, called Box J, 
 required two separate movements to open it ; others called 
 K and L required three such movements. Bearing in mind 
 that the result in these movements would be something 
 utterly foreign to the initial experiences of the cats, and 
 would to the end remain connected only by the observed 
 fact of sequence and not by any perceived continuity, one 
 is somewhat surprised at the measure of success which the 
 animals achieved. All the cats learned some of the tricks, 
 and all the tricks appear to have been learnt by some. 
 The dogs were not so uniformly successful. Let us 
 then examine the grounds on which Mr. Thorndike uses 
 
IX LEARNING AMONG HIGHER ANIMALS 179 
 
 observations which some writers might have taken as a 
 proof of high intelligence, as proving precisely the 
 contrary. 
 
 3. a. Habituation and number of instances. 
 
 Explicit memory, as we have seen, serves as a basis for 
 inference from a single experience. If we could convert 
 the proposition and be assured that inferences from a 
 single experience imply explicit memory, then we could 
 without further difficulty assign memory and the type of 
 inference based on it to many animals. The elephant or 
 the dog that long cherish vindictiveness for a single 
 injury, the horse which knows better than its rider the road 
 they have once traversed, and that perhaps in a contrary 
 direction, could be said without more ado to draw inferences 
 of this type. We must return to this point later. It 
 is enough for the present to remark that while habits are, 
 as every one knows, generally formed gradually by many 
 repetitions, explicit memory is due to a single experience. 
 
 Mr. Thorndike's first argument is based upon this 
 contrast. 
 
 "The gradual slope of the time-curve, then, shows the absence 
 of reasoning. They represent the wearing smooth of a path in 
 the brain, not the decisions of a rational consciousness." ^ 
 
 But is the slope gradual .'' Turning to the actual curves 
 (p. 1 8, fF.) there seem to be many cases in which it is not 
 so by any means. Thus in box D, which was opened by 
 pulling a string at the top of the box, one cat appears to 
 have learnt the way of escape after four successful trials 
 (the failures clearly would have no direct influence), 
 another after two trials, another after one only. That is 
 to say, after the trials mentioned, the time taken, though 
 slightly fluctuating, did not exceed half a minute. Another 
 cat appears to have learnt the trick in one trial — though 
 its time afterwards rose in two cases to about a minute, 
 and after many experiments it became so well versed in 
 the matter that a lapse of seventy-two days only raised its 
 time to a little over a minute again.^ 
 
 ' P. 45- 
 
 ^ I speak with some diffidence as to the exact numbers, as the curves 
 are not so drawn as to be particularly easy to measure. On this point, 
 
 N 2 
 
i8o MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 Take Box E again, where the cats had to put out a paw 
 and claw a string outside the box — a thing that would hardly 
 be done accidentally in many minutes of random clawing, 
 and would, one would say, not be done twice over in 
 such a manner within twenty experiments. One cat 
 (No. 6) after one success reduced its time to about ninety 
 seconds, and after the third trial to fifty seconds. It had a 
 few more trials, and after fourteen days its first experiment 
 took about one minute. These figures surely suggest 
 partial recollection rapidly becoming perfect, rather than a 
 slowly ingrained habit. Box I, which was opened by a 
 lever, appears to have been mastered by cat No. 3 in one 
 instance, while Nos. 4 and 5 seem to have had no difficulty 
 with it from the beginning — their time never rising much 
 beyond half a minute, and remaining at a minimum after 
 the lapse of many days. 
 
 In many cases no doubt the fluctuations persist longer 
 and the instances approximate more closely to the type 
 required by Mr. Thorndike's argument. But a few 
 instances to the contrary are sufficient to disprove his 
 sweeping general statement. It is quite possible that some 
 of the cats learnt the tricks more intelligently than others, 
 just as some failed to learn many tricks altogether. These 
 diiFerences are still more marked in the case of the few 
 dogs experimented on. Hardly any of their time curves 
 can be called gradual — unless the slope of a church steeple 
 is gradual. In the lever box, one dog's time curve came 
 down from several minutes to fifty seconds after a single 
 success. Another began with a time of some forty seconds 
 only, which he reduced in three experiments to eight or 
 ten. A third seems to have got the trick nearly perfect 
 after one success, and quite so after two. It seems 
 
 and in the whole examination of Mr. Thorndike's important monograph, 
 I have been specially helped by Mr. A. E. Taylor. 
 
 As to the fluctuations, it must be observed that the time taken can only 
 be a very rough and imperfect measure of the perfection of the cat's habit 
 or understanding as the case may be. Alterations in degree of livehness, 
 accidental failures to clutch properly, and a dozen other causes, would 
 produce delays, and various fluctuations occurring in cases where habits 
 were well established seem to indicate that this occurred. Mr. Thorn- 
 dike does not seem to realise at all adequately the very rough and ready 
 character of his statistical methods. 
 
IX LEARNING AMONG HIGHER ANIMALS i8i 
 
 superfluous to quote further examples. Mr. Thorndike 
 himself would probably have been impressed by those 
 referred to if he had not entertained an exaggerated 
 conception of the "perfection" of what we have called 
 explicit memory, or memory in its stricter sense. 
 
 ..." Real memory is an absolute thing, including every- 
 thing 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." ^ 
 
 The statement Is so astonishing that one would take it for 
 a mere slip, but that much of Mr. Thorndike's argument 
 is founded upon it. A moment's self -recollection is enough 
 to show that memories of past events or of things learnt 
 are of all degrees of completeness. That it should take 
 four or five trials to teach a cat a novel sort of trick is 
 certainly no more than one would expect on the hypothesis 
 that a clear grasp of the relations involved was being 
 gradually formed and fixed in memory. What Mr. 
 Thorndike's experiments prove, so far, is not that cats 
 and dogs are invariably educated by the association process, 
 i.e., by habituation alone, but, on the contrary, that at least 
 some cats and dogs conform in at least one point to the 
 methods of acquisition by concrete experience — they learn 
 in a very few instances.^ 
 
 4. Failure to learn by being put through an action. 
 
 What we may call the sense-impulse theory of associa- 
 tion implies that an animal can only learn to do a thing by 
 doing it, and so getting the pleasure of success associated 
 with the doing. Now, if one puts an animal through an 
 act to show him how It is done, and if he can learn in this 
 way, the theory breaks down. F'or to have his limbs 
 mechanically moved by the hand is quite a different thing 
 from moving them himself. The set of sensations involved 
 would be, apart from the perception of the movement, in the 
 main different. In particular, the Impulse to move would 
 be absent. This case therefore is critical for the sense- 
 
 1 P. 98. 
 
 "- On the question of the value of time-curves see above, p. 156, note. 
 
1 82 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 impulse theory. Mr. Thorndike himself obtained nega- 
 tive results from his experiments, which he generalises. 
 But here again his experience is surely at variance with 
 common knowledge. I have seen dogs in process of learn- 
 ing tricks by being held in position. Wundt ^ explains 
 that he taught his poodle to shut the door in that fashion 
 — in four or five lessons moreover ; and my wife, who had 
 a pug which shut the door to admiration, tells me that she 
 taught it in the same way. The regular method of teach- 
 ing elephants is, as I am informed by the experienced 
 elephant trainer at the Belle Vue Gardens, Manchester, for 
 the keeper to guide the trunk from point to point.^ To 
 test Mr. Thorndike's assertion, I myself made a little ex- 
 periment with a kitten, which seems clear enough. I 
 showed the kitten some food, fish or milk, and then, setting 
 the dish for a moment on another table near, I lifted the 
 kitten on to a desk, and handed it the food. I did this 
 six times without result, the kitten merely mewing and 
 begging in its own fashion. The seventh time the kitten 
 jumped on to the desk of itself.^ After this I left home, 
 and it had no more lessons for a fortnight. On my return 
 I found that it jumped on to the desk at the first trial, and 
 after that the act became habitual. In this case the kitten 
 did the thing regularly after doing it once ; and it never 
 had any inducement to get on to the table, such as might 
 produce a nascent impulse, in seeing the food there while 
 it was below. It saw the food in my hand, near but not 
 on the desk, or else, as I bent to pick it up, on the table 
 near. 
 
 No doubt cats and dogs differ, and so do their trainers, 
 but even a few positive instances are sufficient to destroy 
 Mr. Thorndike's generalisation.* 
 
 1 Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, p. 360. 
 
 2 See below, p. 198. 
 
 ' On the sixth trial, the kitten got on to a chair as if to get up, but 
 went down again. Except on one day, when I gave it two lessons, the 
 experiments were, roughly, at intervals of twenty-four hours. 
 
 * Mr. Small, whose remarks (American Journal of Psychology, Jan. 
 1900) go to the root of the matter, points out that any "Attempt ... to 
 restrain or constrain the animal would defeat the desired end — attention 
 would assuredly be diverted from the objective point to the restraining 
 conditions — would be lost in the affective absorption induced by them " 
 (p. 163). And commenting on Mr. Thorndike's experiments, he says : 
 
IX LEARNING AMONG HIGHER ANIMALS 183 
 
 5. Failure to imitate. 
 
 A more serious negative result was reached by Mr. 
 Thorndike on another point. He found reason to think 
 that imitation in the sense of "transferred association" does 
 not exist among mammals below the primates. That is to 
 say, that animals never will do a thing because they see 
 others obtain their ends by so doing. Cats and dogs were 
 shut up in boxes, and allowed to watch the method by 
 which another cat or dog escaped from another compart- 
 ment of the box. To this compartment they were 
 afterwards admitted, and it was found that they had learnt 
 nothing. These experiments are of somewhat doubtful 
 value.^ So far as they go, they fall in with the view to 
 which I have been led independently, that an animal 
 makes no intellectual provision for the future. If the 
 cat could say to itself, " There is my friend Tom in the 
 outer compartment. I shall be let in there in a minute, 
 so I will watch, and see how Tom gets out;" it would 
 doubtless watch Tom's proceedings with care, but it would 
 also be a much more reflective animal than it is. The 
 probability is rather that its attention is aroused only as a 
 rule by the act or object that leads up to or is connected 
 with the end to which it is itself striving. Other things 
 may strike it by chance, but its interest is not directed to 
 them. Thus it would be more likely that one animal 
 would imitate another if both were trying to escape or to 
 get fed at the same time.^ Whether under these conditions 
 
 " This method manifestly disregards the factor of attention above adverted 
 to, and consequently fails to demonstrate the absence in animals of those 
 higher associative processes involved in inferential imitation " (p. 164). 
 It follows that the method would be much less likely to succeed with a 
 cat, which resents being held, than with the obedient elephant or the 
 trustful dog. I failed in my attempt to use it with a Rhesus monkey 
 (see below, p. 284). 
 
 ' Mr. Thorndike says that the cats watched their instructors " more or 
 less," and afterwards reckons up the number of times which a cat 
 " probably saw " or " certainly saw." My own experience in experiment- 
 ing convinces me so strongly of the difficulty of judging what a cat or 
 dog really sees — even when I am making a direct effort to get its atten- 
 tion — that I am surprised that so experienced an investigator should 
 speak of certainty in connection with the question whether one cat saw 
 another perform a seemingly trivial operation on the other side of a 
 grating. 
 
 ^ Mr. Thorndike tried this experiment with two cats, of which, one, in 
 fact, succeeded. Mr. Thorndike, however, states that it acted just like 
 
1 84 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 there might be reflective imitation — imitation based on 
 the perception of another's act and its result to that 
 other — remains uncertain. 
 
 What has first to be settled is the possibility of a still 
 simpler mental act — learning by the perception of an event 
 and its consequence — when that consequence directly affects 
 the learner. If an animal sees something done which has 
 the immediate effect of giving it what it wants, then the 
 something done falls within the sphere of interest as above 
 
 the others who formed the association by accident. But I notice in 
 Mr. Thomdike's table that this particular cat only succeeded in one other 
 box ; we are not told in how many it failed. In any case, Mr. Thorndike 
 seems to be in error in arguing that there was no imitation because the 
 one cat used its teeth to pull the string, and the other its claw. In my 
 experiments I found that animals frequently varied their own method in 
 this fashion. Mr. Thomdike's argument would only hold against a purely 
 mechanical and unintelligent theory of imitation. 
 
 Another cat failed to climb up netting, though eighty times it saw other 
 cats climb up and get fed ; but as Mr. Thorndike tells us that even when 
 a piece of fish was held out through the netting he would not climb after 
 it, this result is not very surprising. If the cat would not climb to get 
 fish which he saw before him, it is not likely that he would climb because 
 he saw others do so. 
 
 In the remaining experiment mentioned by Mr. Thorndike, two cats 
 learned to do as a third, but they did not " form the association more 
 quickly than they would have done alone." But how quickly would they 
 have formed it alone ? One could only judge from the speed of other 
 cats, and nothing is more unsafe than to infer from the performance of 
 one animal to that of another. 
 
 Mr. W. S. Small's experiments with rats {American Journal of 
 Psychology, Jan. 1900) are more satisfactory on this point. They go to 
 show — (a) that when two or more rats are confronted with a difficulty 
 [e.g., to find their way into a box to get food) one will overcome it first, 
 and there will be no tendency on the part of the others to learn from him 
 as long as he is there. They will follow him, and very likely rob him, 
 but they will leave him to do the work. But {b) if the pioneer rat is 
 removed, the effect is not uniform. In several instances the remaining 
 rats seemed to have learned nothing ; but in the case of four young rats 
 called A, B, c, and D, the results seemed to favour imitation. Here rat A 
 learnt the trick first in an hour and a quarter. As long as he remained 
 in the box, no other rat seems to have made any attempt to help or learn 
 from him, but on his removal, rat B made the attempt, and succeeded in 
 two and a half minutes. Again, when B was removed, c succeeded in 
 the same time. D was not tried alone. This does, 1 think, suggest that 
 both B and C had learnt something from A, but Mr. Small seems to 
 think that what they learnt was merely to attack the door and not waste 
 time on the rest of the box. What is most instructive in aiding us to 
 judge the value of negative results is the total change in the behav- 
 iour of these rats as soon as the pioneer is removed. If a rat finds 
 that steaUng is easier than work, he will leave his friend to work, and for 
 his own part will adhere to his stealing. There is evidently a good deal 
 of human nature in rats. 
 
IX LEARNING AMONG HIGHER ANIMALS 185 
 
 defined. Do animals profit by experience of this kind ? 
 If so, their action falls outside the category of habituation. 
 If an animal pulls a string because having done so before it 
 has given him pleasure, it is possible to regard his educa- 
 tion as the gradual growth of a random way of acting into 
 a habit. But if he pulls it because he has seen it pulled, 
 and then got the pleasant result, his act appears rather as a 
 practical application of what he has seen — a perceptual 
 relation converted into a practical adjustment. It is quite 
 possible that an animal should get to this point without 
 being capable of the slightly more complex act of applying 
 to himself what another does on his own account.^ 
 
 ^ Mr. Thorndike's experiments have given rise to voluminous discussion 
 and a long series of experiments in American laboratories designed to 
 confirm or refute his results. Meanwhile he has reprinted his original 
 monograph without substantial alteration, and I think that it is on the 
 whole best to leave the criticisms contained in this chapter in their 
 original form. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 
 
 I. In the hope of deciding whether animals can learn 
 oy perception of results (as distinct from " imitation " in 
 the usual sense), I made a number of experiments on a 
 variety of animals. I have not been able to carry the 
 experiments as far as I could wish, but they seem to me to 
 be suggestive of certain results both in regard to the special 
 point which I had in view, and in relation to the broader 
 question of the part played by accident and habituation on 
 the one hand, and by the " intelligent " apprehension of 
 means and ends on the other. My experiments were begun 
 with my own dog and cat. They were afterwards, by the 
 courtesyof Messrs. Jennison,^ extended to several animals in 
 their great collection at the Belle Vue Gardens, Manchester, 
 including monkeys of several species, a young female 
 elephant, and an otter. It seemed to me that interesting 
 analogies and contrasts might be drawn by confronting 
 different animals with the same or similar problems, and 
 so, I think, it turned out. 
 
 I must say a word about the methods used. Of the 
 character of the individual animals, a most important 
 point, I will speak as I come to each. Essentially, each 
 experiment consisted in setting the animal the task of 
 obtaining food by some method presumably strange to it. 
 For example, food was put into a box, which was 
 then shut, and left for the animal to open, or it was 
 
 ' I must particularly thank Mr. George Jennison for many hours of 
 helpful collaboration. 
 
 i86 
 
CHAP. X SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 187 
 
 placed out of reach, yet so that it could be obtained by 
 pulling a string, or pushing a door. The animal was 
 first allowed time to discover the method of obtaining it 
 for itself. If after a little while it showed no sign of 
 hitting on the right method, it was shown, and allowed to 
 get the food.-' Fresh food was then placed as before, and a 
 new trial began. It was of course necessary that the 
 experiments should be tried before the animal's ordinary 
 meal, but there seems to be an immense difference in the 
 effort which different animals will make to satisfy their 
 hunger, and this difference has to be kept carefully in 
 mind in weighing results. 
 
 2. The original object being to discover whether 
 what an animal sees done will have any effect, the first 
 thing was to secure that it should see. This can only be 
 done by gaining its attention, and I do not think that 
 any one who has experienced the difficulty of getting an 
 animal to attend to what is going on before his nose, will 
 be surprised at any number of failures to learn by 
 perception of results. In every case the animal is taken up, 
 on the one hand with its desire for the food, on the 
 other with its own instinctive or habitual method of 
 dealing with the obstacle before it. One's dog will 
 momentarily attend out of politeness to his master, but a 
 cat is moved by no such considerations, nor is an elephant, 
 nor a monkey. A mere mechanical performance of the 
 act before the animal, which it may or may not see, 
 has no effect whatever. I therefore always endeavoured 
 to call attention to what I was doing. 
 
 It must be added here that as with a human being, so 
 with an animal, attentive perception is something different 
 from mere perception. I will not attempt to determine in 
 what psychologically the difference consists, but there is in 
 some animals a certain obvious difference of expression 
 which strikes the observer. The pricked ears, fixed gaze, 
 and strained, tense, alert attitude of the attentive dog are 
 
 1 It might be thought that to withhold the food is the better plan. 
 Sometimes I did this, but never for many trials together. It discourages 
 the animal, and makes him think (I speak popularly) that he is being 
 fooled. The opposite danger — very marked with some dogs — is that he 
 may simply wait, or beg his master to do the thing for him again. 
 
i88 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 unmistakable. When one says that the dog attends, one 
 means that he assumes an attitude of this kind, and where 
 there is attention, there seems to be a mental digestion of 
 the fact attended to, a working of it into the mass of 
 experience so that it becomes available as a guide to action. 
 Whatever else may be said of human attention, this will, 
 I imagine, be allowed to be its normal eiFect, and this is, 
 I think, also its normal efFect in the animal world. 
 
 3. Besides showing the thing to be done, then, I also tried 
 to attract attention. Further, after the trick was shown, 
 in case of failure on the part of the animal, I used two 
 supplementary methods. The first, which I call Sugges- 
 tion, consisted in pointing to the object to be attacked by 
 way of reminder. It was used rarely.^ The second, 
 which I call Encouragement, was used habitually, and 
 consists in stimulating the animal to persevere by a " good 
 dog " or a " get it, pussy," or by pointing, not to the 
 object to be seized, but to the plate where the food is. 
 . Encouragement is distinct from Suggestion as merely 
 stimulating the animal to effort, and not helping in any way 
 to direct its efforts. I also used Discouragement, when an 
 animal became rough in his excitement. 
 
 The time of each trial was not regularly taken. Times 
 are apt to be quite as misleading as instructive. Suppose, 
 for example, that a cat begins without any delay to pull out a 
 bolt which sticks a little. It is an open question whether 
 she will persist or not. If not, she will probably take to 
 her ablutions, and after washing her face with great 
 elaboration while the experimenter waits with what 
 patience he can command, ' will deign to return to the 
 
 ' Suggestion is to be distinguished from inducement. I might teach 
 my dog to bite at a string by waving my hand with a piece of meat 
 towards it so that he would jump after my hand and accidentally catch 
 the string. I might get him to raise a catch by smearing the box below 
 and at the side of it with meat, so that in smelling at it he would knock 
 the catch up. Then, if he discovered that to bite the string or raise 
 the catch gained him meat, he would, of course, repeat the act. This 
 would be a simple case of learning the thing by doing it, and bears no 
 relation to learning by seeing. Mere pointing could only be an induce- 
 ment if there were a previous association through which an animal had 
 learnt to interpret the sign. Apart from such association its function is 
 to direct attention to the proper object, and so revive the " ideas " 
 associated therewith. 
 
X SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 189 
 
 business in hand, and perhaps with one strong pull get 
 the bolt out. In this way the time may suddenly rise 
 from twenty seconds to five or six minutes, and the rise 
 really signifies nothing but a slight failure in persistence. 
 Nevertheless, I generally took the time when I could get 
 a time keeper, as there are cases, particularly where " trial 
 and error " play a large part, in which it can be made 
 instructive. In the main, I relied on taking notes of 
 everything that seemed essential at the moment. What 
 an animal does is far more important for our purposes 
 than the time which it takes to do it. 
 
 My original aim being to measure the Influence of 
 • perceptual acquisition (learning by perception of results) 
 as distinct from motor acquisition (learning an act by 
 doing It) I tried to find things for the animals to do in 
 which accidental success was improbable. It Is no easy 
 matter to devise problems which combine this feature with 
 that of being clearly within the competence of the animal 
 physically and mentally. Some experiments I discarded 
 when I found them opening a door to accidental success. 
 Others I went on with for the sake of collateral problems, 
 without regarding them as Instances of learning by 
 perception. Those which do seem to Indicate perceptual 
 acquisition are of unequal value, some being more and 
 others less open to the suggestion that the success may 
 have been accidental.^ 
 
 4. Description of experiments. 
 
 (i) Pulling string. 
 
 My first experiment was with my cat Tim, a small black 
 tom, rather more than a year old. It was repeated with 
 my dog, Jack. 
 
 Tim is a sociable creatute, who follows his friends about in the 
 half dog-like way that some cats have, but as a psychologist he 
 has two great defects. His attention is of the most fickle order, 
 and what is even worse, he gets his meals at the most irregular 
 times, and by methods known only to himself. It is therefore 
 impossible to say beforehand whether he will take any sustained 
 interest in the proceedings at all. He will not put himself out 
 
 ' I was throughout trying to find methods quite as much as results, and 
 I have given a somewhat full account, even of experiments which prove 
 little, in the hope that the methods used may be suggestive to others. 
 
I90 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 much even for fish, and five or six mouthfuls seem always to 
 take the edge oiF his appetite. Jack, on the other hand — my 
 dog, who may be introduced at the same time — has two great 
 merits^ He is always anxious to oblige, and he is quite unfail- 
 ingly ready to eat. In other respects, I should not have regarded 
 Jack as a favourable subject for experiments designed to test the 
 higher limits of animal intelligence. His moral qualities — if 
 psychologists will allow me to speak of such a thing in connection 
 with a dog — have endeared him to a large circle of friends, but 
 his stoutest champions have admitted that his virtues were of the 
 heart rather than the head. At the same time, after comparing 
 his performances with those of other dogs, I think we underrated 
 Jack. It remains, however, that his manners arc rough and 
 boisterous. He is very strong, and claws things to pieces if he 
 does not get what he wants.^ But, as I soon found out, the 
 essential difference between Jack and the cat is that Jack's atten- 
 tion is concentrated, and Tim's dissipated. The cat is the finer 
 workman, doing things scientifically if he does them at all, but 
 he seldom makes a real effort to overcome a difficulty. Jack 
 bounces and blunders into everything, is apt, if the right method 
 fails, to get excited and try his strength, yet by continuity of 
 effort learns more rapidly and learns more. 
 
 In this particular experiment, Jack showed to great 
 advantage as compared with Tim, and indeed, with all 
 other animals on whom I have tried it, except the elephant 
 and the monkeys. A piece of meat was placed on a card 
 to which a string was tied, and then placed on a shelf 
 beyond reach of the animal with the string dangling down. 
 After long delay the trick seemed to " come " to the cat 
 almost on a sudden. 
 
 I first tried this with Tim, thinking that a young cat would 
 very likely pull the string in play. I was surprised to find that 
 he took no notice of it. I showed him seven times, pulling the 
 string down before his eyes, and letting him get the meat. 
 Neither this, nor a series of trials in which the card was placed 
 on the table barely out of the cat's reach, had the slightest effect. 
 The kitten once grabbed at the string as I was arranging the 
 card, probably in play, and brought the card down without 
 the meat. For the rest, he either made no attempt at all, 
 
 1 In this connection it would be natural to mention Jack's breed, but 
 this is a point on which I hope nobody will inquire. I could not bring 
 myself to call Jack a mongrel. I may say that some have thought him 
 more of a fox-terrier than anything else. If so, he is on an unusually 
 large scale with broad brawny chest, and mighty claws. 
 
X SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 191 
 
 or tried to claw at the meat directly. About a fortnight after- 
 wards I began a long series of trials in which the string was tied 
 to a chair leg to make it more conspicuous. Sometimes I let 
 Jack pull the food down — when the kitten frequently stole it — 
 sometimes I pulled it myself, P'ourteen trials gave no result. 
 Next day, eight trials passed without result, but at the ninth, the 
 cat bit slightly at the string close by my fingers as I adjusted it, 
 and as soon as I had got it right, pawed the string down. The 
 biting was doubtless due to the string being slightly smeared with 
 fish, but the effect was apparently to call the cat's attention to 
 the string for the first time in all this long series. It is clear 
 that in pawing it his aim was to get the fish on the table. If he 
 had merely been attracted by the smear on the string, he would 
 have used his mouth. At the next trial, he sat still for a while, 
 and then pawed the string again. At the next, he took to wash- 
 ing himself, and I gave up for a time ; but on replacing the string 
 I saw him watching me, and he pulled it down at once. In the 
 next trial he did the same. Next day he appeared to have for- 
 gotten, but walked under the string and knocked it down with 
 his tail. At the second trial, he slightly brushed against the 
 string, but walked away. I had to rearrange it. He watched 
 me doing so, and pawed it down at once. He then pulled it five 
 times running without hesitation. 
 
 I have described this experiment at length because, 
 putting all the facts together, they seem to show the 
 efFect of attention in a very remarkable way. It really 
 seemed that though the string was constantly before its 
 eyes, the cat never took notice of it till the incident of 
 the biting,^ and from its single success on this occa- 
 sion the trick — in spite of one lapse later in the series, 
 and temporary forgetfulness on the following day^ — was 
 substantially learnt. 
 
 The experiment was tried with two other cats. Teufel, 
 a four-year-old half-Persian, belonging to Miss G. Thring, 
 who kindly made several experiments for me, only suc- 
 ceeded after his attention was called to the string by its 
 
 ^ It is possible that in the case mentioned in the earlier series the cat 
 did turn its attention once to the string, but as it acted prematurely, and 
 failed to get the food, this would disappoint it, and account for its not 
 attempting the same method again. That the cat should fail to take any 
 note of a string just before its eyes will surprise no one who has watched 
 cats attentively. I have known this same cat seize my fingers instead of 
 a piece of fish which I held out. Cats frequently have great difficulty in 
 finding food that lies just before them on the ground. 
 
192 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 being moved about. On the other hand, Miss M. V. 
 Vernon, who also kindly made some observations for me, 
 found that her cat Balbus pulled the string without being 
 shown at all.^ The individual differences among dogs in 
 this experiment are not less striking. Two collies and a 
 fox-terrier which I tried failed to learn it in several trials. 
 One collie brushed the string down four times in roaming 
 about, and still showed no sign of learning the trick. Jack, 
 on the other hand, was present while I was teaching the 
 kitten one day. He saw me pull it down once, and the 
 next time took the string neatly in his teeth and pulled it 
 down. Oddly enough, he did not repeat this success at 
 once, but for several trials would stand and bark stupidly 
 for two or three minutes until I pointed towards the string, 
 or lightly touched it. 
 
 Sometimes I had to point two or three times. He began in the 
 same way next day, so at the second trial I changed my tactics, 
 pointing to the card. Jack then jumped up towards it and 
 scrambled it down. At his next trial— the eighth all told from 
 the beginning — he pulled the string without being shown, and 
 never failed again. As soon as he was perfect in it, I stretched 
 the string across from the chimney-piece to a chair-back, and 
 found that Jack jumped at it at once. He began by aiming too 
 high, and while still on his hind legs, edged away sideways till he 
 came to a point which he could reach. 
 
 In this experiment, anything like accident seems ruled 
 out. The very first success was a quite definite act, with 
 every appearance of deliberateness,and opposed in character 
 to the jumping up and " scrabbling " which occurred at 
 his first trial. Jack saw the thing done, and then did it. 
 He was not, however, established in the trick by the 
 success, but needed "suggestion." Now, it is possible that 
 the mere pointing to the string might induce a dog to 
 seize and pull it independently of any special association, 
 
 ' The card was placed on a table, and the string tied to a chair. The 
 experimenter prevented the cat from jumping at the table, and pointed 
 to the string, which he then pawed. The card was then moved to a 
 (higher) sideboard, and the string left to dangle. After a long delay, 
 Balbus's attention was attracted to the string, and he pawed it. Next 
 day he failed in this once, and was shown. He also failed several 
 times when the food was placed still higher, and this notwithstanding 
 two successes. 
 
X SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 193 
 
 but I cannot think of anything in Jack's previous behaviour 
 which would suggest that it would have had this effect on 
 him. My lightly touching the string might, I think, have 
 led him to smell at it, and possibly to paw at it. I know 
 nothing to suggest that it would have led him to bite it, 
 and it therefore seems to me to have acted as a suggestion 
 or reminder of what he had just done. On the whole, the 
 impression left on me is that Jack learnt this trick by 
 perception of result plus suggestion. 
 
 (2). String on banisters. 
 
 Alter teaching Jack the previous experiment, I tied a 
 string to the banisters of the landing, and hung to it a 
 little tin toy bucket containing meat. I passed the string 
 round the next banister to the one to which it was tied, so 
 that by pulling the string between the two, he could get 
 the bucket up. I will give Jack's full record for this 
 experiment, as it is a little interesting, 
 
 1. In showing Jack the arrangement his paw got twisted in 
 the sting. I notice this point as possibly helping to suggest 
 pulling to him. As soon as I put meat in, and dropped bucket, 
 Jack ran downstairs to see if he could get it from there. He 
 then came back and tugged at string, but, taking it near the 
 place where it is tied, he only pulls at the post, so to say, and 
 there is no tendency to pull bucket up. I encourage him a little, 
 but without result. I then alter string by passing it over three 
 or four posts, so that if he seizes it at the further end from place 
 where it is tied, and then backs away from banisters, he can get 
 it. Having altered it, I partly pull it up from right place, where- 
 upon Jack seizes string and gets food. 
 
 2. He pulled at once, but string slipped, and he failed. I then 
 pointed to right place, whereupon he pulled again. Bucket stuck 
 just at top ; I pulled it in, and meat had tumbled out, so I gave 
 him a piece. (The bucket was very apt to catch in ledge made 
 by floor ; it was not very easy to get meat out.) 
 
 3. Jack again pulls, without waiting for a sign, but fails to 
 back far enough, and bucket slips down. He tries again and 
 fails. I pull it up for him. 
 
 4. After some delay Jack succeeds, backing better this time. 
 
 5. Slight delay ; then success. 
 
 6. First trial — pulls it nearly up, and then misses. After some 
 encouragement, tries again, and succeeds. 
 
 Next day. 
 
 I. Jack makes two or three attempts ; is uncertain as to right 
 
194 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 place, finally gets bucket up to top, but knocks it back in trying 
 to seize it. I then show him. 
 
 2. Does not get string well at right place, but backs well, and 
 so manages to pull bucket up. 
 
 3. Took right place, helped self with paw, and got it. 
 
 4. Does not go at right point first, but gets towards it, and 
 rapidly gets meat. 
 
 Two days' interval. 
 
 I. Jack gets it without difficulty. 
 
 It will be seen that Jack did not require to be taught to 
 pull at the string. This might be explained by saying 
 that Jack had come by this time to pull at strings as such. 
 This, however, would be to pass over the fact that he first 
 ran downstairs, trying to get the meat there. I think, 
 therefore, we ought to call it an adaptive use of the expe- 
 rience previously gained with the string. Next, Jack had 
 to learn the right place to pull at. Pointing did not teach 
 him this, as the record shows. He learnt it apparently 
 from seeing how the meat was pulled up ; and by the 
 same method, also no doubt aided by his own failures and 
 successes, he learnt to back properly, at the same time 
 letting the string run through his teeth. On the whole, 
 the experiment is rather a complicated one. It does not 
 succeed unless the animal takes the string, backs away 
 from the banisters, and lets the string run through his 
 teeth as he does so without letting go. Yet Jack prac- 
 tically learnt it at the fourth trial, and only wanted to be 
 shown once on the following day. I should ascribe this 
 success to a fusion of the method of perception of results 
 with that of experience of success and failure.^ 
 
 (3). Lever. 
 
 I took an old bird-cage, and passed the pole laterally 
 through the wires of the door, weaving them in and out. 
 
 ' Since writing the above, I have been shown an interesting account of 
 a similar performance by a bird, in Our Bird Friends, by R. Kearton. 
 For the benefit of some blue tits, Mr. Kearton hung the kernel of a 
 Barcelona nut from a stump. The little birds could hang on to it with 
 their feet and peck at it. " Great Tits tried time after time to imitate 
 their lighter brethren, but never once succeeded in maintaining their hold 
 upon the kernel. But one, wiser than the rest, did a much cleverer thing 
 one day. He stood on the stump, and, seizing the thread, hauled it in 
 reef by reef with his bill and feet until he got the kernel to the top, when 
 he held it down and chipped his well-deserved reward off it " (p. 11). 
 
X SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 195 
 
 The pole ran out along and beyond the side of the cage, 
 so that by pressing it, the door, which otherwise shut with 
 a spring, could be opened. I held the cage above Jack's 
 head, in such a position that the door would open down- 
 wards, and a piece of meat placed inside would then fall 
 out. For six trials (after each of which he was shown) 
 Jack merely jumped up and " scrabbled " at the cage. He 
 then pulled the lever but did not get " fixed " in the habit 
 immediately. 
 
 There were three or four more failures out of eleven trials in 
 this series, and he had to be shown three times the next day. 
 He then became perfect in it, and when for the cage I substituted 
 a box which could only be opened by a projecting lever, he soon 
 went at the lever after a little preliminary scratching at the box, 
 and without being shown. 
 
 It is clear that accident might easily enter into this experiment, 
 especially in the case of the box. Jack, however, did not seem 
 to learn it by any accidental clawing. He naturally aimed 
 straight at the food, and he had to learn to claw or bite (he used 
 both methods) at a bar some inches away. He seemed to do 
 this quite definitely all of a sudden,^ though he sometimes forgot 
 it afterwards. 
 
 Tim failed to learn this trick in three trials with the 
 bird-cage, but acquired it at the third trial with the box, 
 and did not afterwards fail.^ 
 
 Of other animals, the otter learnt to use the lever by being 
 first accustomed to open the door, which for his benefit was left 
 with a crevice afterwards filled up. The elephant had no diffi- 
 culty with it. One collie, Rose, absolutely failed, or perhaps 
 refused ^ to open a box thus by lifting the lid. Her son opened 
 it after being shown three times.* 
 
 ' The notes show that he once before nearly pawed the lever — in his 
 first trial. 
 
 " When a general statement of this kind is made it refers only to the 
 same experiment under the same conditions. Sometimes an acquired 
 trick enters as an element into a more complicated experiment, and then 
 failure in that experiment would put the animal off its simpler performance. 
 This occurred in the present case. 
 
 ^ After showing her several times, her master arranged so that she ' 
 began pushing her nose in as he lifted. Even this had no effect. 
 
 * He failed several times the same night, but I found afterwards that 
 the lever would rub uncomfortably against his nose. I altered this, and 
 next night he succeeded. 
 
 O 2 
 
196 MINP IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 (4). Pull-bolt. 
 
 The same and similar boxes were fastened by a loose 
 bolt which could be drawn right out. I call this the 
 pull-bolt. 
 
 I first showed this box to Jack placed on a chair in such a 
 way that the bolt being drawn the lid would fall. He pulled 
 the bolt out at once with his teeth. This was not extraordinary 
 cleverness, but rather a " false analogy " from the lever experi- 
 ment. He had been accustomed to seize the lever in his mouth 
 and pull, and he now treated the bolt in the same way. To 
 determine how far he could discriminate the two things, I gave 
 him the two boxes alternately, and found that he got on very 
 well as long as one box was on the floor and the other on the 
 chair so arranged that the bolt was end on to him as he approached 
 it. But next day I placed both boxes on the floor, and much 
 confusion resulted. Four times Jack pulled the bolt as though it 
 were the lever, at right angles, and had to be shown. The fifth 
 time he got it roughly out, helping himself at the end with his 
 paw. 
 
 I subjoin the rest of his " record " under this head. 
 
 Same afternoon (this from imperfect notes jotted after series 
 was over) he had to be shown the lever once^ and was then suc- 
 cessful. (His experience with the bolt would of course put him 
 off the lever.) Then was thrice shown bolt. Then succeeded 
 twice. 
 
 Next day the bolt and bar are put on the same box, which 
 is now slightly tilted so that it is necessary to paw bar (after 
 the bolt is drawn out) to open it. 
 
 1. Pulls out bolt, but puzzled because door does not open. 
 Shown. 
 
 2. Scrabbles and pulls more or less in right direction, but has 
 to be shown — and also have door opened for him. 
 
 3. Gets bolt out, and opens door half by accident. 
 
 4. Pulls out bolt very awkwardly, and after delay, opens door. 
 
 1 now give him the bar alone. 
 
 I. He takes it in his teeth, but has his paw against the door, 
 and gets violent. I have to set the box to rights and give it him 
 again, when he opens it. 
 
 2 and 3. Opens bar upwards. 
 
 We return again to bolt, which he pulls out better, but he 
 scrabbles so hard at door that it breaks. 
 
 Two or three days after, pulls out bolt and opens box three 
 times, though coming up from off side and from behind. Also 
 twice pulls out bolt by string attached to it. 
 
X SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 197 
 
 Many days later I gave him thirteen trials with the bolt 
 again, in all of which he succeeded in both movements (bolt and 
 lever). The average time of the second to the seventh trials 
 being, roughly, 29", of the last six, 23". 
 
 This success was a case of acquired discrimination. 
 Jack had to learn that' one sort of projection had to be 
 pulled out, while another had to be pulled at right angles. 
 This was perhaps rendered more rather than less difficult 
 by his spurious success at first. There was the further 
 difficulty, that, by using his strength, Jack could get out 
 the bolt, or possibly break it when pulling at a consider- 
 able angle. This was much against rapidity and neatness 
 of learning. 
 
 This was the first experiment in which a double action 
 was made necessary. The bolt and lever being learnt 
 separately, the box was so arranged as to combine them . 
 Jack was baffled by this until twice shown. 
 
 The cat learnt the bolt rapidly, and soon came to pull 
 it out scientifically, curling his claw round, and working 
 by a series of pulls. 
 
 His record is as follows : — 
 
 I and 2. Shown. 
 
 3. I now place box on floor. He claws bolt out. I put it 
 back, holding door firm, thinking he has done it accidentally. He 
 does it again, and gets meat. 
 
 4 to 9. Pulls bolt out. N.B. Once in 5 after bolt is out, 
 does not see door is open, until I swing it for him. Afterwards 
 opens door himself. In 8, tries to open the door before bolt 
 is properly out. 
 
 Next day. (Box tilted, so that door must definitely be opened 
 by cat after bolt is drawn.) 
 
 1. Claws about, has to be shown. 
 
 2. After hesitation, pulls out awkwardly. Door not opening, 
 cat is puzzled, and I have to do it. 
 
 3. Pulls out better, and opens. 
 
 4. Same. 
 
 After two days — new smooth bolt. 
 
 1. Several times tries bolt, but it is too slippery. I put in a 
 rough one. He refuses to try. I pull it out, and he opens door 
 by the bolt-catch. 
 
 2. Pulls it out after two or three efforts. Opens. 
 
 3. Same. 
 
198 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 Box turned with lid up. 
 
 After some exploring of side, kitten pushes lid up. 
 It will be seen that the cat also acquired the double movement 
 (clawing door open after pulling out bolt) after two trials. 
 
 The bolt trick seems important. In Jack's case it 
 could be done by blundering strength, but it would seem 
 that the cat had to know pretty clearly what to do, and 
 how to do it, before he could succeed. 
 
 The bolt trick was also taught to two elephants. The 
 box used was broadly similar, except that the bolt was 
 made of iron and the lid of the box was opened with a 
 knob. The first elephant, an old female named Sally, was 
 taught in my presence by the keeper. As the box was 
 placed for the lid to open upwards, three movements were 
 necessary — (i) to pull out the bolt ; (2) to pull up the 
 lid by the knob ; (3) to get the trunk under the lid to 
 prevent it falling again. This last was physically no easy 
 matter. The method used by the very experienced keeper, 
 Mr. Lawrence, was that of taking the trunk in his hand 
 and guiding it, teaching his elephant the whole trick stage 
 by stage. 
 
 The bolt was virtually learnt at the seventh trial, but the com- 
 bined movement was not perfect till after the fortieth trial on the 
 third day. Sally showed some intelligence in trying to meet the 
 difficulty of the falling lid — trying, for example, to throw it right 
 back, but I doubt if she would have had the patience to get it 
 perfect without guidance. 
 
 I now began to teach a young elephant inappropriately 
 called Lily. 
 
 Lily is ten years old, and not much taller than I am. In 
 teaching her, two or three points have to be kept in mind. Her 
 trunk is ceaselessly in motion, groping about everything outside 
 her cage, frequently about the pockets of her teacher. There is 
 therefore a large proportion of random movement which some- 
 times contributed to success, and sometimes to failure, and in any 
 case leaves a large field open for accident. Again, her eyes are a 
 long way off, and one cannot tell what she is looking at. She is, 
 I regret to say, a very impatient pupil, and apt to get excessively 
 annoyed when she fails in an experiment. On these occasions, 
 like a monkey, but unlike other animals that I have taught, she 
 
X SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 199 
 
 seems to get angry with her tools, and, if she can, gets hold of 
 them and smashes them. 
 
 I first showed Lily the box unbolted, and she quickly learnt to 
 open it by the knob.^ I then put in the bolt, and she pushed it 
 out by a random movement. That it was random was proved 
 by the two following trials in which she failed and was shown. 
 At the fourth trial she succeeded, and here she seems to have 
 learnt the trick, for three more successes followed, and no fail- 
 ure.^ The next day, however, she was awkward about it, and I 
 showed her twice.^ Some days later she pulled out the bolt at 
 the first trial, though she failed to get the lid open until I turned 
 it conveniently for her. 
 
 I do not think there is any doubt that the elephant 
 learnt the trick substantially at the fourth trial. How 
 she learnt it is another question which I cannot decide. 
 The first — purely random — success apparently gave her 
 no ielp ; and, indeed, my observations suggest that, as a 
 general rule, the more a success appears to be purely 
 accicental, the less it is likely to be repeated. The same 
 tendency to random movement caused her partial failures 
 (trying the knob first, and pulling the bolt the wrong 
 way) later on. It is to be observed that this was a double 
 movement learnt regressively — i.e.^ the act to be done last 
 was learnt first. Having learnt to open the door by the 
 knob, she had then to learn that it was useless to pull the 
 knob till the bolt was out. To learn this without getting 
 disgusted implies a certain measure of articulateness in 
 experience. Two things must be, in some sense, known, 
 and their order kept in mind. 
 
 Billy, the otter, a most mercurial little animal, was now 
 taught to bolt. 
 
 ' I kept the box sideways to avoid the complication of raising the hd. 
 Even so, the opening was not easy, as the bars of the cage would get in 
 the way. 
 
 ^ After the seventh trial I turned the box up. This baffled her at first, 
 and she kept fumbling about the side where the bolt had been. (This 
 suggests that she goes more by feeling than by sight.) However, she 
 succeeded in the end. 
 
 ^ In her first trial she tried the handle before the bolt, and also tried 
 to pull the bolt the wrong way. She then took to knocking the bolt out. 
 I replaced it, and showed her. After this she got vexed, and tried to 
 confiscate the box. I rescued it, and showed her. Two or three times 
 this day she was awkward and uncertain, in her actions. 
 
200 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 Billy's method of solving a problem is quite distinctive. His 
 principle is never to stay still. He slips all over and round the 
 box like a drop of quicksilver, sniffing and pawing and gnavv^ing 
 with a vast amount of superfluous energy, and greatly delaying 
 himself thereby.^ He was but a young thing, however, and 
 rather like a kitten in his ways, mewing with excitement while 
 the box was being adjusted. He learnt the bolt after seeing it 
 done twelve times, but how far by seeing it done, I am unable to 
 judge. Billy was taught by his keeper. When I visited him 
 he showed a distinct inclination to increase his meal at the exp 
 pense of my legs. At the same time, by an odd coincidence, I 
 found that a better view of the proceedings could be obtainfd 
 from outside the bars. So Billy's education was left to Mr. Cray- 
 thorn, who has taken great interest in his development, and ias 
 frequently assisted me by taking notes in my absence. 
 
 The bolt was pulled out twelve times, the otter being left ejch 
 time to open the box by the lever. The otter then pulled out 
 the bolt three times running, with some delay. The next day 
 he had to be shown the first time, but, after that he always tuc- 
 ceeded, though by no means always with equal neatness. He wf)uld 
 often bite at the bolt a good deal, and sometimes on the wrong side 
 of the staple, but he would soon correct himself. Sometifnes, 
 too, he would pull the bolt half out, leave it hanging, and then 
 try the lever. After a struggle with it, he would go back^ and 
 finish with the bolt.^ At times he would take a run round after 
 pulling out the bolt, or gnaw irrelevantly at the lever o: the 
 extracted bolt itself. At other times, when the door was swollen 
 with damp, and would not open easily, his persistence in pLishing 
 at the lever was really remarkable. On the whole !^illy's 
 behaviour may be understood best by regarding the proper plin of 
 action as a kind of centre from which he kept deviating always 
 to return again. 
 
 (5). Push-back bolt. 
 
 A similar box was fastened by a bolt furnished with a 
 knob. It could not be pulled out, but had to be pushed \ 
 back. This turned out to be much harder for the i 
 
 1 Mr. Small's description of his rats (" An Experimental Study of the 
 Mental Processes of the Rat," W. S. Small, American Journal of 
 Psychology, Jan. 1900) often reminds me of Billy. Superfluous movements 
 of the kind make it difficult to measure intelligence, especially when they 
 intervene between two actions. Mr. Small rightly remarks (p. 142) that 
 extra hunger sometimes increases rather than diminishes the useless 
 movements, which, of course, come nearer to the normal methods by 
 which hunger is satisfied. 
 
 ^ He is now, I am told, very perfect with the bolt, but he has been used 
 to it for between two and three months. 
 
X SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 201 
 
 animals, principally, I think, because they got no definite 
 impression of the thing to be done. The other bolt was 
 pulled out. There was a definite change, which the 
 animal soon learnt was a necessary preliminary to the 
 opening of the box. The cat altogether failed with this 
 trick, trying to draw the bolt out like the other one. 
 Even the chimpanzee failed, though repeatedly shown. 
 The little Rhesus monkey, Jimmy, of whom I shall have 
 to say more, dealt with the difficulty by turning the box 
 over and over, till presently the bolt fell.^ Afterwards, I 
 kept my foot on the box, and he gradually learnt how to 
 deal with the bolt by constantly experimenting with it. 
 A similar box with an ordinary iron bolt fitted with a 
 catch was placed in a cage with three large Drills. The 
 bolt was drawn several times in their presence, but they 
 were far too wild to be systematically shown. They made 
 no attempt at it, and it was not till two days after that 
 the box was first found open. 
 
 That day, it was opened twice. Three days later it was again 
 found open, and the next day it was opened half a dozen times. 
 The next day I saw it done for the first time. At the first trial 
 two of the three still bit at the box, but the third pulled the bolt. 
 At the second trial a second ^ monkey attacked the bolt, which 
 was now placed with the catch down. He took the handle, 
 raised it out of the catch by an up and down movement, and con- 
 tinuing the same movement, gradually worked it back. Evidently 
 he had learnt to free the bolt from the catch by repeatedly work- 
 ing the handle up and down, and he kept up this movement when 
 there was no need for it. 
 
 The monkeys, when they did learn this trick, learnt it 
 properly. The case was different with Jack and the 
 elephant. In all, I gave Jack about ninety lessons, and at 
 the end I do not think he clearly appreciated what he had 
 to do. The reason probably is that the staples hid the 
 
 ^ On the other hand, a little female monkey did it at sight. She had 
 lived in a house before, and must, I think, have had experience with 
 bolts. 
 
 2 I wish I could be quite sure that it was not the same monkey, as it 
 would throw light on the question of imitation ; but the truth is that the 
 three were so much alike and so wild in their movements that it was 
 difficult to tell. Both Mr. Craythorn and I were under the impression 
 that it was not the same monkey. 
 
202 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 bolt, and the dog never clearly saw the difference between 
 pushing it back all the way and part of the way. 
 
 A special source of confusion on this head would be that if the 
 bolt were nearly but not quite back, an extra strong pull and a 
 vigorous shake of the box would shake it back and open the box. 
 Hence Jack was tempted to trust to strength rather than art. 
 Hence, also, he never quite perfectly learnt that the bolt must be 
 pushed before the lever was pulled,^ though he seemed to get 
 nearly right on this point in the first ten trials. 
 
 Upon the whole, whether by his own attempts or by 
 watching me, or by both methods combined, Jack learnt 
 that he had to push the bolt and then paw the lever, but 
 exactly how, or how far the bolt was to be pushed, he did 
 not understand. His perceptions, as indicated by his 
 method of dealing with the bolt, were, to use Mr. Small's 
 expression, " crass." He knew that a lot of puUing with 
 the teeth or pushing with the paw at the bolt was the 
 thing wanted, but he had no "idea " of the object of the 
 pushing and pulling — i.e., he did not seem to direct it 
 definitely to the effecting of a particular physical change as a 
 step towards his desire. In this respect his action con- 
 trasted with, for example, the behaviour of the cat in 
 pulling out the other bolt, and with his own behaviour in 
 pulling up the string, and in other experiments to be 
 mentioned later. 
 
 A further point of interest in this experiment was the 
 impotence of a casual success. 
 
 Jack actually succeeded at the third trial, but clearly without 
 understanding how, for at the next attempt he tried to pull the 
 bolt the wrong way. A second sporadic success occurred much 
 later, and at the forty-fourth trial ^ came a third success, after 
 which there were few complete failures,* but the work remained 
 
 ' In the last fifty-eight trials he tried the lever first seven times, three at 
 the beginning of one day's series, two at the beginning of another, and 
 the remaining two quite sporadically. 
 
 ^ There was a gap of two or three days after the first fourteen trials, as 
 Jack in his efiforts with the lever broke it. 
 
 ' Three or four times I showed him without waiting to see if he would 
 manage it himself— the main interest being to see whether he would get 
 really perfect. His average time during the last three days was, roughly, 
 37*, 29", and 32" The time frequently fell to 5", and sometimes rose 
 to 70 or 80". 
 
X SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 203 
 
 very rough, and the average time nearly constant from day to 
 day. Such seems the typical character of a trick in w^hich the 
 point is not clearly apprehended, and all the animal know^s is, 
 roughly, that a certain sort of action is required. 
 
 The elephant learnt this trick better than Jack, but, on 
 the whole, in the same way 
 
 After leaving her to fumble with the bolt and bar for a long 
 time, I showed her both movements. After this, she twice suc- 
 ceeded in a fumbling way. She seemed to learn from this that 
 both bolt and lever had to be used, and that the bolt came first. 
 (She only three times afterwards made a mistake on this point, 
 and only once seriously.) At the eighth and ninth trials she 
 succeeded again,^ and the next day was successful, though in a 
 fumbling way, throughout. I only once noticed her definitely 
 trying to push the bolt the wrong way, and when once I turned 
 the box round (so that to pull in the same direction as before 
 would be wrong), she tried to push instead of pull, and then, 
 after a little fumbling in the wrong direction, moved round in 
 her stall so as to get in the right position for pulling.^ 
 
 On the whole, we may say that the elephant learnt that 
 the bolt must be pushed inwards, and the lever then 
 pulled. She nearly learnt this from seeing it done two or 
 three times, and had it practically perfect after eight trials, 
 in which she had herself done it three times. She failed to 
 learn that the bolt must be pushed quite back. 
 
 (6). Catch. 
 
 I had a box made for Jack, closed with an ordinary 
 window-catch. He could lift it with his nose, and then 
 open the box by pulling at the catch with his paw. This 
 second movement, unless skilfully applied, was apt to 
 close the catch again ; and this difficulty entirely baffled 
 the cat, who never tried to lift the catch, but failed in 
 this preliminary. Tim, I must say, showed great stupidity 
 in this experiment. He never grasped that by merely 
 changing his position he would avoid the hitch, but would 
 
 ' The experiment ended for the day at this point, because Lily 
 succeeded in getting hold of the box, with which she was obviously 
 annoyed, and leant her chin on it. It was a very strong box, but an 
 adjournment for repairs was at once necessary. 
 
 2 When I reversed the box again, she was not so successful, fumbling a 
 bit, but presently she seemed to get accidentally into a better position, 
 and then opened the box easily. 
 
204 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 sit In the same place, pawing the catch down two or three 
 times running. At the same time he generally modified 
 the act in some slight way so as to get it open in the end. 
 Jack, on the other hand, found out the whole process 
 for himself in one trial. He had by this time had a con- 
 siderable experience of boxes, and he went straight for the 
 latch. His record is as follows : — 
 
 1. Not shown. After a little scrabbling, raises latch with nose, 
 scrabbles at it, and knocks it down two or three times. Tries to 
 pull it with mouth. At length opens. N.B. He attacked 
 fastening immediately. 
 
 2. Begins scrabbling. Soon lifts with nose, and after an un- 
 successful attempt, opens with paw. 15". 
 
 3. Lifts latch at once, and scrabbles at it with paw, but 
 knocks it down again. Then takes it in mouth, lifts, and 
 opens. 24". 
 
 4. Lifts at once ; scratches open. 9". 
 
 5. 5". 
 
 6. 4". 
 
 Next evening — runs at box arranged for cat, lifts twice with 
 nose, each time knocking down again with paw ; lifts again, and 
 opens with paw. 
 
 I cannot regard any part of Jack's behaviour on this 
 occasion as a wholly random act. He selected the catch 
 
 for attack, soon found that some- 
 thing was movable, and moved 
 it. He would then feel that the 
 door was free, and would try to 
 scratch it open. That, notwith- 
 standing initial failures in the 
 . , scratching — suitably varied once 
 
 *, bolt, drawn ; c, catch, raised : , .,. .. /, ^ ,, , 
 
 I, lever. by puUmg With the teeth — he 
 
 should have virtually learnt the 
 whole business in one trial, indicates something more like 
 appreciation of the actual thing that needed doing, and 
 the dependence of one point on another, than anything 
 else that I have seen in Jack's behaviour. 
 
 For the otter I had a different kind of catch. The 
 projecting wooden lever of the lid had a notch cut In It, 
 into which another wooden lever, pivoted on the side, 
 descended. Once raised, the catch did not fall again, as 
 
X SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 205 
 
 it worked stiffly, and the box was opened by the lever. 
 This is his record : — 
 
 December 6th. — i. First tried lever itself, next lifted catch by 
 pushing nose under, but did not understand it. Seized catch by 
 teeth, pushing it down again. Pushed head under catch, raising 
 it, pulled lever, and opened. Time about 50". 
 
 December 7th. Morning. 
 
 Did it immediately (keeper's statement). 
 
 Afternoon (own observation). 
 
 1. Raised catch quickly ; did not pull lever at once ; bit at 
 catch ; then pulled. 
 
 2. In interval he has done a " string " trick.^ In doing that, 
 he tried unsuccessfully putting head under lever. This now puts 
 him ofF. He gnaws and pulls at both lever and catch for some 
 time, but presently lifts with head and opens. 
 
 December 8th. Morning. Pull bolt added. 
 (Keeper reports) raised catch and pulled bolt together three 
 times rapidly. 
 
 Afternoon (own observation). 
 
 1 . Bolt and catch. Knocks up catch, but gets excited, and bites 
 and pulls at right angles at bolt instead of pulling it out. Then 
 bites and struggles all about. 
 
 Catch taken off. Half pulls out bolt, but leaves it hanging, 
 and rampages again. Bolt replaced. Pulls it out up to outer staple 
 and opens. 
 
 2. Does both actions pretty rapidly, lifting catch, then drawing 
 bolt and again lifting catch, which has fallen, and opens. 
 
 3. Keeps on at lever and catch. Pulls bolt half out. Gnaws 
 again. At last opens. Time about 2' 35". 
 
 Subsequent experiments showed that the trick was 
 learnt. 
 
 There was much more of accident in this than in Jack's 
 success, as the detail of the first trial shows. Nevertheless, 
 the otter showed great alertness in taking advantage of an 
 accidental success. 
 
 A second box was then given him, similar to the first, 
 except that the catch had to be depressed instead of raised. 
 Result : — 
 
 I. Otter quite baffled — all over place ; presently gets chin over 
 catch ; depresses it ; at once puts head under and raises it again. 
 
 ' In this the lever was tied by a string. The experiment failed through 
 difficulties of arrangement. 
 
2o6 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 This done twice. At length depresses further by double move- 
 ment, and, after a little scrabbling, opens. Time over 2'. 
 
 2. Similar. Thrice pulls down lever and raises again, once 
 without raising again. After some minutes, shown two or three 
 times. But does not try. Gives up. 
 
 Next day — 
 
 1. Pushes down catch twice and raises again. At length pulls 
 it down and opens door by lever. Time 30" to 40". 
 
 2. 10". Tries at once this time, pushing at lever as soon as 
 catch is depressed. 
 
 3. 16". Pushes down and does not raise again, but quits for 
 a while and smells round. Comes back and at lever. 
 
 4. 10". Would be immediate, but did not clear catch of lever 
 at first. 
 
 5. 12". Sniffs about a bit. Then both movements at once. 
 
 Next day, the two boxes were alternated, and he did 
 both without difficulty and no sign of confusion. 
 
 With this second box it is clear that the first trial of the 
 second day was the critical success. The showing had 
 apparently no effect. It was a random success properly 
 utilised. 
 
 I gave the same box to the elephant. 
 
 After accustoming her to the lever, I put on the catch. She 
 pulled violently at the catch and lever, nearly thrusting the catch 
 down. I had to take the box away in fear of consequences. 
 When I gave it back, she showed no improvement. I then 
 showed her twice, once opening the box, but not letting her get 
 the bread. Again she got violent, and I had to rescue the box. 
 After this, however, she began fumbling at the catch, pulling it 
 down and up again, and then pulling at the lever. She was 
 beginning to learn. I now showed her the whole process twice, 
 and thereafter she managed to do it, though she had a way of 
 catching the tip of the trunk in the end of the catch after she 
 had depressed it, whereby she kept raising it again. At the twelfth 
 trial she was perfect, her times for this and the four remaining 
 trials of the day being roughly 3", 2", 5", 6", 3". 
 
 Next day her times were about 12", 30", and 5 to 7". There 
 was some fumbling in the first two, but the clear downward 
 thrust was unmistakable. 
 
 This experiment is perhaps more distinctly suggestive 
 of learning by perception than any other of Lily's 
 performances. At any rate, it was a rapid piece of 
 
X SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 207 
 
 learning. There was only one occasion after her first 
 success in which she so far forgot herself as to try the 
 lever first. 
 
 (7.) (Loop). 
 
 As already mentioned, Jack's box had an iron lever 
 projecting from the lid by which it was opened. I drove 
 a gimlet into the side of the box parallel with the lever, 
 and placed a brass loop over it and the lever. As I 
 placed the box for Jack, the loop had to be pushed up in 
 order to open the box. Jack learnt this after being shown 
 twice. 
 
 During the first two trials Jack " scrabbled " a good deal, once 
 or twice nearly knocking the loop up with his nose in the course 
 of his random movements. The loop was twice pulled off, and 
 he was left to open the box. The third time he knocked up the 
 loop with his nose, and with some difficulty opened the box. He 
 did not fail again, though for three or four trials there was some 
 useless preliminary scrabbling.^ Sometimes the loop stuck a little, 
 and he would then push hard and repeatedly. Next day, there 
 was a little scrabbling at the first trial, but no failure. 
 
 There may have been an element of accident in the 
 first success. It was within the scope of a random move- 
 ment. The dog seemed quite clear in this instance as to 
 what had to be done. The persistence and gradual dying 
 away of useless scrabbling is noteworthy. 
 
 The cat did this trick at sight. 
 
 No doubt attracted by the novelty of the loop (which for his 
 benefit was put sideways), he began clawing at it at once, and in 
 about go seconds got it off and opened the box. He repeated 
 this eight times, but showed a tendency to claw at the gimlet 
 (also a novelty) before the lever. The total times varied from 
 60" to 15". The next night he refused to try, but the next he 
 succeeded, awkwardly, three times. 
 
 This was a clear case of a single random success having 
 a permanent effect. 
 
 (8.) Spike. 
 
 Taking out the gimlet I put a small chain over the 
 lever, and, stretching it tight, stuck a skewer through a 
 
 1 From the seventh to eleventh trials inclusive, his average time for the 
 whole process was under 14". 
 
2o8 
 
 MIND IN EVOLUTION 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 link and into the hole. The chain was too tight for 
 Jack to get at it with his teeth, and the only resource was 
 to pull out the skewer. 
 
 During five trials Jack'^ bit and pulled indiscriminately at 
 lever, chain, and skewer. At the sixth trial he pulled skewer out 
 awkwardly.2 
 
 At the seventh he pulled it half out with an effort, and then 
 gave up, returning after an interval, and pulling it out. There 
 was then an interval, after which his record is as follows : — 
 
 8. Scratches long time at chain ; does not try to pull skewer out 
 with teeth. 
 
 9. Half pulls out with teeth ; tries to scratch out rest of the 
 
 Box ARRANGED WITH LoOP. 
 /, lever ; A, loop ; £, gimlet. 
 
 Box ARRANGED WITH SPIKE. 
 /, lever ; c, chain ; s, spike. 
 
 way and to push his nose through the door. Shown. Time 
 3 minutes. 
 
 ID. Half pulls skewer, gets it out at last ; declines to open for 
 some time, at last opens. 
 
 11. Knocked skewer further in with nose, scrabbled, barked, 
 gave up. I put skewer so as to project beyond bar ; he opened. 
 Time, little over i minute. 
 
 12. Pulls it out and opens with very little scrabbling. 
 Reluctant, little scrabbling, opens. Time 30". 
 Pulling at skewer nearly all time ; skewer-head in beyond 
 
 35". 
 
 Does not try to bite skewer for long time, but pushes at 
 
 13- 
 
 14. 
 bolt. 
 15- 
 
 lever and chain. I pull skewer out beyond bolt, thinking he 
 
 ^ In the first trial I had used a string, which he managed to get off (he 
 had had a previous experiment of this kind which failed owing to defective 
 mechanism). I then substituted the chain. At the fourth trial he took 
 the skewer in his teeth as I was pulling it out. 
 
 2 I left it projecting further, so that it was more easily grasped. 
 
X SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 209 
 
 could not get at it, but he accidentally knocks it in ; then deliber- 
 ately pulls skewer out and opens. Time 1' 20". 
 
 16. Barks, slowly pulls out, skewer sticks a good deal, opens. 
 Time, i' 5". 
 
 Next day, I alternated the loop and spike experiments. 
 Result : — 
 
 Loop. 
 
 1. 12". Pushes from beginning with nose. 
 
 2. 7". Does it at once. 
 
 Skewer immediately afterwards substituted. 
 
 1. i' 11". Gets it out gradually, pulling at it practically 
 whole of time ; some difficulty in grasping, as skewer pushed in 
 up to head. Began at skewer at once. 
 
 2. 16". Skewer a little further out, more easily grasped. 
 
 The cat, oddly enough, pulled out the skewer at sight 
 as he had done with the loop, but in a casual fashion. In 
 this case the random success left no impression. The cat 
 had three more trials, in which he utterly failed, never 
 even trying the skewer again, though I showed him each 
 time, and finally used suggestion, pulling the skewer 
 half Out. 
 
 A comparison of the two experiments of the loop and 
 skewer is instructive. They show, first, how much a young 
 cat may do as the result of random exploration. In this 
 respect the elephant, monkey, and cat resemble each other 
 for experimental purposes. All fiddle with things, espe- 
 cially new things, examine them and pull them about. In 
 this, they differ, if not from puppies, at any rate from 
 older dogs, which investigate things, not by picking them 
 to pieces, but by smelling at them. To avoid accidental 
 success with a dog, he must be given something that he 
 will not effect either by smelling about in the neighbour- 
 hood or by random scratching. For this reason, notwith- 
 standing the case of the cat, I cannot think Jack's success 
 with the skewer was in any way accidental. The act was , 
 for him a very awkward one, and at best he had a great 
 struggle with it.^ In some cases he had to make more 
 
 1 I believe that I spoke encouragingly once or twice during these 
 struggles. The adjustment of the skewer might also have been sugges- 
 tive as a reminder in some of the later trials. I mention these as the only 
 possible aids to him, other than perception and his own efforts. 
 
 P 
 
iio MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 than one distinct effort. Altogether it seemed very clear 
 to me in this case that he saw what had to be done, and 
 did it. The cat's two performances, on the other hand, 
 are instructive as a contrast. In both cases it led off with 
 a random success. In the one case this success was 
 immediately utilised ; in the other it had no effect at all. 
 
 (9). Upsetting jug or tumbler. 
 
 One knows how a cat will get milk out of a jug, which 
 it cannot reach with its tongue, by dipping in the paw, and 
 licking it. Would a cat learn to turn a jug over and 
 pour the milk out, a thing which a monkey does as a 
 matter of course ? Or, conversely, if a tumbler or vase 
 were inverted over a piece of food, would it turn it over 
 to get the food ? With the jug, JVIiss G. Thring made a 
 series of experiments with her cat Teufel, the result of 
 which was somewhat anomalous. 
 
 After experiments on five successive evenings, which had 
 resulted in complete failure, some scraps of meat were put into 
 the jug instead of milk. The cat turned the jug over accident- 
 ally with his hind leg, but was not allowed to pick up the meat. 
 He then put his paw in, and turned the jug over four times in 
 ten minutes. On the third occasion, the jug being more fiill, he 
 fished out the meat with his paw twice, but then, not getting 
 any more turned it over. He still refused to turn it over when 
 filled with milk instead of meat, until the ninth night, when it 
 happened that the jug was placed on a newspaper instead of a 
 plate. The cat, for some reason best known to himself, seemed 
 to think that this made an essential dilFerence, overturned the 
 jug at once, and lapped up the milk. This was done several 
 times. After a week's interval the cat was given the jug on a 
 plate as at first, but overturned it without any hesitation. 
 
 The interpretation of this very interesting experiment is not 
 easy. The first success with the meat may have been due to 
 the accidental overturning. If so, it was a singularly intelligent 
 application of an accident, since the cat was not allowed to get 
 the meat. From what I saw of the cat, I am more inclined to 
 think that there was not much discrimination between clawing at 
 the meat, and clawing the jug over. The other question sug- 
 gested is why the substitution of the newspaper should make any 
 difference. I cannot pretend to answer this question ; but it 
 seems clear, for whatever reason, that the cat had originally some 
 reluctance to upsetting the milk, which was overcome when he 
 once accomplished it without untoward results. 
 
X SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 211 
 
 I tried my cat with the milk jug once or twice only, but 
 without eiFect. I then gave him several lessons with a 
 tumbler, inverted over meat, also without efiFect. He per- 
 sistently tried to claw at the carpet, or to smell at the 
 bottom of the tumbler. Miss Vernon's cat Balbus be- 
 haved in the same way. 
 
 1 now substituted for the tumbler a little bronze tripod, 
 which was more easily upset because it stuck in the carpet. 
 The cat soon learned to upset this, apparently by seeing it 
 done, and afterwards extended the act to other objects. 
 
 I upset it, by pushing at the top, six times. The seventh time ^ 
 the cat turned it over deliberately with its paw at the top, and 
 repeated this six times. 
 
 The next day, the cat still failed with the glass, but repeated 
 its success with the tripod.^ A tall vase was then substituted. 
 The cat put its paw round, and moved the v^se, finally managing 
 to push it away from the meat. A short silver candlestick was 
 then substituted, being inverted over the meat. This the cat 
 pushed with paw or nose, either pulling it away or knocking it 
 over, seven times in succession. But when the candlestick was 
 set upright, and the meat put under its broad, flat bottom, the cat 
 failed to turn it over. Next day, he turned the candlestick over 
 twice, and when set upright managed to move it away. I now 
 took a china vase again, and first gave it him upright ; he put his 
 paw right down, and managed to reach the fish, at the same time 
 upsetting the vase. I then reversed the vase. He tried to get 
 the fish by moving it along, so I lightly held the vase over it, 
 whereupon he put his paw round it higher up, and turned it over. 
 At the next trial, he repeated this at once. 
 
 This success seemed to be originally due to perception 
 of results. There was no movement in the original efforts 
 of the cat at all resembling those which I showed him. 
 There was the tentative pawing of the fifth trial, which 
 suggested that the " idea " was half formed. Then came 
 the definite success of the seventh trial, followed by an 
 unbroken series of successes. 
 
 In strong contrast with the performance of Tim was 
 
 ' At the fifth trial, the cat put its paw gently to the top and side of the 
 tripod, as though half making up its mind to give a push. Otherwise it 
 merely smelt about, and made no efifort. 
 
 2 It knocked it down first with its head, but the tripod being replaced, 
 knocked it down again with paw. 
 
 P 2 
 
212 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 the success of two older cats, Teufel and a Persian living 
 in the same house, who turned tumblers over without 
 being shown. 
 
 I tried Jack with this experiment, but it was of no avail, 
 for he applied his nose so vigorously to the bottom of the 
 tumbler, that he knocked it over or pushed it away without 
 the slightest difficulty. On the other hand, a little fox- 
 terrier who visited me one evening behaved in a manner 
 strikingly recalling Tim's performance. 
 
 During three trials, he merely smelt about, or stared in a sur- 
 prised fashion at the vase. At the fourth, he knocked it over. 
 At the fifth, after staring and smelling, he very hesitatingly 
 pawed the top and sides. He then seemed to abandon the enter- 
 prise as too bold, but presently plucked up heart, put his paw out 
 again, and knocked it over. The sixth time, after pawing in- 
 effectually at the side, he knocked it over with a push of his nose 
 near the bottom. The seventh and eighth times he knocked it 
 clean over with his paw, each time after a short pause. The 
 dog's behaviour suggested that he had seen something very sur- 
 prising ; and though he had seen it, did not quite believe in it. 
 It was not the hesitation of an imperfectly formed habit, but — at 
 least in appearance — rather that of an imperfectly grasped idea. 
 
 (lo). Cover. 
 
 A very simple experiment was to see whether a cat 
 would lift a lid to get at food beneath it. Tim learnt this 
 on being shown five times. 
 
 I took a little china tea-pot, and dropped some fish inside before 
 Tim's eyes. At first he pawed hard at it, chiefly at the spout. 
 I lifted the lid, and he clawed out the fish. At the next trial, he 
 pawed at the cover, and pushed with his nose, but had to be 
 shown again. At the next, he made a dash at it as I put the 
 meat in, and helped by this, pawed the cover off. However, at 
 the fourth and fifth trials he failed. At the sixth, I took the 
 cover off two or three times, replacing it. He then pushed it 
 off, and repeated this three times without failure. The next 
 day he seemed at first to have forgotten, but presently succeeded 
 without being shown. When I substituted a larger tea-pot of 
 wholly different appearance, he got off the top at once, and got 
 the meat out without turning it over. 
 
 Jack did this trick without being shown. 
 
 He was in the room while I was teaching the kitten. Whether 
 he was watching, or merely used his common sense, I do not 
 
X SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 213 
 
 know ; but he lifted the cover with his nose at once. He could 
 not, however, get the fish out, and I upset the tea-pot for him. 
 Next time he pulled off the lid and upset the pot at once. The 
 food unfortunately stuck in it, and I pulled it out. The third 
 time he turned it completely upside down ; and when, after an 
 interval, I gave him the large tea-pot, he first, after removing the 
 cover, turned it on its side ; then, as the fish was still unattain- 
 able, turned it completely over, and pulled it away from the 
 food. 
 
 After being once shown Jack learnt to pull a stopper 
 out of a jar with his teeth. 
 
 The stopper fitted into a large round glass jar, and could be 
 lifted with the teeth by a projecting peg. I lifted it out for him 
 once, and left him to deal with the jar, which he did by knock- 
 ing it over, and rolling it all about the room until the meat vi^as 
 jerked out. At the second trial he pulled at the stopper himself 
 with his teeth ; and he repeated this many times. As to the 
 other part of -thg^ experiment : if I left the bottle to Jack, he 
 found no better method than that of rolling it about. Another 
 way was for me to hold the bottle, when he could get his paw in. 
 I took his paw, and pulled the biscuit out with it twice ; and 
 after this he used the paw himself when I held the bottle. The 
 first time that he did so, however, seemed to be in the course of 
 general scrabbling, so that an accidental success may have com- 
 bined with the effect of my teaching to influence him. 
 
 The first part of this experiment seemed to me strongly 
 suggestive of perceptual learning. 
 
 (11). Drawers. 
 
 I used a small cabinet of four drawers for the instruction 
 of Jack and three cats. The cats could open the drawers 
 easily by clawing the loops. Jack could not get hold of 
 the loops well, and had to do it by hard scratching. In 
 this way, whether by watching me, or by random efForts, 
 he learned the trick substantially in seven trials. 
 
 During four trials, there was no result beyond smelling about, 
 and once a little scratching near the handle. At the fifth and 
 sixth trials, he scrabbled wildly at the handle (and the one right 
 handle out of four). The seventh time he scrabbled hard at the 
 top of the drawer, and apparently in the crevice between the 
 drawer and the chest. In this way he somehow got the drawer 
 open. There was then an interval, after which he failed once, 
 and then succeeded five times. I afterwards tried his power of 
 
214 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 discriminating the drawers, in which he failed signally ; and 
 owing to his disappointments, he twice failed or refused to open 
 at all. Nevertheless, I think it may fairly be said that the trick 
 of opening, as distinct from discriminating, was definitely ac- 
 quired. It is hard in this case to say how much was accident, and 
 how much perception of results. 
 
 Some time later, I tried Jack with a drawer more suited 
 to his capacities. It was a drawer in the sideboard, a little 
 above his head, with a brass handle which I stuck out for 
 him to take in the teeth. If he pawed at it the handle 
 fell, and he frustrated himself, so he could only pull quite 
 deliberately with his teeth. From the result it appeared 
 that he rapidly learnt what he ought to do, but for a long 
 time failed, owing to a curious reluctance to pull the metal 
 handle. 
 
 For five trials Jack clawed indiscriminately ; for three more 
 he clawed at or about the handle ; at the ninth and tenth he took 
 the handle gently in his teeth, but did not pull, and refused any 
 further attempt. The next day, after twice refiising any attempt, 
 he again took the handle gently in his teeth without pulling, and 
 again refused further attempt. After two days' persistently 
 showing him, I tried holding him up to it, and pointing, without 
 result. I then took his head in my hands, and tried to put the 
 handle in his teeth, but he merely resisted. By this time I was 
 convinced that it was not stupidity, but reluctance to pull the handle, 
 which he probably felt hard to his gums. I therefore lashed a short 
 stick (previously used in the bolt and lever experiments) to the 
 handle. He at once, without any showing or pointing, took the 
 stick in his mouth near the end, and pulled. The pull being a 
 little sideways, the drawer jammed, and I helped him. The rest 
 of his record (from the 4th trial of that day) is as follows : — 
 
 4. Same — again drawer jams, and I have to help. 
 
 5. He manages it alone. 
 
 6. I now take stick off handle. He again barks as before, and 
 refuses for some time, but finally, being encouraged, takes handle 
 in teeth, and after hesitation, pulls. 
 
 7. Pulls it out, but not far enough, and in scrabbling to get 
 his nose in, shuts it again. Then baffled. Knocks handle up 
 with his nose. I put it out for him, and he pulls drawer out 
 again, further this time. 
 
 8. Same thing happens. 
 
 9. This time he pulls it farther out. Nevertheless, as he rises 
 to take food, his weight somehow shoves drawer back, and it 
 
X SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 215 
 
 catches his paw. He naturally refuses to try again for some 
 time, but I encourage him a good deal, and at length he opens, 
 
 10. Opens more carefully, using nose instead of claw, when 
 drawer is opened a little way. Then uses paw. 
 
 I can hardly doubt that Jack really understood this trick 
 from an early stage, but was afraid of it. When he found 
 that the drawer opened so easily, he got over his objection 
 to the handle. The minor adjustments, in particular the 
 avoidance of shutting the drawer upon his paw a second 
 time, are interesting, and show a very clear appreciation 
 of what had to be done. 
 
 About three weeks later I gave Jack another little 
 cabinet of drawers, hanging a button-hook on to the 
 handle so that he could get hold of it. This he very 
 rapidly dealt with. As he was smelling about, the drawer 
 shook a little bit open, and I shut it again. This seemed 
 to stimulate his attention, and he at once opened it, re- 
 peating his success three or four times. 
 
 The cats dealt with the cabinet of drawers in a much 
 more scientific fashion than Jack. 
 
 My cat was encouraged by the drawer being left slightly open 
 at first, but two other cats, Teufel and his companion, a two 
 year old Persian, learnt it without any such adventitious aids. 
 Teufel was shown it three times, and then opened with the 
 handle. At the next attempt he failed at first, tried again, and 
 succeeded. After this he did not fail again. The Persian was 
 shown twice only, and then opened without fail.'^ 
 
 The discrimination of the drawers was quite another 
 matter. Jack failed in this hopelessly ; so, at first, did 
 Tim. I have seen the cat open the bottom drawer when 
 the food was placed in the top. The failure seems due 
 entirely to inattention. 
 
 In a long series of experiments, the cat was right three times 
 out of six — and in the remaining trials, hesitated twice at the 
 right drawer — when allowed to stand just in front of the drawers. 
 When held further away while the meat was put in, he became 
 confused, and in the next six trials was only right twice. In 
 the next six he was right three times ; in the next, twice ; but 
 counting from the last trial of that six, he was right four times 
 
 1 The experiment was repeated with Teufel the next evening without 
 failure, but apparently not with the other cat. 
 
2i6 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 running, which suggests that, if I had continued the experiment, 
 there would have been an improvement. 
 
 The older cats did better. Teufel, in the first series, 
 was right four times out of six ; in the second series was 
 wrong once only, and right three or four times running.^ 
 The two year old Persian was right three times out of five. 
 
 The little Rhesus monkey, Jimmy, who was kindly lent 
 to me by Messrs. Jennison for some days, also failed 
 signally in this experiment. 
 
 He was generally right if I let him sit in front of the drawers 
 while 1 put the food in ; but if I banished him to a chair, he got 
 quite wrong, and by degrees I noticed that he was elaborating a 
 method of his own to save him the trouble of attention. To 
 make quite sure, he would open the drawers systematically, from 
 the bottom upwards.^ 
 
 Success or failure, in an experiment of this kind, seems 
 to be a matter principally of attention, partly of reten- 
 tiveness.^ 
 
 ' In this series bread and butter were used instead of meat, to avoid 
 guidance by smell, if possible. This, however, is hardly a danger in this 
 experiment, as the cat opens with its claw, and at that distance the smell 
 could hardly guide it as between one drawer and another. 
 
 2 He did not, indeed, get this system perfect, as he often forgot the 
 bottom drawer ; but it seemed to be growing as he went on. The point 
 of it was that when an upper drawer was pulled out, the one below was 
 difficult to reach, so Jimmy made sure of avoiding this difficulty. In 
 quite a similar way the chimpanzee, who had to identify two boxes out of 
 seven (marked B and containing banana), frankly gave up the attempt, 
 and took them quite systematically in order, sometimes finishing the row 
 after he had secured two pieces of banana, and sometimes leaving it. 
 In discrimination experiments of this kind the penalty of failure is not 
 sufficient to stir the animal's attention. Somebody unkindly suggested 
 that if we put a live wasp in each of the blank boxes, we should soon 
 teach the chimpanzee his alphabet. 
 
 ' Some further experiments confirming this view will be mentioned 
 lower down. 
 
 Mr. G. V. Hamilton (J. A. B., 191 1, pp. 33 ff.) has described a series 
 of experiments with human beings, monkeys, dogs, cats, and a horse, 
 where the problem was to open one of four closed doors. The rule was 
 simply that the same door was never locked twice. Only the human 
 beings showed by their behaviour that they grasped the relation. But 
 some of the animals, particularly the monkeys, took to opening all the 
 doors in succession either in regular or irregular order. This is precisely 
 the behaviour to be expected of a semi-intelligent animal. Mr. Hamilton's 
 trick would be more baffling to such an animal than to one that was quite 
 stupid, for it would always tend to be guided by the result of the last 
 experiment, which would always be wrong. It gets out of this by the simple 
 process of trying all four doors in succession, the best thing it can do in 
 the circumstances. 
 
X SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 217 
 
 (12). Sliding lid. 
 
 1 taught Jack to open a child's toy box, the lid of which 
 slid out in one direction only. 
 
 During three trials he clawed promiscuously. At the fourth 
 he pawed the top half open, but not seeing that he had succeeded 
 lay down dejectedly. I pointed at the top, and he jumped up 
 and finished his work. He repeated this four times, the last 
 three without any delay. The next day he had to be shown 
 twice, and after this he sometimes clawed from the side or at 
 random at first ; but he always got it right in the end. In the 
 fourth trial, for example, he came round, and clawed from the 
 end. In one case he tried to finish the work with his teeth. 
 
 Clearly it would be possible to learn this by random 
 clawing, and I will not undertake to discriminate the 
 factors in Jack's success. Some of the details that I have 
 mentioned, however, show that, by whatever means, he had 
 acquired a pretty clear appreciation of what was to be 
 done ; that is to say, that the lid had to be pulled, and 
 pulled in a particular direction. My cat wholly failed in 
 this trick because he sat at the end where the meat was 
 put in, i.e., the blind end of the box ; and persistently 
 scratched in that direction. Teufel, on the other hand, 
 learnt the trick in almost the same way as Jack. He is 
 described as watching anxiously during four trials. At 
 the fifth he scraped the lid, slightly opened it, and then 
 was helped. He did not fail again that night or the next, 
 but required a hint once on the third night. 
 
 (13). Pushing of door. 
 
 After Jack had learnt to pull the string, I put the card 
 with the meat on a high shelf, and tied the string to a 
 tack stuck into the top of a cupboard door, near by. The 
 door swung open so as to bring the tack near to the shelf. 
 When pushed away from that position, it would pull the 
 string, and with it the card and food, down to the floor. 
 Jack never showed any appreciation of the mechanism of 
 this arrangement, for after he had learnt to push at the 
 door, he frequently came to the wrong side. I must 
 admit, however, that by pushing hard enough on the 
 wrong side, he caused the door to rebound, and so several 
 times obtained his desire. 
 
2i8 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 1 did not begin by showing him how to do this, as I wanted 
 to see whether he could puzzle it out for himself. At the first 
 trial the door was pushed accidentally, but it is not likely that 
 Jack saw how it happened. At the second, Jack managed by an 
 extra high jump to catch the string. At the third, I called 
 attention to the door, and he pushed it. At the fourth, he 
 pushed the door on the wrong side, without result. I pointed to 
 the door again, and he stood up to it, so moving it ; whether 
 intentionally or not was not clear. He then twice got the meat 
 by knocking the door with his back as he jumped up towards the 
 string ; but at the seventh time he failed altogether, and I showed 
 him the whole process. After this, he never failed to respond to 
 the pointing,^ which I made slighter and slighter till, on the 
 third day, and twenty-third trial in all, I dispensed with it. 
 
 This series was abnormal in the number of trials re- 
 quiring suggestion after the first success. It may be noted, 
 however, that while there was one complete failure after 
 the first success, there was no such failure after he had 
 once been shown. This experiment is mainly interesting 
 as illustrating what Mr. Small calls crassness. The dog 
 learns quickly that he is to push a door ; but which way 
 he is to push it is a point which he treats as more or less 
 immaterial. 
 
 (14). Weight. 
 
 I arranged the box already described on a table, with 
 the projecting bar pointing upwards. In this position, if 
 the lid were not held, the door would fall open of its own 
 weight, and a biscuit would fall out. I then tied a string 
 to the lever, and passed it over the back of the box nearly 
 to the floor. A flat iron placed on a hook at the end of 
 the string held the lid closed. If the flat iron was knocked 
 ofFthe lid fell. 
 
 Jack pretty quickly learned to knock it off. I showed him 
 four times without success, the mechanism being defective.^ 
 After the mechanism was put right, I showed him three times. 
 The third time he tugged hard at the string. The fourth time 
 he stared hard at the iron, and then retired. I said to him, " Get 
 it." He whined, and went towards the box. I said to him, 
 
 ' At the first trial next day he showed no remembrance when I touched 
 the door. He then put his paws up, but it was not quite clear that he 
 pushed with intention. 
 
 2 For the same reason two previous trials had been without result. 
 
X SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 219 
 
 " No." He then came to me, knocked the iron off with his 
 paw, and got the biscuit. Next time he did this almost at once. 
 Next time he began by biting at the string. The iron fell off^, 
 but I prevented the lid from falling, and replaced the weight. 
 He then began jumping on the box, but, being restrained, looked 
 carefully at the iron and pawed it ofF. Next time I had to 
 restrain him from pulling the table cloth, and he then pawed off" 
 the iron. Next time he knocked it off without hesitation. The 
 next day he first bit at the string, and the iron tumbled off, and 
 he got the biscuit. In the next trial he repeated this, but I 
 cheated him by keeping my fingers on the lid, and replaced the 
 iron. He then pawed it off the hook, and repeated this four times 
 in succession. 
 
 This experiment seemed to me strongly suggestive of 
 learning by perception of results. I cannot think that any 
 accident would have led Jack to pay the slightest attention 
 to the weight. 
 
 Failures of Jack. 
 
 (a) I tried without success to arrange a converse experi- 
 ment to that of the weight. 
 
 A basket was hung by a string from the door of the box, and 
 the plan was to balance it so that when a weight was put into 
 the basket, it would weigh the lid down. Unfortunately my 
 arrangement was very defective ; and furthermore. Jack soon 
 found out that to put his own paw in the basket was quite as 
 effective as putting the weight in it. I tried to defeat him by 
 frankly holding the lid in place when he used his foot, and I 
 gradually got him to the point of knocking down and pawing the 
 piece of wood which I used as a weight, and which was placed 
 near the basket. At other times he would take the wood in his 
 teeth, and three or four times he knocked the wood on to the 
 basket. The failure may be ascribed partly to the complexity of 
 the task ; but equally, I think, to the knowledge of another and 
 simpler method. 
 
 {b) Hook. 
 
 The same explanation applies to an experiment in which I tied 
 the latch of a box by a string to a hook, which was then fastened 
 to a nail, first, on the box itself ; later, at a distance of about a 
 yard from the box.^ The string held the latch in place, and to 
 free it, it was necessary either to break the string or remove the 
 hook. I began by testing whether Jack would learn this without 
 
 ' See diagram, p. 280. 
 
220 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 seeing it done. I kept putting the hook on, and removing it 
 while his attention was distracted by something else. This had 
 no effect ; he merely bit and clawed at the string, and at times 
 succeeded in biting it through. When I substituted wire, he 
 would still pull so hard that the wire sometimes broke. After an 
 interval of some days, I tried the same trick, only showing him. 
 Unfortunately, the hook several times gave, which encouraged 
 him in pulling hard at the wire. It was not until the twentieth 
 trial that he made any attempt at the hook, though he had twice 
 before come to look at it, probably because I called his attention 
 to what I was doing. He then pawed at it a little, but failed to 
 get it off. This seemed to discourage him. He tried at the 
 hook vaguely two or three times afterwards, but never succeeded. 
 
 It seemed indeed that an accidental failure, when the 
 trick was attempted in the way shown, was abnormally 
 discouraging. Thus, I tried Jack with the simple trick of 
 opening a cupboard door by pulling a key arranged so 
 that he could easily get hold of it. He was so quick about 
 this that at the first trial he jumped up to help me to 
 pull, and at the second he began to pull at once. Unfortu- 
 nately, to reach the key he had to put his forepaws on the 
 ledge below the doOr, and they rested against the door 
 itself, neutralising his efforts to open it.^ After this 
 failure, though several times shown, he refused to make 
 the slightest effort — surely a suggestive result.^ 
 
 5. Habit and Discrimination. 
 
 To these experiments, in so far as they may be 
 ofFered in proof of learning by perception of results, two 
 objections may be raised. The first is that, after all, 
 each trick might have been performed in the first instance 
 in a more or less random way, and that such an accidental 
 success, not the sight of what the teacher did, would 
 be really responsible for the establishment of the trick. 
 
 1 Instances of animals thus hindering their own actions are fairly 
 common, but both Jack and the elephant frequently showed some adroit- 
 ness in overcoming that kind of hindrance. I thought my Rhesus, 
 Jimmy, very stupid for trying to open his box upward while he sat on the 
 lid, but my respect for him increased when, after many trials, he managed 
 it — by sidling to the edge of the hinges. 
 
 2 I mean that the effect was more marked than that of an ordinary 
 failure, and points to more subtle psychological forces than that of bare 
 perception and its application — namely, to the dog's confidence in his 
 master and what he points out to him. 
 
X SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 221 
 
 This objection I will deal with later. It will be most 
 convenient to consider, first, another line of criticism 
 which allows " imitation," but holds that, at least below 
 the apes, it is of the sensori-motor kind. This kind 
 of imitation Mr. Small found well-marked among his 
 rats,^ leading one to dig or scratch where another was 
 digging or scratching, and, indeed, it is matter of common 
 observation. The question, then, is this : does my dog 
 pull a string or a lever merely because he sees me doing 
 so, or because he has just seen the results which followed 
 when I did so .'' In the first alternative, the imitation is 
 sensori-motor — that is, the perception of what is done 
 discharges a motor impulse to do the same thing, quite 
 apart from any purpose to be served by doing it. Of such 
 a character, to quote Mr. Small again, is the frown of the 
 baby which answers the frown of the nurse. 
 
 In an extreme form, this interpretation would be quite 
 inapplicable to the animals observed by me. The inter- 
 pretation would require that the animal should be influenced 
 by the perception at the time when it perceives it. Thus 
 the rat, I suppose, runs to dig or gnaw where and while 
 the other is digging or gnawing. My animals, on the 
 other hand, normally repeated my performance only after 
 it was all over and the result had accrued. Jack did not, for 
 example, rush forward to help me to drag down the string, 
 but watched me as I dragged it down, searched for the 
 meat, ate it up, waited while I replaced meat and card, and 
 then dragged it down again. The opposite cases ^ were 
 quite exceptional, and I think confined to Jack, who was 
 always the most eager of my pupils.' 
 
 ' Op. at. p. 102. 
 
 ^ Such were his actions in one trial of the spike experiment, and in the 
 cupboard-door experiment. 
 
 ^ By way of testing this irrational suggestibility, I did one or two 
 " control " experiments. I took a little ivory box, and solemnly opened it 
 before Jack. There was nothing inside. I then gave it him to play with, 
 and he pawed it about and chewed it. This was repeated four or five 
 times, after which Jack would not touch it unless bidden. He never tried 
 to lift the lid off, though it came off several times as he played with the 
 box. A day or two afterwards I put an empty paper-rack before the cat, 
 who was at once very much interested. The rack consisted of three or 
 four brass leaves or sides. One of these was loose, and I pulled it out. 
 The cat began at once to claw the rack, and presently pulled the loose 
 
222 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 The theory may, however, be reconstructed In a more 
 plausible form. It may be said that the animal never 
 perceived the relation between one act and another, but 
 that when his attention was called to the act, he acquired 
 a slight impulse to do it, which was speedily confirmed by 
 the satisfactory results. There are not wanting facts in 
 favour of this theory. Jack, for example, undoubtedly 
 acquired a taste for hanging strings, and would pull at 
 them frequently with no result. Similarly, the elephant, 
 who would pull in a basket containing bread by means of 
 a cord, would also pull dummy cords arranged for the 
 purpose. I have seen the cat sitting up before the cabinet 
 of drawers systematically pulling out one after another 
 when there was nothing in them at all, and what is more, 
 I have seen him pull out the same drawer three or four 
 times in succession. Such cases suggest at least that the 
 action tends to become habitual or sensorl-motor. That is 
 to say, it tends to become attached to the perception Itself. 
 And so far as it is attached to the perception, the rela- 
 tion between the act and Its apparent end ceases to be 
 operative. 
 
 How far, then, does this tendency go, and how far can 
 we stIU trace the direct influence of the end upon the act ? 
 The simplest method of determining this question is by a 
 
 piece out, but sideways, not lengthwise as I had done. Nothing hap- 
 pened. I showed him again several times, and as nothing happened, his 
 interest speedily drooped, and he departed, probably in some dudgeon. 
 
 Meanwhile, Jack was watching the proceedings. He now came up, 
 and pawed all about, getting out the loose piece first sideways, and after 
 a time, during which he was not shown again, lengthwise. I then showed 
 him once or twice, and at length he pulled it out more or less deliberately. 
 When he found that nothing happened, and I replaced the piece, he took 
 no notice of it at all. I showed him again, and he knocked the piece out 
 sideways, and bit it. After this he refused to take any notice till I had 
 shown him three times, when he pawed at the side, and knocked the 
 whole thing over. After this he absolutely refused to take any notice until 
 he was ordered to pull it out, when he again got up and knocked the 
 whole rack over. 
 
 Both animals began with every appearance of expectation that 
 this was to be another of the now familiar tricks, which, according to 
 experience, resulted in a tit-bit for them. Both showed interest in the 
 proceedings, and an attempt to follow what I was doing at first ; and 
 both, when they found there was no result, abandoned their efforts. It 
 would, of course, be possible to get the dog to persist through the motive 
 of obedience, but this would be quite a different thing from mechanical 
 imitation. Of this there seemed to be no trace. 
 
X SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 223 
 
 discrimination test. An animal is accustomed to react to 
 a particular object, and by so doing gets food. We wish 
 to decide whether the reaction is determined by the sight 
 of the object, or the desire for the food. Let us then 
 multiply the object by two or three, and arrange so that 
 the food is connected with one only. If the animal has 
 means of knowing this, and — the food of course being out 
 of sight at the time of action — prefers the appropriate 
 object, the motive seems sufficiently clear. I have already 
 mentioned some of the experiments which I made in this 
 connection. The behaviour of the cats to the drawers 
 showed in two cases a decided, in the third case a slighter, 
 preference for the right one. The otter showed no hesi- 
 tation or confusion at all between the two similar boxes, in 
 one of which the catch had to be lifted, and in the other, 
 depressed. But as a special test of this question, I made 
 some experiments with Jack and his strings. 
 
 In the first series,^ I put a paper on the projection over a door, 
 carried the string over a neighbouring picture, and dangled a 
 dummy string down from the upper hinge of the door, so that the 
 two strings hung at an interval of about a yard. The dummy was 
 the nearest to Jack. As I was arranging this. Jack tugged at the 
 wrong string, and I drove him away. When I put the biscuit 
 up, and called him, he ran up, and pulled the right string. Next 
 time he pulled the wrong string. 
 
 His whole series is as follows. 
 
 1. Right string first. 
 
 2. Wrong first. 
 
 3. Right first (seeing me put it up). 
 
 4. Right first (seeing put up). 
 
 5. Wrong first ; not seeing put up. 
 
 6. Right first; ditto. 
 
 7. Right approached, not pulled ; pulled wrong, then right 
 (ditto). 
 
 8. Right first. 
 
 9. Right first. 
 
 ID. String shortened (to obviate difficulty of his seizing it too 
 
 ' I had previously made an experiment with four strings attached to 
 his box. Three were dummies, and one pulled the lever which opened 
 the box. Jack virtually failed in this. I kept turning the box about, and 
 his tendency was to take the string nearest him. He was right first 
 seven times out of twenty. The strings swung about near together, and 
 this and the movement of the box made matters too puzzling for him. 
 
224 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 low to pull efficiently). Fails to find right string ; pulls wrong 
 one ; back, and looks for right, but does not see it till I point 
 repeatedly. 
 
 11. Right first. 
 
 12. Right attempted ; misses seizing it. Pulls wrong, chews 
 it, and goes back to right. 
 
 Next day. 
 
 Right five times running. He only pulled at wrong string at 
 beginning, while I was arranging experiment, and before I put 
 right string up. (N.B. wrong string once pulled down after 
 biscuit eaten.) 
 
 In this series ; 
 
 (a) He was right from the first when he saw process of 
 arrangement. 
 
 {¥) When not seeing it, his first record was wrong, right, 
 wrong, right, right. 
 
 (f) Then came shortening of string, and he failed to see it. 
 That twice put him wrong. But that he had really learnt the 
 right string is shown by his behaviour next day, when the string 
 was made more easy to see, and he made no mistake. He there- 
 fore certainly learnt to discriminate strings in eight experiments 
 without seeing the biscuit put up ; and probably three trials 
 would have been enough, but for the difficulty of sight. 
 
 I now reversed the strings, making the arrangement before his 
 eyes. We will call the string which was formerly right and now 
 wrong, the old string, and the other the new string. 
 
 1. Pulls the old string first, then new. 
 
 2. New. 
 
 3. New. 
 
 He is now taken away, so that he cannot see biscuit put up. 
 Result : 
 
 I I times pulls old string first, each time passing the new string 
 to get to it. 
 
 12. Stops at right, with claw on it ; hesitates, looking towards 
 old : biscuit falls down. 
 
 13. Old again. 
 
 After three-quarters of an 1 
 
 14. Old. 
 
 24. Old ; hesitation. 
 
 15. New. 
 
 25. Old. 
 
 16. Old. 
 
 26. New. 
 
 17. Old. 
 
 27. New. 
 
 18. New. 
 
 28. New. 
 
 19. Old. 
 
 29. New. 
 
 20. New. 
 
 30. New. 
 
 21. Old. 
 
 31. New. 
 
 22. Old. 
 
 Next day. 
 
 23. New. 
 
 New, five times running, 
 
X SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 225 
 
 This was a case of sheer mechanical habit, gradually overcome. 
 The seizing of the wrong string became more and more mechanical, 
 so that after pulling it the dog would not wait to see whether 
 the biscuit had fallen down but would go to the new string at 
 once, even with the old string still in his mouth. 
 
 It must be remembered, however, that the penalty of mistake 
 was a very slight one ; he always pulled the right string immedi- 
 ately after the wrong one — therefore virtually lost nothing by it. 
 
 So far the experiments were not decisive. The first 
 series showed that Jack could discriminate the strings, 
 and preferred that which he learnt to be connected with 
 the food. The second series, on the other hand, testifies 
 forcibly to the strength of habit. Later on therefore I 
 made a second series of experiments in which he saw the 
 biscuit put up, but could not see it after it was put up. 
 Three strings hung down side by side, at intervals of 
 about a foot ; and I put the food first on one card, and 
 then on another, varying them quite irregularly. The 
 result showed a rapid growth of discrimination, which 
 soon became nearly perfect. 
 
 Jacic, who had not had the string experiment for some time, 
 was very much excited, and at first kept pulling down the strings 
 before I had time to put the meat up. He then began pulling in 
 very random fashion, and only chose the right one first three 
 times in the first fifteen trials. Soon, however, he became more 
 attentive. In the next fifteen trials he was right seven times, and 
 seven times also in the next ten. The experiment was resumed 
 in the afternoon under stricter conditions. He was held back a 
 yard or two, and I counted three after the biscuit was placed, and 
 before he was let go. In the first four experiments he was right 
 twice, but had some difficulty at the beginning in seeing the 
 strings. In the next ten, he was right seven times, and one trial 
 was doubtful.^ During the course of these trials he gave up 
 pulling down the remaining strings after getting the biscuit. 
 
 I now made a further experiment to test the effect of 
 irrational imitation. Putting the biscuit on one of the 
 cards, I pulled it down, and let him take it. I then placed 
 a biscuit on another card, to see whether he would be 
 guided by what he now saw, or by what I had just done. 
 The case was closely analogous to the ordinary experi- 
 
 ' He jumped between two strings, but caught the right one. 
 
 Q 
 
226 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 ments, in which he had learnt to get food by the method 
 by which I had previously got it for him ; and the ques- 
 tion therefore seemed here to come to a head. If he was 
 influenced by what he saw me do, there would be some 
 tendency to pull the string which 1 had pulled. But if 
 this influence was subordinate to the desire of getting the 
 biscuit, he would soon learn that for once he was wrong in 
 following me ; and he would as before take to watching 
 where the biscuit was put, and pulling the string that led 
 to that place. This is in fact what fell out. In the first 
 four trials, he three times pulled the string which I had 
 pulled previously.^ After this, he six times in succession 
 pulled the right one, to the neglect of that which I had 
 pulled before. 
 
 This experiment seemed to me to show at once the 
 influence of previous perception, and its subordination to 
 the results connected with it. The experiment also illus- 
 trated once more the function of attention. Comparing 
 its earlier and later stages, it would seem that Jack's 
 attention was rapidly cultivated. He began with great 
 carelessness ; and his successes were actually below the 
 average of pure chance. By the end of the day, he had 
 improved so much as to be nearly always right. 
 
 Tied cord. 
 
 I was struck by a performance of the chimpanzee with a 
 cord which I had knotted round a bar outside his cage. 
 He was accustomed to pulling in food by means of this 
 cord, and I wished to see how he would act if I tied the 
 cord round a staple, so that the end in his possession 
 became inoperative. I found that without any hesitation, 
 he "made a long arm," and reached beyond the knot ; and 
 I thought it would be interesting to compare the action of 
 other animals on this point. I therefore arranged a cord 
 for Jack's benefit, which passed from the leg of a table 
 diagonally upwards, round a support of the sideboard at 
 about three feet from the ground, and from there up to a 
 
 1 At the first trial he nearly pulled the right one, but passed to mine. 
 Both strings fell. In the third trial he pulled neither the right string nor 
 mine. It must be added that each time, after having pulled down the 
 card, I replaced it immediately before placing the biscuit on another card, 
 so that his attention to the wrong card was maintained. 
 
X SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 227 
 
 high shelf where a little basket was placed. The result 
 showed that Jack had no appreciation of the knot, and did 
 not find the right place for himself, but learnt it rapidly 
 from my suggestion. 
 
 The string was first made loose, and Jack got the basket by 
 pulling the lower portion. I then knotted it round the support, 
 but, as it happened, I did not make the knot tight enough ; and 
 by biting persistently at the lower string Jack got the biscuit again. 
 At the third trial. Jack pulled the lower string till it broke, when he 
 got some satisfaction in chewing it. He then pulled slightly at 
 the short hanging end of it, and then pulled above the knot. I 
 now substituted a stout cord, and first made it loose. Jack pulled 
 from below as before. I then tied it again, and the rest of his 
 record is as follows. 
 
 5. He pulls hard at wrong place. Then higher up, close 
 to the knot but not above, which involves his coming round leg 
 of sideboard. Sits watching. Goes away. Comes back. Just 
 nips at cord in wrong place, but gives no real pull, and sits still 
 again. 
 
 I say, " Good dog ;" he pulls at wrong part again. I point to 
 basket. Again at wrong ; now jumps up and at knot. I point 
 to basket again — similar result. I point to string — similar result. 
 I point to right spot of string. Same, only tries to get paw up on 
 to sideboard. 
 
 I point again. He comes round under string and to right place, 
 and pulls successfully. 
 
 6. Wrong again. Then waits. I say, " Good dog ;" no result. 
 Then he comes round, bites just by knot, but gets right side, and 
 so succeeds. 
 
 7. Right at once (both these times he started from same corner 
 where he had sat at first, and had to come round corner of side- 
 board). 
 
 8. Comes round at once, but at first takes string just below 
 knot. Quickly drops it, and pulls right. 
 
 g. Pulls wrong hard. Then jumps at sideboard. Pulls, not 
 seriously, at wrong again. Pause. At last comes round as before 
 from corner, and yet pulls wrong, near knot. He lies still a long 
 time. At last I say, " Go on, Jack." He goes to right place, 
 pulls wrong slightly, then right. 
 
 10. To right place at once (from old corner). Pulls wrong 
 slightly. Then right. 
 
 11. Wrong slightly, but quickly to right. 
 
 12. Barely mouths wrong string. Then right. 
 
 13. Right at once. 
 
 14. Same (makes a sort of feint at wrong). 
 
 Q 2 
 
228 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 Next day. 
 
 1. Wrong first. Then quickly round, and pulls right. 
 
 2. Right at once. 
 
 3. Same. 
 
 4. Same. 
 
 This really resolved itself into a discrimination 
 experiment, in which Jack learnt the right part of the 
 string by my pointing to it twice in one trial,^ after 
 which he never altogether failed, though he once tem- 
 porarily forgot.^ 
 
 Teufel also did an experiment of this kind, in which 
 the right part of the string was at first distinguished by some 
 wool. The right string was pointed at the first time and 
 once later. The whole record is as follows. 
 
 RECORD IN BRIEF. 
 
 (Right or wrong at fint trial.) 
 First night. Second night. Third night. 
 
 1. Right (pointed to). 
 
 2. Wrong. 
 
 3. Wrong. 
 
 Right. 
 Right. 
 Right. 
 
 Wrong, 
 
 Right. 
 
 Right. 
 
 4. Right. 
 
 5. Wrong. 
 
 6. Right. 
 
 
 Right. 
 Wrong. 
 
 Right. 
 Right. 
 Right. 
 
 7. Wrong. 
 
 8. Right (pointed). 
 
 9. Right. 
 ID. Right. 
 
 
 
 11. Right. 
 
 12. Right. 
 
 
 
 
 Finally, I arranged a similar experiment for the elephant, 
 with similar results. 
 
 1 His success in No. 3 may have helped him, but it would probably be 
 neutrahsed by my leaving the string slack again in No. 4. 
 
 2 This was a particularly instructive case of temporary failure. I did 
 not give him the slightest hint or reminder, but after he had waited 
 stupidly for a long time, I told him to go on, in the reproachful tone 
 which one might use to a person who really knows a thing, but is 
 suffering from some inhibition which prevents his using it. In Jack's 
 case my remark seemed precisely to have this effect of removing the 
 inhibition, or perhaps of supplying the needed stimulus to set the 
 pnachinery to work. 
 
X SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 229 
 
 A cord started from the bottom of her stall and was passed 
 over the railing above her head. From there it descended 
 diagonally, and was tied to a basket placed out of sight, two or 
 three yards away. She pulled it in six times by means of the 
 near portion of the cord, showing by the way some ingenuity in 
 so doing, either helping herself with her foot, or turning her head 
 right away. The cord was now tied round the railing, and the 
 elephant was at first baffled. In despair she opened her mouth 
 wide for the food to be thrown in, and having raised her trunk 
 for the purpose, brought it down with a swish over the outer 
 portion of the cord, and secured the basket. This was clearly an 
 accident, and at the second trial she was quite baffled again. At 
 length the keeper, who was present, pointed to the right cord, 
 and she pulled it. At the third trial, however, she again pulled 
 the wrong part hard at first, but at length, in again putting her 
 trunk up to open her mouth, she put it round the outer cord, and 
 pulled. This time it did not seem to be altogether an accident, 
 for she curled the trunk about the cord ; and in fact, in the 
 next trial, she pulled the right almost at once. In the next 
 trial again, after slightly trying the wrong part, she pulled right. 
 She was then three times right in succession. Two days later 
 she began by pulling at the right cord, but the basket caught in 
 some rails over which she had to pull it. This led her to try the 
 wrong part for a while, but she reverted to the right portion, and 
 got the bread. At the next trial she tried the wrong part for a 
 moment, and then was right ; after this she was right four times 
 in succession. Six days later she always pulled the right cord, 
 though generally with a slight preliminary pull at the wrong one. 
 On the knot being loosened, however, she pulled the downward 
 string. 
 
 Result of the 'Discrimination experiments — Instinct^ Habit, 
 and Intelligence. 
 
 Taken together, the discrimination experiments go to 
 /'show that whatever the force of habit, and whatever the 
 feebleness and uncertainty of attention, the animals are on 
 the whole aware of what they are about, and able at need 
 to correct their errors by resists. Their behaviour is 
 most easily understood'ifwe conceive the more intelligent 
 act as overlaying habitual action, which in its turn over- 
 lays the actions of instinct and impulse, Mr. Small notes 
 the inveterate tendency of his rats to " fool." They run 
 about, smell, dig, or gnaw, without real reference to the 
 business in hand. In the same way Jack scrabbles and 
 
230 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 jumps, the kitten wanders and picks, the otter slips about 
 everywhere like ground lightning, the elephant fumbles 
 ceaselessly, the monkey pulls things about. This is, as 
 it were, the basal behaviour : the matrix out of which 
 more adaptive action is hewn. But it tends to persist, even 
 when the intelligent mode of conduct is fully formed. 
 Still more does the animal tend to relapse into it when his 
 intelligence fails. Under the pressure of desire he must 
 do something ; and he falls back on the action that is 
 native to him. Upon this tendency are superimposed the 
 results of experience. Experience selects some of these 
 actions, and applies them to this or that object. So 
 selected or applied, the acts tend to become habitual, and 
 are performed apart from those results which brought 
 them into being. They become in this way incorporated, 
 though less intimately, in the life of the animal, and 
 serve him as a form of play or recreation. But once 
 more, they give place on occasion to the actual desires of 
 the animal, and the thing necessary for their attainment. 
 We must take habit into account as a disturbing influence 
 in the work of intelligence, but we must not attribute to it 
 all that intelligence does. 
 
 6. Probable reasons for imputing perceptual Learning. 
 
 The question remains, whether, after all, any of the 
 tricks were learnt by perception. I have admitted, as the 
 detailed account shows, that other elements may in some 
 cases have entered in, and may not this be true even when 
 appearances suggested the contrary ? Is it not possible 
 that in each case, after a certain amount of random 
 endeavour, the animal hit by chance upon the appro- 
 priate movement, and finding that successful, repeated 
 it ^ If this were so, to show the method would be 
 superfluous, and an animal should learn on the average 
 as quickly if left to itself as upon the method adopted by 
 me. 1 may say at once that the influence of imitation 
 cannot be finally established until comparative experiments 
 on a large scale have been conducted upon this point.^ 
 
 1 As a beginning I myself borrowed two collies, mother and son, for 
 the purpose. My intention was to proceed as follows ; — Taking experi- 
 ment a, to show the method to the mother, and leave the son to discover 
 
X SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 231 
 
 My experiments gave the affirmative instance, and the 
 negative is required. But the reasons for holding as a 
 probable inference that my animals were guided by what 
 they saw are briefly these. There was in nearly all the 
 experiments which succeeded (and most did succeed) 
 a certain point at which a well marked change of attitude 
 took place. This point varied, from the second trial to 
 the seventh or eighth, and once or twice it was still longer 
 delayed. Before this point, the efforts were of a random 
 character ; not purposeless, indeed, but directed towards 
 getting the foods by the methods natural or habitual to the 
 animal. At a certain point it became clear that the 
 animal was abandoning these methods, and adopting mine. 
 The transition was more or less clearly marked, in accord- 
 ance with the nature of the thing to be done. Where 
 that was something very definite, the transition was 
 striking and conspicuous. Such, for example, was Jack's 
 first experiment with the string, where he began by leaping 
 up and pawing wildly, and after once seeing the card 
 pulled, took the string neatly in his teeth, and pulled it 
 down. Other conspicuous instances with Jack were the 
 spike experiment, in which, from general biting at spike, 
 
 it. Then, taking b, to reverse the process, showing it to the son, and 
 leaving the mother to find it out. For both dogs, each trial was to be 
 limited to 30 seconds, and, upon a series of experiments, it would appear 
 whether the tricks shown were upon the average learnt in fewer trials 
 than the tricks not shown. By this method of alternation I hoped to 
 eliminate the differences of quality between the two animals. My experi- 
 ment failed, because neither animal was sufficiently successful to give 
 tangible results. The older collie would pay no attention at all to what 
 she was shown, but merely looked to her master, and begged him to do 
 the thing for her. I only succeeded in teaching her (by showing) to 
 scratch open a lid ; and I am bound to say that, having once got the 
 method, she applied it to a quite different box intelligently enough, always 
 turning the box rapidly round till she found her scratching succeeding. 
 In fact, she was not wanting in intelligence, but in initiative. So marked 
 was this that when, in despair, I gave her a tin, which, as I held it, could 
 not fail to open if once scratched at, and which the young dog accordingly 
 scratched open at once, she made no effort till shown it several times. It 
 was after learning this that she was taught to scratch open the lid of the 
 other two boxes. The young dog was much more lively, and inclined to 
 attempt things. He learnt rapidly (by showing) to open a box by the 
 lever, throwing it upwards with his nose ; and also more slowly (when 
 shown) to push back a lid with his nose. But the matter could not finally 
 be decided without employing at least a dozen dogs or cats. At best, I 
 do not think that perception of results would, except in difficult tricks, 
 counterbalance any marked difference in intelligence or initiative. 
 
232 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 chain, or lever, he passed in one trial ^ to the deliberate 
 attempt to pull out a skewer somewhat tightly rammed in, 
 and four or five inches long — an action which required 
 definite and sustained effort. Another case was that of 
 the weight, where, from biting at a string and jumping up 
 at the box. Jack after having steadily looked at the 
 weight, came up and knocked It oflF. Equally definite was 
 the removal of the stopper, done neatly with the teeth 
 after the operation had once been seen. No less definite 
 was the pulling out of the sideboard drawer by the handle, 
 though this experiment was marred by the reluctance 
 described above. There is no sort of gradual transition 
 from a general scrabble of the paws about a drawer, to the 
 act of quietly seizing the handle with the teeth. Similarly, 
 the opening of the drawer by Teuf el and the Persian ; the 
 drawing of a bolt by my cat ; the upsetting of the tripod 
 and the pulling down of the string by the same animal, 
 were very definite actions, not emerging from a general 
 scratch, but, from the first, to all appearance definite in 
 their aim. The little fox-terrier's action with the tripod, 
 like the cat's, seemed to be a quite definite act, emerging 
 as it were out of pure nothingness, i.e., out of mere absence 
 of effort. It must be added that as the table (p. 246) 
 shows, both in these instances and in others, what was 
 once acquired was very rarely lost. In many cases 
 there was no complete failure after the first success. 
 In others, there were none in the same series. Where 
 there were failures, they were generally few, suggesting 
 a momentary forgetfulness rather than an imperfectly 
 formed habit. 
 
 7. Evidence of guidance by "Ideas." 
 
 Nor is this all. In some cases there were indications 
 that the animal was learning not merely to execute a 
 certain movement, but to do a certain thing : to move a 
 certain object in the way in which it had been shown. 
 Such, at least, was the impression left on my mind. When 
 the cat, for example, learnt to pull out 'a bolt, it learnt 
 not merely to paw, nor to paw at a particular thing, but 
 to pull that bolt right out, a thing requiring a certain 
 ' After one preliminary effort, in which he joined me in pulling. 
 
X SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 233 
 
 combination or repetition of minor movements.^ I have 
 already referred once or twice to Jack's efforts with the 
 skewer. Even more remarkable was the combination of 
 efforts by which he pulled the string up through the 
 banisters. We cannot in such a case apply the conception 
 of a perceived object discharging a uniform motor reaction. 
 There is rather a combination of movements which are 
 not always the same except in this, that they are so 
 adjusted as to produce a certain perceptible change in the 
 external world. The string is seized in the place learnt 
 through two or three experiences to be best ; the dog 
 backs, and lets the string run through his teeth without 
 letting go, or perhaps helps himself with his paw ; and 
 finally darts forward for the bucket, all as the needs of 
 the moment dictate.^ So again in opening the sideboard 
 drawer : Jack not merely pulls, but learns for himself how 
 to get his head into the drawer without shutting it again, 
 altering the method when he once hurts himself, and 
 finding another. So again I have seen him, when standing 
 up to pull open the door of his box by means of a wire, 
 accidentally pushing it with his paws again as he let go. 
 At a second trial he was careful to avoid this, dropping 
 the wire, and pushing his nose in as soon as there was 
 room. Similarly, I have seen the elephant shift the box 
 that she was opening when she had found that in a certain 
 position the door would slam to again before she could 
 get her trunk in. I have mentioned how well she would 
 pull in the rope by successive stages, and in the same way, 
 in an experiment in pulling a stick, which will be referred 
 
 ' This at least is true of his action at its best. It was not always 
 equally decisive, and once at least the cat pulled at the door before the 
 bolt was properly out. 
 
 2 Thinking memory might have exaggerated Jack's performance in 
 this trick I tried it again after writing the above. In the first trial he 
 succeeded with some difficulty by backing, and letting the string run 
 through his teeth as he pulled. At the second he tried another method. 
 Having pulled the string in a little way, he dropped it, and tried by 
 darting forward to catch it further on. In this he was defeated, because 
 the string slipped away more quickly than he could get forward. He 
 then put his paw on the string, holding it while he darted his mouth 
 forward. Repeating this once or twice he succeeded in getting the 
 bucket up — on the whole perhaps his most intelligent performance, and 
 in detail quite novel. 
 
234 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 to lower down, I noticed her " shortening," slipping her 
 trunk along the stick as she got the end nearer towards 
 her. These minor adjustments suggest the dominance 
 of an effort to effect a certain external change : to pull in 
 a stick, pull out a bolt, open a door. They thus 
 correspond to what in human experience we know as 
 ideomotor action — action in which we deal with the 
 objects of perception not in accordance with a fixed 
 habitual response, but in such a manner as to produce in 
 them a certain change which we desire. 
 
 These indications, slight as they may be,^ suggest — and 
 the result would hold, apart from the question of imitation 
 — that what the animals learnt was not merely to respond 
 in a particular way to a particular object, but to produce a 
 certain change in that object as a means to securing their 
 food. If this view is correct we have here in an 
 elementary form the equivalent in action of the practical 
 judgment — or idea. That is to say, we have a series of 
 muscular movements directed towards a certain proximate 
 end, which end is supported and made valuable by the fact 
 that it is a means to something further. Action is directed 
 towards the end a. a is in itself indifferent, but is valuable 
 to the animal as a means to b. This relation, a — b, the 
 animal has had opportunities of perceiving. We have, 
 therefore, if the observations are correctly analysed, the 
 clearest evidence that it is the knowledge of this sequence 
 applied by the animal which determines its behaviour. In 
 human experience the means and the end in such a case 
 form the content of ideas, and their combination would be 
 called a judgment. The above observations suggest that, 
 if animals have not such ideas, they have something which 
 can perform an equivalent function. To put it differently, 
 I would define a practical idea as the function which directs 
 action, not necessarily in accordance with habit or instinct, 
 to the production of a certain perceptible result. It is, 
 further, a necessary part of such an idea that it rests on a 
 
 1 I much regret that I did not make more frequent notes on points of 
 this kind, the significance of which did not occur to me at first. I have 
 tried in the text to render fairly the impression left on my memory by 
 many of the experiments, in the hope that in future experiments special 
 attention may be given to this point. 
 
X SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 235 
 
 perceptual basis, and is capable of being brought into 
 relation with another such idea, for example, as means 
 to end.^ 
 \/ Absence of analysis. 
 
 At the same time it must be understood that, if we 
 attribute ideas to an animal, they are not ideas arrived at 
 by any breaking-up, analysis, or other elaboration of what 
 is given in perception. None of my animals (with the 
 possible exception now and again of the monkeys) showed 
 the least understanding of the how or why of their 
 actions, as distinct from the crude fact that to do such 
 and such a thing produced the result they required. It is 
 this want of what one may call analysis that made, for 
 example, the push-back bolt such a difficulty. What 
 Jack or the elephant knew was, crudely, that they had to 
 push this bolt. That the reason why they had to push it 
 was to get it clear of the staple they obviously never 
 grasped.^ 
 
 Similarly, Jack learnt to push a door, but which side he 
 was to push it he did not know. Clearly he did not 
 realise that to push the door would pull the string, and so 
 drag down the card. All he knew was that a push on 
 either side might get him the meat.^ If, then, positively, 
 
 ' The practical ideas which I would attribute to animals, therefore, 
 correspond with the explicit ideas of Dr. Stout. Ideas in Dr. Stout's 
 terminology' may be either tied, explicit, or free. Tied ideas are those 
 "complicated" with perception, the elements which, in the terminology 
 here used, have been assimilated by a sense datum. They are not 
 separable elements in a mental state {Manual, pp. 191 following). 
 Explicit ideas " extend and supplement present sense perception." 
 Such an idea is a distinguishable element in consciousness but it does 
 not arise except in relation to a percept (p. 196). Free ideas, on the 
 other hand, have an individuality of their own and can exist apart 
 from that which originally revives them {ibid.). Explicit ideas corre- 
 spond precisely to those which I impute to the stage of the practical 
 judgment. Free ideas, I think, belong only to that more reflective 
 consciousness which we presume to be the exclusive attribute of 
 man. 
 
 ^ It may have been mere chance, but I did observe the monkey Jimmy 
 at times fingering the space between the two staples. Here at least was 
 a datum out of which understanding of the bolt might come. 
 
 ^ I therefore fully agree with Mr. Small's meaning, though I should 
 employ a slightly different terminology, when he says :— " It is also clear, 
 I think, that, what properly may be called ideas, find slight place in the 
 associative process. Crass images — visual, olfactory, motor— organic 
 conditions, and instinctive activities are assuredly the main elements. 
 
236 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 the experiments suggest " practical ideas " negatively, 
 they strongly suggest absence of any sort of analysis in 
 the genesis of those ideas. An animal can shift its 
 attention to this or that object or change within the 
 sphere of perception ; but it cannot apparently follow out 
 the structure of any complex object with any minuteness 
 and accuracy. 
 
 8. Further evidence as to perceptual learning. 
 
 To return to perceptual learning. If we allow ourselves 
 to go outside the region of experiment we find plenty of 
 instances of it in the observations of psychologists and 
 others. Of these the ordinary case of the cat and the 
 thumb-latch will serve, as an example, as well as another. 
 Writers like Mr. Thorndike, who deny imitation, have to 
 fall back on the theory that the cat learns this, in the first 
 instance, by some lucky combination of random jumpings 
 and clutchings and scratchings and pushings. This would 
 only be possible, to begin with, if cats habitually jumped 
 about and clutched and scratched in such a manner when 
 they wanted to leave a room. Mr. Thorndike has experi- 
 mented so much with cats shut up in cages that he seems 
 to think this a possible explanation. If three cats out of 
 eight learnt, by scrabbling all round their pens, to open 
 their latches, why, he asks,^ should not three cats in a 
 thousand learn to open a thumb-latch "in the same way" .'' 
 — i.e., I suppose, by jumping and scratching all round the 
 room. But the reply is that a thousand cats do not 
 spend their time jumping and scratching round rooms. 
 Such behaviour is, no doubt, natural to cats confined in a 
 cage, but ordinary observation of cats under normal 
 conditions is enough to show that this explanation is 
 purely imaginary. 
 
 Comparative unimportance of accident. 
 
 I must add here that, so far as I could judge, the more 
 a success was accidental the less likely were the animals 
 
 That these elements may bleach out and attenuate into ideas is not 
 impossible" {pp. cit., p. 155.) 
 
 As I use it, the term idea means any mental state, however little 
 analysed, the function of which is to refer to something not actually 
 perceived (see above, Ch. VIII., p. 151). 
 
 ' Op. cit., p. 44. 
 
X SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 237 
 
 to take advantage of it. The elephant, for example, who 
 succeeded by a random pull in getting out the bolt at the 
 first trial, failed immediately afterwards. But when, after 
 being twice shown, it succeeded again, the trick was 
 established. Jack seldom failed more than once or twice 
 after learning apparently by perception. But consider the 
 case of the push-back bolt, which Jack learnt principally 
 by trial and error. Here there was a random success at 
 the third trial, followed by no less than twenty-nine 
 failures. A second success later on was also isolated, and 
 it was not till the forty-fourth trial that a third success 
 practically established the trick. I have referred above to 
 the collie, which no less than four times knocked the 
 string down by roaming about, but showed no inclination 
 whatever to pull it down by a deliberate act. In short, 
 these experiments seem to suggest that recent writers have 
 over-estimated the effect of pure accident. In any case 
 it would seem that, whether accidental or not, the success 
 is only effective if attended to. When due to some chance 
 movement disconnected with the efforts of the animal,' 
 it seemed, as a rule, to leave no impression.^ 
 
 1 As, e.g., the knocking down of the string by the cat with his tail. 
 
 ' So far as they go the "double movement" tricks, if properly arranged, 
 tell in favour of learning by attention to the changes rather than by 
 association of movements. The most instructive of these experiments 
 are those in which an animal first learns an act A, and then learns that B 
 must be done to make A possible. Thus, the otter first learns to pull a 
 lever, then to draw a bolt or raise a catch in order that the pulling of the 
 lever may be effective. If this be explained as regressive association it 
 must be borne in mind that first the association of success with the act A 
 has to be dissolved — the animal pulls at the lever and finds it of no use. 
 Then the association has to be reconstituted for A-in-the-circumstances- 
 created-by-the-performance-of-B, and then B has to be learnt. Now, all 
 this is accomplished by the animals in some cases in a very few trials. 
 
 Instances of double movements learnt by Jack were the " loop " and 
 "skewer" and "pull-out bolt." It is noteworthy that where, as in the 
 " push-back bolt," he had great difficulty in learning the preliminary 
 movement, he would every now and then try the other out of its place. 
 
 The cat got the order right in the "loop" experiment, but wrong in the 
 "skewer." He also got disheartened with the lever in the " push-back 
 bolt " experiment, and refused to try it. 
 
 The elephant learnt bolt and knob, and gradually got perfect about the 
 order (see table). After learning the catch she was only once wrong as to 
 the order, but in the " push-back bolt " did not properly acquire it. 
 
 The otter learnt some highly complex movements rapidly, but was 
 never " safe " as to the order. Subject to that limitation it may be said 
 to have learnt the bolt and lever in thirteen trials, catch and lever in one. 
 
238 MIND. IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 Attention not natural but acquired. 
 
 Nor had the animals — and this is a further negative 
 result of some importance — any natural impulse to attend 
 to what they were shown. There is no instinct to learn 
 by perception. So far as my own experience goes, indeed, 
 the absence of this instinct is as strongly marked among 
 apes as among lower mammals. I found the Rhesus 
 monkey less attentive than my dog, and certainly not more 
 attentive than the cat.^ To learn new methods of action 
 by watching an external process is certainly not a part of 
 an average animal's normal life. On the other hand, 
 attention can be cultivated. Jack showed a very marked 
 improvement in this respect, so that I was able to lead him 
 on step by step to more difficult things ; and both he and 
 my cat showed what may be called a general appreciation 
 of what was to be done. They became excited when I 
 
 It did the catch and bolt together, with only one failure, though with 
 much delay. Later it was given a box with two levers to be raised 
 running at right angles with each other. It took five minutes over this 
 at the first trial, and two minutes at the second. When I saw it a fort- 
 night later it bungled the first trial rather, but did the second in thirty-five 
 seconds. It then tried a box with one catch to raise, another at right 
 angles to depress, and a bolt to draw. It failed in the first two trials 
 because it knocked one catch up so as to interfere with the other. This 
 being prevented with a nail it succeeded, though with a good deal of 
 bungling, but in the second trial it seemed clear about the two catches. 
 The Rhesus monkey, Jimmy, learnt several double movements. Thus, I 
 taught him first to push back one bolt, then to pull at a wedge which 
 prevented the bolt from going back, then to remove a spike which pre- 
 vented him from pulling at the wedge, and, in addition, to pull out a 
 loose bolt, by which the box was also guarded. Jimmy, when mterested, 
 would go through the whole performance, every part of which, except the 
 pushing of the bolt, he learnt for himself, with great rapidity. But I am 
 bound to add that he would also pull at the spike when I so arranged it 
 as to have no function. Playful pulling at things is the basis of Jimmy's 
 learning. 
 
 Further experiments are wanted on this head, particularly with regard 
 to the rapidity with which the order is learnt before any safe inference 
 can be drawn from them. 
 
 ^ Hence he utterly failed, though repeatedly shown, to learn to open a 
 cupboard door by turning a button. For another conspicuous failure see 
 p. 284. I also tried in vain to teach him to use a hammer to break 
 walnuts. Miss Romanes succeeded in this with her Cebus, but it was 
 already accustomed to use a metal plate for this purpose, and merely 
 learnt to substitute the hammer. I do not wish to generalise from a 
 slender experience, but I am bound to say that the monkeys I observed 
 scarcely showed a trace of "mechanical" imitation in their behaviour, 
 and generally learnt much less by being shown than from their own 
 experimentation. 
 
X SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 239 
 
 made preparations for an experiment, even though it was 
 of a new kind. This was very plainly marked in their 
 disappointment with the " control " experiment which I 
 tried without food. 
 
 9. The normal process of learning. 
 
 Whatever the basis of learning, whether accident, 
 imitation, or other, the normal process was clear enough. 
 In each case the central point was what I have called the 
 critical success. In nearly all cases this was also the first 
 success. SometimeSj'indeed, success was arrived at in stages. 
 The animal would fairly attempt the right method without 
 succeeding ; or perhaps, though having once succeeded, it 
 would require a reminder before succeeding again. But 
 seldom would it fall back from partial success to complete 
 failure. In other cases success was heralded by a kind of 
 tentative action, as when the fox-terrier or the cat slightly 
 pawed the vase without seriously trying to overturn 
 it. Finally, after success, it was not uncommon to have 
 a break-down in one, and, more rarely, two trials of the 
 same series. Generally this happened when the series 
 had been prolonged, and it gave the impression that the 
 animal's powers of concentration had been exhausted by its 
 successful effort. There is no doubt that the process of 
 learning what to us appears so simple is to them attended 
 with great effort. It was seldom of any use to prolong a 
 lesson beyond a dozen, or, at most, twenty trials ; and the 
 dog and cat in particular would seem, at the end of such a 
 series, quite exhausted, and would stretch themselves out 
 for a good sleep, after half-an-hour of which they would 
 wake up, and do very much better. 
 
 Many observers credit animals with apparent "memory " 
 of particular events, and, rightly understood, this view 
 coincides with the conception to which we have been led 
 of the learning process. We cannot, indeed, from any 
 external action infer that an animal makes a memory- 
 judgment in the strict sense, z'.i?., is aware of an event as 
 having taken place at a certain time in the past. In this 
 sense the possession of memory by animals is at least 
 unprovable. What we can say is that a single occurrence 
 often has a permanent effect upon the animal, as shown by 
 
240 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 its actions after perhaps considerable lapse of time. With 
 the higher animals this eiFect is not confined to cases in 
 which a simple reaction is encouraged or inhibited by the 
 immediately attendant pleasure or pain.^ It is seen equally 
 in the speedy and long-retained recognition of places and 
 persons. The power of cats and dogs to find their way 
 home over a route once traversed, even among all the 
 turnings of a big town, is too familiar to need remark. 
 Similarly, Romanes correctly writes : — 
 
 " The memory of the horse is remarkably good, as almost every 
 one must have had occasion to observe who has driven one over 
 roads wrhich the animal may have only once traversed a long time 
 before." 2 
 
 A comparatively trivial event may also be " fixed " by 
 a single occurrence. 
 
 " When I was at the Cape I used to take my two dogs up the 
 Devil's Peak, an outlying point of Table Mountain. There were 
 several places at which it was necessary that I should lift them 
 from ledge to ledge since they could not scramble up by them- 
 selves. After the first ascent they always remembered these 
 places and waited patiently to be lifted up." ^ 
 
 It would be useless to multiply instances. The question 
 is, how to interpret a familiar observation. In that inter- 
 pretation we cannot, if we go solely by the actions of the 
 animal, attribute to it a memory-judgment in the sense of 
 an act of thought about the past. But we can fairly say that 
 one condition of the memory-judgment is present, i.e.^ the 
 animal takes note of a single occurrence and guides his 
 conduct thereby on subsequent occasions. 
 
 1 Inhibition is, of course, the least definite, and in that way the easiest 
 lesson that experience can teach. A case of inhibition by one experience 
 is alleged by Bingley ^quoted by Romanes, p. 25) from the MoUusca. I 
 should like to see it tested. It is also possible that in the matter of the 
 signs of approaching prey or danger, heredity prepares a machinery with 
 which the appropriate sound or sight fits not congenitally, but after a 
 minimum of practice. In these cases there may be rapid learning, and 
 yet the operation of experience may be only of the mechanical, inarticulate 
 kind. But where a poodle remembers his way to any house where he has 
 once been, we have to do with an appreciation of space relations probably 
 very complex, which, one would say, must either be retained in an 
 articulate form, or not at all (see Brehm's Thierleben, 3rd ed., Vol. II., 
 
 P- 157)- 
 ^ Animal Intelligence, p. 330. 
 ^ Lloyd Morgan, Comparative Psychology, p. 118. 
 
X SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 241 
 
 Summary. 
 
 To put these points briefly together, the experiments 
 suggest : — 
 
 1 . That animals learn by attention to a simple sequence 
 of events. It is easiest for them to learn if the first event 
 is an act of their own, and the second a result of that act, 
 which gratifies or hurts them. But even in those cases, 
 their method of learning does not ordinarily, in the 
 instances which I have observed, conform to the notion of 
 the gradual growth or inhibition of a habit. It conforms 
 rather to the rise of an idea, at first perhaps dimly grasped ; 
 then clearly seen ; for a while waveringly held, but soon 
 definitely established. 
 
 2. For reasons that have been given, the basis of what 
 was learnt was, in several cases, most probably the per- 
 ception of what was done by the experimenter, and its 
 result. This, however, requires further proof. 
 
 3. Whether by perception of what was done by another, 
 or by noting the results of their own actions, It seems fair 
 to say — though on this point, also, further evidence is 
 required — that what the animal learnt to do was. In some 
 Instances, though not in all, to effect a certain perceptual 
 change as a step to securing food. Their behaviour can- 
 not be described in all cases as a uniform motor reaction 
 to a perception but rather suggested a combination of efforts 
 to effect a definite change in the perceived object. Such a 
 direction of action to an external change, I call a practical 
 Idea. And the correlation of such an idea with a remoter 
 end, I call a practical j udgment. 
 
 4. This "idea," however, does not represent any analysis 
 of what Is perceived. Animal perception as compared with 
 human perception would seem, by the use of it, to be 
 crude ; and the ideas derived from it are no less crude. 
 
 5. There is no natural tendency to learn by perception ; 
 
 still less to " reflective " as distinct from " simple " 
 
 imitation.^ 
 
 1 Mr. Small says, " It is not impossible that a form of imitation, 
 involving the higher associative processes, might be demonstrated if it 
 were possible to direct the attention of the rat to the actions of the other 
 rat, while retaining undiminished the affective basis for action "(p. 163, 
 op. cit.). Except that the animals used to watch, not the actions of another, 
 
 R 
 
242 MINp IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 It may be added that In spite of much difference in the 
 way of going about a thing, there appeared to be no 
 essential difference in capacity to learn between the dogs, 
 elephants, cats, and otter. The difference between in- 
 dividual dogs, for example, appeared much more marked 
 that those beween the dog Jack and the elephant Lily.^ 
 
 but my motions, this sentence expresses in a few words the point on 
 which success or failure in the above experiments appeared to turn. 
 
 ' The problem of perceptual learning has been the subject of a large 
 number of laboratory experiments since the above was written, many 
 of which gave negative results. It must be remarked, however, that 
 the question is not whether the lower animals in general can learn through 
 perception, nor whether the higher animals normally use this form of 
 intelligence, but whether some of them are on occasion capable of 
 so doing. It is therefore a case in which the affirmative instances are 
 decisive as against the negative, and in a number of cases the affirm- 
 ative appears to be clearly made out. To begin with monkeys, 
 Kinnaman ("Mental Life of Two Macacus Rhesus Monkeys in Captivity," 
 American Journal of Psychology, Vol. XIII.), while associatmg his 
 general account of their methods with that of Thorndike's cats, shows 
 clearly that the female learnt from her male companion to pull out a 
 plug in which she had failed when by herself, and Dr. Haggerty 
 ("Imitation in Monkeys," J.C.N., Vol. XIX.) showed that of eleven 
 monkeys which she used all but two exhibited imitative behaviour (p. 
 434). Her remarks upon the nature and stimulus of imitation are very 
 instructive. In the first place she points out that in the most successful cases 
 the imitator responds " by attacking a particular object." He does not 
 necessarily repeat the " movements of the imitatee in detail. The impulse 
 seemed to be to do something to the object, and the imitating animal 
 used his hands and teeth interchangeably " (p. 439). This accords with 
 my experience. It is against a mechanical interpretation of the imitative 
 act and favours its purposive character. Further, " there is evidence to 
 show that in certain cases the behaviour of the animal, unaccompanied by 
 any profitable result, is not sufficient to produce imitation." Our author 
 concludes : " Thus the facts would indicate that not only the act of the 
 animal but also the profitable result of that act was a necessary feature 
 in producing imitation" (p. 441). 
 
 Rapidity of learning comes out markedly in Kinnaman's experiments 
 in relation to complex acts such as opening a door by turning a button, 
 lifting a lever, and so on. In several of these cases the time falls plumply 
 after the first trial in a relation of ten to one or more. 
 
 Coming lower than monkeys, we have Mr. C. S. Berry's studies of rats 
 and cats. In the case of rats Mr. Berry concludes, like Dr. Haggerty, 
 that the result is of importance. The untrained rat learnt the way out 
 from the trained one, but " it was not until the trained rat had got out a 
 few times that the untrained rat began to follow him." At the beginning 
 they showed "no particular tendency to take note of each other's moves." 
 ("The Imitative Tendency of White Rats," J.C.N.P., Vol. XVI., especially 
 p. 359). His experiments on cats ("An Experimental Study of Imitation 
 in Cats," J.C.N.P., Vol. XVIII.) gave very similar results. Imitation 
 occurred and once again Mr. Berry interpreted it as due to the perception 
 of the result rather than to the perception of the performance of the act 
 itself by the trained animal. "In many cases I think it is not so much 
 
X SOME EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS 243 
 
 the association of the trained-animal-performing-the-act with the getting- 
 of-food as it is an association of the act-being-performed with the getting- 
 of-food" (p. 20). It may be remarked that Mr. Berry found evidence of 
 imitation where both the imitator obtained food each time that the 
 trained animal performed the act and also where the imitator was not fed 
 at the moment but was free to imitate. He found no cases of imitation 
 where the imitator observed a performance of the act from another com- 
 partment. This again coincides precisely with the view taken in the text 
 of the limits of possible learning by perception of results. 
 
 With regard to dogs, Mr. Jennings ("Animal Behaviour," reprinted from 
 the American Naturalist, Vol. XLIl.) quotes a paper by Mr. G. van T. 
 Hamilton, which unfortunately I have not been able to obtain, describing 
 an experiment in which a dog had to learn that in order to escape from a 
 pen he must select for pressing a lever bearing the same sign as one that 
 he could observe on a sign-board elsewhere in the pen. The dog suc- 
 ceeded in this, but unfortunately " discovered a much simpler method of 
 action that accomplished the same results. He merely began at one end 
 of the series and pressed the levers in order till he came to the one that 
 worked." When electric shocks were attached to the wrong levers he 
 decided that he did not care to play that game any longer and the experi- 
 ments had to end. The dog's method was in fact the same as that 
 described by Mr. Hamilton as used by animals of various species in 
 learning to escape from a room, and by my monkey in opening drawers. 
 It is one in which the animal experimented on at least shows enough 
 intelligence to outwit the psychologist. 
 
 Lastly, Mr. L. W. Cole made some remarkable experiments with 
 raccoons that have been already referred to. Three signals of different 
 colours were shown to the raccoons in a certain order. Upon the appear- 
 ance of the third they had to mount some steps in order to obtain food. 
 The order could be varied and they had to learn to discriminate between 
 the series which meant and the series which did not mean food. The 
 raccoons achieved this rather complicated result (Jennings, loc. cit., cf, 
 Gregg and McPheeters, " Behaviour of Raccoons to a Temporal Series of 
 Stimuli," J.A.B., 1913, p. 241. I regret that I have not been able to lay 
 hands on Mr. Cole's first paper) and would themselves claw up the 
 signals and, as will be mentioned elsewhere, tore down the wrong one. 
 Whether this remarkable result can be quoted as proof of the existence 
 of images of the unseen signals in the mind of the raccoons I will not 
 pretend to determine, but that it involved actions directed by relation to 
 that which was not present on the basis of past experiences in which the 
 object had been presented I am clear, and so to direct action is the 
 function which practical ideas perform. Mr. Cole, in his reply to Dr. 
 Hunter and Messrs. Gregg and McPheeters ("Chicago Experiments with 
 Raccoons," y..<4.5., 191 5, pp. 158, etc.), points out that the explanations to 
 which his critics are driven come by a roundabout process to the admis- 
 sion of a function identical with that which he supposes. Thus he quotes 
 Dr. Hunter as writing : " Some intra-organic (non-orientation) factor not 
 visible to the experimenter must be assumed in order to explain a number 
 of the correct reactions of the raccoons and all of the successful reactions 
 of the children. These cues fulfil an ideational function." And again : 
 " By applying the term ideas to these cues, I mean that they are similar 
 to the memory idea of human experience so far as function and mechan- 
 ism are concerned " This really admits all that is here required. Of 
 what passes withm another organism we can know nothing but the nature 
 of its functions and its origin. In full logical strictness this applies to 
 every human being as it does to animals. 
 
 R 2 
 
APPENDIX TO CHAPTER X 
 
 The object of the subjoined tables is to exhibit some of the 
 main results of the above experiments in summary form. They must 
 be taken rather as a rough aid to the formation of a judgment than 
 as an exact statement of results possessing equal numerical value. 
 Different experiments were directed towards different objects, and 
 none were performed with a view to tabulation. Hence, for 
 example, the number of failures after first success depends largely 
 on the interest which the experimenter had in getting his animal 
 perfect by showing it repeatedly. There was no time-limit for 
 successes. These defects are, it is hoped, partly remedied by the 
 appended notes and partly by the full preceding description. In 
 the first tables, only experiments in which success was established 
 are reckoned — the test of success being, unless otherwise stated, 
 at least four successes — whether on the same or different days — 
 after the last failure. In Table IV. is given a list of definite 
 failures. Table I. illustrates the process of acquisition — especially 
 the effect of the first success. Before the first complete success 
 there was often an act which might on various grounds be termed 
 a partial success. There must be something arbitrary in the 
 nature of such successes, but it would be more misleading to 
 ignore them, and, when necessary, their character is briefly ex- 
 plained in the " Remarks." Only complete failures are reckoned 
 under the heading so named, mere mistakes or blundering being 
 passed over. 
 
 Table II. arranges the experiments with the elephant somewhat 
 differently, distinguishing the apparently random successes before 
 the trick had been shown from those achieved afterwards. The 
 result is to suggest that the showing had a material effect. As 
 the elephant was a great fumbler, columns are added for her 
 partial failures — in which are reckoned not mere mistakes of 
 execution, but failures indicating misapprehension or forgetfulness 
 of the right method. 
 
 =44 
 
APPENDIX TO CHAPTER X 245 
 
 Table III. deals with the Method of Acquisition. It is con- 
 fined to the cats and dogs, and to those experiments in which 
 there was some suggestion of perceptual learning. It states the 
 method used by the experimenter (in which connection see the 
 general account, pp. 186-189), *"^ compares the behaviour of 
 the animal at the first trial with the behaviour necessary for 
 success. When there was a distinct suggestion of some other 
 influence guiding the animal, that is noted. 
 
 Table IV. notes the definite cases of failure where the experi- 
 ment was fairly tried. Twelve trials distributed over more than 
 one day are taken as establishing a fair trial. In some cases I 
 have entered failures of special interest not fulfilling this condition. 
 Only animals appearing in the other tables are entered. 
 
246 
 
 MIND IN EVOLUTION 
 
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248 
 
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 cesses ; second day, one trial, 
 failure, little effort ; third day, three 
 successes. 
 
 " = opens slightly. 
 
 ' = does it on pointing. 
 
 In this case there was only one trial 
 after last partial failure, but there had 
 been many previous successes. 
 
 " Much earlier string was once pulled 
 down (? playfully) before meat was 
 put on end. 
 
 ' At next trial required suggestion. 
 
 " First success due to his dashing at 
 food. No failures after deliberate 
 success in No. 6. 
 
 ? = attention had twice to be called to 
 string. 
 
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 ' = without pointing. 
 
 Trick practically learnt after second 
 pointing. 
 
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 Lid . . . 
 
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 Tied string . . 
 
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APPENDIX TO CHAPTER X 
 
 249 
 
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 before bolt is drawn. 
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 at No. 2. 
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 cord not reckoned as partial 
 
 failure. 
 " i.e., four times shown ^ 
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 (partial 
 
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APPENDIX TO CHAPTER X 
 
 251 
 
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 8 
 
 Remarks. 
 
 Trial and error appa- 
 rently the main 
 factor. 
 
 Some encouragement 
 possibly given to 
 animal when skewer 
 stuck. 
 
 Iron once or twice 
 tumbled off when 
 he was pawing at 
 string; 
 
 Tendency to revert 
 from use of handle 
 to scrabbling at 
 chest, which would 
 effect opening, but 
 not so well. 
 
 7 
 
 Evidence of pro- 
 cesses guiding 
 animal indepen- 
 dent of 
 ■ experimenter. 
 
 Trial and error 
 
 None 
 
 3) 
 
 6 
 
 Method used by animal 
 with success. 
 
 Pawing or pushing 
 bolt with nose 
 
 Pulling out stopper 
 
 with teeth 
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 with teeth 
 
 Pawing iron off hook 
 
 Pulling string with 
 
 teeth 
 Scrabbling at handle 
 
 and top of chest 
 
 5 
 
 Behaviour of animal at 
 first trial. 
 
 Pulling lever . . . 
 
 Not noted . 
 
 General scrabbling, 
 nearly knocking loop 
 
 Scrabbling, and biting 
 at lever, chain, and 
 skewer 
 
 Jumping at box and 
 pulling string 
 
 Jumping up and scrab- 
 bling 
 
 Smelling about and 
 very little scratching 
 
 4 
 
 Supple- 
 mentary 
 methods 
 after first 
 success. 
 
 None 
 
 Discour- 
 agement 
 
 from scrab- 
 bling 
 
 Suggestion 
 
 3 
 
 Animal. 
 
 ..... - « « 
 rt „ .. .. ., « « 
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 2 
 
 Experiments. 
 
 Push-back bplt 
 
 Stopper 
 Loop . . 
 Skewer 
 
 Weight 
 
 Pulling string . 
 
 Opening small 
 drawers 
 
 I 
 
 Method 
 used by ex- 
 perimenter 
 before first 
 
 success. 
 
 bli 
 
 
 
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252 
 
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APPENDIX TO CHAPTER X 
 
 253 
 
 ■ 
 
 Two failures after 
 quasi-accidental suc- 
 cess. 
 
 He sometimes clawed 
 between lever and 
 box. 
 
 "Clawing not always 
 equally good. 
 
 Very large number of 
 failures before first 
 success, in course of 
 which he once gets 
 paw over string and 
 once pulls it down 
 prematurely. 
 
 Drawer not always 
 opened by handle. 
 
 "Slight suggestion 
 once on third day. 
 Help consisted in 
 finishing opening lid 
 once after the cat 
 had partially opened 
 it. 
 
 
 1 
 
 First success 
 perhaps acci- 
 dental 
 
 1 
 
 
 ■s 
 
 I 
 1* 
 
 Pawing cover .... 
 
 Putting paw to top of 
 tripod, and over- 
 turning 
 
 Clawing at lever, or 
 pushing it with head 
 
 "Curling claw round 
 
 bolt and pulling 
 Clawing string . . . 
 
 Inserting claw in han- 
 dle and pulling 
 Scraping along lid . 
 
 c • 
 
 s. • 
 
 
 
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 in 
 
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 nately 
 
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 Clawing at cage or 
 box 
 
 Not specially noted . 
 
 In general no atten- 
 tion to string 
 
 Purring, and walking 
 
 about box 
 Watching ... 
 
 1 
 
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 Cat (Teufel) 
 
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254 
 
 MINQ IN EVOLUTION 
 
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CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE KNOWLEDGE OF CONCRETE OBJECTS 
 
 I. So far, the results of experiment indicate that the 
 higher animals can learn, not merely by the mechanical 
 repetition of experiences, but by careful attention to one 
 or more instances, the number being really irrelevant, 
 provided that attention is once seized. Further they 
 appear to learn by the perception of concrete facts in their 
 relations, i.e., in their order as experienced. This order 
 they are capable of " reproducing," in the sense that they 
 can apply the results of perception to guide their future 
 action. This does not mean that they are aware of 
 relations as such, or order as such, or qualities as such, 
 but that they are aware of the concrete whole, which the 
 qualities in their relations build up ; and that when the 
 whole is familiar to them, they can proceed inferentially, 
 from the part or state which they see, to the part or state 
 which they do not see. This view is corroborated by 
 certain general considerations and by evidence outside the 
 region of experiment. 
 
 a. Class Inferences. 
 
 The more intelligent animals not merely learn to react 
 appropriately to a certain kind of sense stimulus, but from 
 knowledge of one concrete and perhaps highly complex 
 object, they learn to deal suitably with another object of 
 the same class. Thus, a dog that is accustomed to one 
 house readily familiarises himself with another. In the 
 course of some observations which I made on the power 
 
 2SS 
 
256 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 of dogs to find their way about a new place, I carried a 
 fox-terrier in a box into a room on the first floor of my 
 house, and asked her master to call her from outside. 
 After being let out from the box, and going to the 
 window, she appeared for a short time to be puzzled, but 
 soon started off, and went steadily out of the door, down- 
 stairs, out of the house door, and round the corner to her 
 master. Her total time was 27 seconds. This dog was 
 not in the least infallible, for in the very next experiment 
 she missed her way to begin with. But apparently she was 
 guided by what in a human being we should call common- 
 sense. Familiar with houses, staircases, rooms, and doors, 
 she would understand that to reach her master, she must 
 get out of the room and out of the house. She would be 
 familiar with stairs as leading her to the ground floor. 
 She would judge that, though leaving the house in the 
 opposite direction, she would be able to get round to 
 where her master stood.^ None of the dogs which I 
 observed in this connection, with the exception of one 
 puppy ,^ showed any hesitation in endeavouring to get out 
 of the house, by however roundabout a way, if their 
 master was outside, or to run round to some door which 
 they had before passed through, if he was inside.^ That 
 is to say, the full-grown dogs, though in different degrees, 
 could use their experience of houses as structures that 
 have passages and doors and staircases by means of which 
 you can reach your object through roundabout paths, as a 
 guide in my house, which was strange to them. In the 
 same way, an animal's attitude to strange men is deter- 
 mined by his dealings with the men he knows ; if he is 
 guided by resemblance, it is certainly not because he fails 
 in discriminating one individual from another. The little 
 monkey Jimmy was respectful and even friendly to all 
 men, and flew quite systematically at all women and 
 
 ' From the front door onwards, she may very possibly have been in- 
 fluenced by previous experience, as she had come in that direction from 
 her home. In fact, she took the same turning wrongly in the next experi- 
 ment. She had not, however, been brought in through the front door, but 
 by another way ; nor had her master been in the house at all. 
 
 ^ Another young dog failed at first to go down the stairs. 
 
 ' On the other hand, they had considerable difficulty in locating a room 
 from outside, particularly if it was upstairs. 
 
XI KNOWLEDGE OF CONCRETE OBJECTS 257 
 
 children. Whether this was due to a generalisation from 
 teasing boys, and the nurses who accompany them, I do 
 not know. The point remains, that Jimmy was guided 
 by a general, or, as it might be called, a class resemblance, 
 and this again not to the detriment of his knowledge of 
 individuals,^ for I have seen him get into a state of wild 
 excitement on merely hearing the footsteps of his former 
 keeper. 
 
 Little facts of this kind suggest that the assemblage of 
 qualities which constitute an individual make a certain 
 impression upon the animal mind,^ and prepare it to deal 
 with objects presenting a general similarity to those with 
 which it is familiar. In short, an animal reacts, not only 
 to resemblances of simple sense quality, but to the more 
 general similarities which unite the individuals of a class. 
 Such similarity is notoriously difficult to analyse ; but it 
 seems to be a similarity in which many elements are con- 
 cerned, and in which the relation between the elements is 
 perhaps the determining feature. I one day gave Jack his 
 box with a footstool in front, which prevented the door 
 from opening. After very little hesitation, Jack scratched 
 away the stool and got at the door ; and he repeated this 
 action when for the wooden footstool I substituted a large 
 hassock. Now, Jack would be of course accustomed to 
 scratch at things, and in particular to scratch away earth 
 to find a buried bone. It is extremely unlikely that he 
 ever before had to scratch away a similar object under 
 similar circumstances. It was again an act of common 
 sense, the application by a kind of analogy to a new object 
 of an action familiar under other circumstances. The 
 similarity connecting this action with Jack's ordinary ex- 
 perience would be a similarity in the relation between the 
 thing desired and the obstacle hindering access to it. 
 Similarly, when I gave Jack a box with a new sort of 
 fastening (the catch), he attacked it at once and per- 
 sistently. Though he did not know what was to be 
 
 ' At the same time his memory is very short. He clearly did not 
 recognise me at first after a few days' absence. 
 
 ^ On this point see some good remarks in Mr. Schaler's Domesticated 
 Animals, p. 39, on a dog's knowledge of the boundaries of his master's 
 property. 
 
258 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 done to it, he saw that this was the thing to attack and 
 explore. 
 
 On the whole, then, it would seem that animals are 
 influenced by similarity of relatipns. Not that they 
 dissect out the common element which constitutes a class 
 identity ; they have not solved the problem which has 
 baffled logicians. It is rather that they have a concrete 
 perception of the man or animal, house or locality with 
 which they are familiar ; that such an object contains 
 many elements in various relations ; and that when they 
 meet another object similar in general character, x.^., really 
 in its constitutive relations, to the first, they know how to 
 deal with it. This implies that they have the power of 
 grasping an object as a whole including distinct elements 
 which I have called Concrete Experience, and the power of 
 applying this experience which I have called Practical 
 Judgment. 
 
 2. b. "The object as centre of relations. 
 
 A further point distinguishing the knowledge of objects 
 lies in the use made of it. To perception, as already 
 pointed out, any object is a centre of many relations. 
 And if there is knowledge of objects, any one of these 
 relations should be available to serve whatever happens to 
 be the purpose of the moment. Here again is a marked 
 difference from the habituation in accordance with which an 
 animal learns to react in a uniform manner to a given 
 stimulus. Thus one can understand that by habit or 
 association, an animal should always resort to a particular 
 spot as his home or his feeding place, or that he should 
 follow — ^as our own feet often mechanically follow — a well- 
 known path. But if applied to explain a dog or cat's 
 acquaintance with locality, the habituation theory seems to 
 break down. Thus, on this theory, when a dog, hearing 
 the dinner-bell, rushes down to the dining-room from a 
 distant part of the house, we should have to explain its 
 action somewhat after this fashion. The sound of the bell 
 impels it to rise : the sight of the door, to open it and 
 pass through ; the sight of the passage, to turn to the 
 right, go downstairs, turn to the left, and so forth. Each 
 new motion must on this theory be due to an impulse 
 
XI KNOWLEDGE OF CONCRETE OBJECTS 259 
 
 arising out of a similar reaction in the past, with which a 
 satisfactory result "s associated. It is, on the surface, an 
 argument against this theory, that if the direct or custom- 
 ary way into a room is barred, a dog or cat will at once ^ 
 betake itself to any other route that there may be. This 
 adoption of alternatives suggests that their action is to be 
 referred, not to an impulse urging them to move in a 
 particular direction, but rather to a desire to be in a par- 
 ticular place, the road to which is indifferent, so long as it 
 is passable. 
 
 By way of testing the point, I made a number of experiments 
 with dogs about the house in which I live, to which all of them 
 were strange. Like most houses that go back for four centuries, 
 this house is full of turnings and windings, and afforded oppor- 
 tunities for devising on a small scale intricate and alternative 
 routes. My method was to get the dog's master to stay outside 
 the house, while I took the dog in, and brought it to the window, 
 whence it could see its master, who would then call it. After- 
 wards I would reverse the process, the master going inside, while 
 the dog remained outside. In all cases, the use of scent was pre- 
 vented, by taking care that the master did not go over the track 
 which the dog would have to follow. The dog, it will be 
 observed, had to respond to its master's call in quite unfamiliar 
 circumstances. It has no association between taking this turn or 
 that turn, and the satisfaction of rejoining its master. 
 
 In these as in other experiments the dogs showed a great 
 variation in intelligence, initiative, and persistence.^ The most 
 noticeable defect was a failure in " orientation," the result of 
 which was that on getting out of the house, for example, the 
 dog would turn towards the spot where his master had last been 
 found instead of towards that in which he had last been seen.* 
 In such cases, the dog would as a rule rapidly return, and either 
 go back into the house, and perhaps to the window again, or (as 
 
 ^ As a rule. I confess I have seen dogs fail in this respect. 
 
 2 Putting aside the case of the puppy mentioned above, there were 
 comparatively few complete failures (though there were often initial 
 mistakes) when the master was outside. The dogs were also very fairly 
 successful in finding their master in a ground floor room, but uniformly 
 failed when he called to them from upstairs. This may be attributed 
 partly to greater complexity, but mainly to the impossibility for a dog of 
 identifying an upstair room by its window. The ground floor room the 
 dog could look into and recognise. 
 
 ^ I only noted one clear case in which the more familiar route was at 
 once rejected for the right one, against many in which a mistake was 
 made at this point. 
 
 S 2 
 
26o MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 in at least one case) at once try the other direction.^ In these 
 cases, no doubt, previous experience has an undue influence, i.e.y 
 we get incipient habit, but the habit explains only the wrong part 
 of the act, not the effort to correct it. 
 
 Neither impulse guided by habit nor random searching seem 
 adequately to explain the way in which a dog looks for his master. 
 Thus, in one of my experiments, a dog is held at the back of the 
 house, and sees his master go in through the back door and re- 
 appear at the dining-room window, which looks in that direction. 
 After trying to follow his master through the back — unsuccess- 
 fully, because the door is shut — he makes off round two corners 
 to the front door, and so into the dining-room. He had never 
 been in this room before, but has once been from the back into 
 the house by the front door.^ The experiment is once repeated, 
 and the dog remembers this route five days later. On arriving at 
 the house on this occasion, he is taken through a side door into 
 the dining-room, and then out at the back. He first finds his 
 way in through the front as mentioned, and then for a further 
 trial both front and back door are shut. The dog goes to and 
 fro from one to the other,' and then suddenly goes right off round 
 the house and in by the side door — a route which he had never 
 taken before. There may have been an element of chance in this 
 success,* but, on the whole, we seem to have a series of acts 
 dictated by the desire to find the master operating on the remem- 
 brance of the modes of entrance. The same interpretation seems 
 to apply to one more instance which may be given. 
 
 A little fox-terrier had once found her way from the back of 
 the house through the front door into the dining-room to her 
 master. I then took her out again, the master remaining where 
 he was, to the same place outside, closing the front door behind 
 me. After trying the front door several times, she at last set off 
 round a further corner of the house, and found the side door, 
 through which she got into the house, and found her master. The 
 total time was 2 minutes 20 seconds. She had indeed traversed 
 the whole of this route before, but under quite different circum- 
 stances, for she had come round from the back to find her master 
 in the garden outside the side door, and from thence I had taken 
 her away from him through the side door to show her the 
 dining-room, upon which followed the two experiments that I 
 have mentioned. 
 
 ' This part of the experiment was unfortunately spoilt in several 
 instances by masters calling their dogs prematurely. 
 
 ^ The room itself he may have found by scent, chance, or possibly 
 '' direction sense." 
 
 ' For some reason he did not go the whole way to the back door. 
 
 * But it was repeated immediately afterwards without any hesita- 
 tion. 
 
XI KNOWLEDGE OF CONCRETE OBJECTS 261 
 
 In this matter of searching for a lost object, the contrast 
 between desire and impulse seems to be presented in a very 
 simple form. By impulse, I understand response un- 
 influenced by an anticipatory idea. Such a response 
 would explain a dog's running straight to his master on 
 hearing his voice. A series of such responses might 
 explain its following a route of which every portion 
 was familiar, and each turn associated with the satisfaction 
 of the impulse. But I do not see how it can be made to 
 explain the traversing of a route not associated with such 
 satisfaction,' nor the rapid choice of an alternative route, 
 nor the return, which I have seen in the case of a puzzled 
 dog, to the point of departure to seek further assurance. 
 These appear rather as a series of actions dictated not 
 merely by the perception of each object on the dog's path, 
 but by the constant pressure of a desire, the determining 
 factor in which is the remembrance of the master as seen 
 at a certain spot, the relations of which to the place in 
 which the animal finds itself determine its motions from 
 moment to moment. 
 
 3. c. Knowledge of individuals. 
 
 It will now be understood that what has been called 
 above^ the knowledge of localities, objects, or individuals, 
 makes its appearance in this stage of intelligence. That 
 is to say, there is something more than acquired appro- 
 priate ^^reaction to a perceived quality. There is an 
 appreciation of an object, as a whole, to which many parts 
 and many qualities belong ; and there is a capacity for 
 definite reference to those of the parts or qualities which 
 are not perceived. A toad, a snake, or even a fish, is said 
 to know its keeper. What this usually means is, in fact, 
 that the animal comes at the sound of his voice, or 
 perhaps at the sight of him. There are two or three 
 kinds of reaction which the presence of the keeper excites. 
 This is no more knowing a person than to put down so 
 many shillings on demand is to know the clerk at a 
 booking office. It is merely appropriate reaction to certain 
 
 ' Except, perhaps, where an animal has only to retrace a path just 
 traversed. 
 2 P. 158. 
 
262 MINP IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 qualities of a person. We human beings know our friends 
 in a very different way. A man is many-sided, and to 
 know him is to respond to him with a many-sided under- 
 standing. In their degree the higher animals have this 
 knowledge of their masters. The ape, the dog, and the 
 elephant — in a lesser degree the horse, and even the cat — 
 notoriously "understand one." The dog follows with 
 anxious sympathy the subtlest variations of mood. 
 " Knowledge " of this kind makes attachment possible 
 as an emotion. It may be said that in attributing emotions 
 of this kind to the higher animals, we base ourselves, after 
 all, on certain modes of reaction. But, if we do, our 
 interpretation is borne out by agreement with the facts. 
 The cat that looks angry also acts like an angry being, 
 and scepticism on this point may prove practically 
 dangerous. On the whole, we may say that knowledge 
 of individuals becomes possible at the level of intelligence 
 which we are discussing, and that the appropriate emotions 
 of attachment, dislike, jealousy, and so forth, are to all 
 appearance expressed at this stage. 
 
 A certain mutual understanding seems also to be implied 
 in many features of animal play. No doubt play is 
 instinctive, and the activities of play are often called 
 forth by a stimulus acting upon hereditary structure ; but 
 observers tell us of many instances in which animals of 
 different species, even where one might naturally be the 
 prey of the other, learn to play fearlessly together.^ It 
 is difficult to think that a game could arise under these 
 circumstances, or be maintained without degenerating into 
 a serious fight or hunt, unless each animal takes what the 
 other does as meant in play, and not as meant in earnest. 
 It must know, that is to say, that the threat to bite is not 
 going to be followed by a real bite. In a word, each 
 animal must judge of what the other is going to do.^ 
 
 The view that an animal not merely reacts to objects, 
 but knows them, is thus confirmed by evidence from more 
 than one source. We have seen some ground for thinking 
 
 1 See Groos, pp. 128, 143. 
 
 ^ For the degree of mutual understanding in courtship, see Groos, 
 P- 253- 
 
XI KNOWLEDGE OF CONCRETE OBJECTS 263 
 
 that it perceives changes in outer objects, and bases its 
 action thereupon, or adapts it to the production of such 
 changes as it desires. It appears to be guided not only by 
 the simple resemblances of sense-qualities, but by the 
 similarities of relation which constitute the bond of 
 identity between complex objects. And now, lastly, we 
 have seen that it is not tied to one uniform type of 
 reaction in response to a perceived object, but forms its 
 behaviour in accordance with the relation in which the 
 object stands to the goal of its desire for the moment. 
 
 4. d. The application of experience. 
 
 These results are corroborated by observers who report 
 cases in which the behaviour of an animal is devised to 
 meet the behaviour which he has learnt to expect from 
 other animals, or from men. 
 
 In these cases, the experience may be said to be applied 
 with a certain amount of originality, which puts the 
 behaviour observed out of the category of habituation. 
 A certain event is anticipated, and, without instruction or 
 suggestion, preparation is made to meet it. Or, perhaps, 
 a situation has been found advantageous, and a spontaneous 
 effort is made to bring such a situation into being again. 
 Or, lastly, unique circumstances occur, in which knowledge 
 is applied in a manner appropriate to those circumstances 
 alone. In all of these cases, we have behaviour indicating 
 not merely knowledge of objects, but also power of 
 applying that knowledge with a certain spontaneity. 
 Now, are these cases authentic .'' Does such behaviour 
 exist ? I know of no experimental evidence of it below 
 the level of monkeys.^ There is, however, a considerable 
 body of casual observation,^ tending to show that be- 
 
 ^ The evidence with regard to monkeys will be referred to in the next 
 chapter. By experimental evidence I mean cases in which the circum- 
 stances and antecedents of the act have been systematically traced. 
 
 Mr. Cole's raccoons (cited by Jennings. Animal Behaviour — American 
 Naturalist, March, igo8, pp. 213, 214) afford an exception to the remark 
 in the text. They learned not only to react to signals (as described above, 
 p. 243), but to claw them up themselves. They could not see which they 
 were getting up beforehand, but if the red one came up, which was wrong, 
 they clawed it down again, raised the green one and prepared to receive 
 food. 
 
 2 The value of evidence of this kind is briefly considered in Chapter 
 XII., p. 296 et seq. 
 
264 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 haviour of this kind is not uncommon, at least among 
 the more intelligent mammals. It will be worth our while 
 to analyse a few instances. 
 
 If it is true that a pointer will sometimes adopt, 
 untaught, the plan of running round cover so that he 
 drives the game towards his master, he evidently acts on 
 the basis of a familiar experience.^ He knows how his 
 action will affect the birds, and he knows what his master 
 wants. Granted this knowledge, it is very easy to under- 
 stand how he applies it to the circumstances before him, 
 and so forms his plan. If we refuse to grant it, the whole ■ 
 proceeding becomes unintelligible. There is no habit in 
 the matter, for the dog is adapting his action newly to 
 meet a difficulty ; while, if we call it association of ideas, 
 then, the idea of the birds rising must be an idea of them 
 rising at a given moment in a given direction as the result 
 of his action — i.e., it is equivalent to an anticipation. In 
 such cases it makes little difference whether we speak of 
 association of ideas or of inference, provided always that 
 it is understood that an idea definitely applied to percep- 
 tion is equivalent to a judgment. There are other cases, 
 however, in which the term Association becomes altogether 
 inappropriate. Mr. Lloyd Morgan, in discussing whether 
 animals can reason, quotes^ a story contributed by Mr. 
 Stone to Animal Intelligence of two dogs. 
 
 " One of them, the larger, had a bone, and when he had left it 
 the smaller dog went to take it ; the larger one growled, and the 
 other retired to a corner. Shortly afterwards the larger dog went 
 out ; but the other did not appear to notice this, and, at any rate, 
 did not move. A few minutes later the large dog was heard to 
 bark out of doors ; the little dog then, without a moment's hesi- 
 tation, went straight to the bone and took it." 
 
 On this, Mr. Stone comments : — 
 
 "It thus appears quite evident that she reasoned — That dog is 
 barking out of doors, therefore he is not in this room, therefore it 
 is safe for me to take the bone. The action was so rapid as to be 
 clearly a consequence of the other dog's barking." 
 
 1 See Hutchinson, pp. 51 and 289, and compare Schaler, Domesticated 
 Animals, p. 28 (a more complicated device). 
 
 2 Comparative Psychology, p. 300. 
 
XI KNOWLEDGE OF CONCRETE OBJECTS 265 
 
 Upon this interpretation Mr. Lloyd Morgan remarks: — 
 
 " Now, here a course of action, which is quite readily inter- 
 preted on the hypothesis of sense-experience through association, 
 is explained in rational terms, and the dog is supposed to think the 
 therefore. But on similar principles every case of association may 
 be thus interpreted." 1 
 
 He proceeds to show how the refusal of a cinnabar 
 caterpillar by a chick may be interpreted as a rational act, 
 and thrown into syllogistic form. 
 
 " Nothing is easier than to interpret this intelligent course of 
 action in rational and logical terms : Black and gold caterpillars 
 are nasty ; that is a black and gold caterpillar ; therefore it is nasty. 
 This does not seem to me to be at all more far-fetched than the 
 suggestion of Mr. Stone's that his dog reasoned : — That dog is 
 barking out of doors, therefore he is not in this room." ^ 
 
 I quite agree with Mr. Lloyd Morgan that there is no 
 evidence that a dog can " think the therefore." That is 
 to say, it has no explicit consciousness of the thought- 
 connection uniting one stage of the inference to the next. 
 I see nothing whatever to suggest that an animal can 
 analyse out this element in its own mental processes as a 
 man does when he uses an illative particle. But this does 
 not seem a sufficient ground for denying to the operation 
 the title of inference.^ To the animal much less is explicit 
 than to the man, but to the man much less is explicit than 
 to the philosopher, and to the philosopher much less is 
 explicit than he could wish. Inference is essentially one 
 function, from the simplest case quoted by Mr. Morgan 
 of the chick, up to the highest elaboration of experience 
 by the human intellect. The differences are differences in 
 articulateness on the one side, and comprehensiveness on 
 the other ; and the question is, precisely what point in the 
 
 ' Comparative Psychology, p. 300. ^ lb. p. 301. 
 
 ^ It is no doubt in part a question of terms. I have used the term 
 inference in a very wide sense to express a certain generic unity of 
 function exercised with very different degrees of articulateness. It is, of 
 course, possible for any writer, while recognising this generic unity, to 
 prefer to keep the term inference for the higher grades. This difference 
 of usage is, as I gather, responsible for making the divergence between 
 Mr. Lloyd Morgan's views and mine appear much greater than it 
 really is. 
 
266 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 scale of ascending clearness is occupied by such an inference 
 as that attributed in this story to the dog. Admitting 
 that it falls below the stage in which inference is expressible 
 in general terms, and the connection of one proposition 
 with another by an appropriate particle, must we say that 
 it falls to the stage represented by association ? If we 
 contrast the use made of experience by the dog and the 
 chick respectively, we shall see that there is a very material 
 difference. The chick's response to a certain stimulus is 
 guided by the feeling experienced in immediate relation to 
 a precisely similar stimulus. We may, therefore, fairly 
 speak of an association^ between the stimulus and that 
 feeling. The dog, on the other hand, in this story, has to 
 make a sort of construction of several different elements of 
 experience. Mr. Lloyd Morgan would not suggest that 
 the sound of a bark outside would naturally impel the 
 little dog in the room to jump up and seize a bone. It 
 has this effect only as applied to the particular circum- 
 stances ; and one does not see how the little dog could 
 apply it except by going through a process corresponding 
 to that attributed to him by Mr. Stone. The bark 
 operates on him only as suggesting that the big dog is 
 out of the room ; and being out of the room, cannot 
 prevent him from taking the bone. Past experience sug- 
 gests each stage in this argument, but the dog has to put 
 them together for himself. His action, taken as a whole, 
 is not based on the association of a feeling with a stimulus, 
 but on a judgment resting on experience as to where 
 another dog is, and what it can or cannot do. 
 
 Under the same head fall cases in which a cat or dog 
 gets a man to do for him what he cannot do himself. A 
 good instance is narrated by P6r^z,^ whose dog, a puppy 
 of six months, having been punished for not going out of 
 doors when it was desirable that he should have done so, 
 wakened M. P6r6z at nights by scratching at his door, or 
 howling. The same writer a little lower down ' describes 
 how M. Marion's cat, as soon as dinner was served, would 
 
 ' In a loose sense. More strictly as we have seen it is a case of 
 Assimilation. 
 ^ Les Trois Premiires Annies de V Enfant, p. 263. ^ P. 272. 
 
XI KNOWLEDGE OF CONCRETE OBJECTS 267 
 
 go to and fro between the table and his master, inviting 
 him by mines persuasives to come to the joint feast. 
 Every one knows, or ought to know, that cat. 
 
 Closely connected with these are the many instances of 
 apparent deceit which give animal psychologists some 
 trouble to explain.^ It is not necessary to suppose that an 
 animal thinks out a lie, as a deliberately treacherous 
 human being would do ; but an animal does know what it 
 is told to do and what it is forbidden to do. It knows 
 what the consequences of disobedience will be ; and it 
 knows when its master's eye is on it, and when it is not. 
 If it is very acute, it may further recognise some of the 
 signs by which its master will gather what it has done in 
 his absence ; and it may seek to remove them. All this 
 follows very simply from the attribution to an animal of a 
 judgment based on experience as to the way in which its 
 master will behave. No higher faculty is required, but 
 we cannot, unless we wholly reject or painfully distort 
 evidence of the kind under consideration, do with any- 
 thing lower. 
 
 The distinctive feature of the cases dealt with in this 
 section is that if they are correctly reported and inter- 
 preted, they are cases of the application of experience with 
 a certain originality or spontaneity. In its lowest form, 
 the application of experience is not distinguishable from 
 its acquisition. Habit is built up out of action, or the 
 refraining from action ; and it issues in similar actions or 
 similar refrainings. The formation of the habit is the 
 tendency to act (or refrain). Nothing need be added to 
 the habit in order to produce the action. In the higher 
 forms of experience, there is a change in this point. Ex- 
 perience is acquired in order that it may be used in practice, 
 but its acquisition and its application fall apart into two 
 clearly distinguishable acts. In its most elementary form, 
 this distinction appears even in cases of learning by direct 
 perception of results. An animal desiring b, observes 
 
 ' For instances, see Schneider, p. 355; K. and O. Miiller, p. 13, 
 and Lloyd Morgan, Comparative Psychology, p. 371 (The story of 
 the Maltese terrier which was supposed to dance round the table on 
 two legs ; but dropped on to four at the end where it could not be 
 seen.) 
 
268 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 the sequence ab. It applies this by setting to work to 
 produce a. It sees food placed in a box, it sees the door 
 shut and bolted ; then again it sees the bolt withdrawn, 
 and finds that it can open the door and get the food. Its 
 attention once clearly awakened to this sequence, it draws 
 the bolt for itself, opens the door, and gets fed. There is 
 here, first, the perception of a sequence of events ; and 
 then, a second stage, in which the perception has to be 
 worked into the effort of desire, and the motor impulses 
 necessary to the act. This second stage sometimes fails, 
 as when my dog refused to pull the drawer, the working 
 of which, as his actions seemed to show, he had perfectly 
 learnt. When it succeeds, it is a kind of synthesis of the 
 result of perception with the motor impulse effected by the 
 organism itself. This, then, is the simplest case of the 
 application of experience. Much more distinctive and 
 decisive are the cases referred to immediately above, in 
 which, on the strength of past experience, a certain event 
 is anticipated, and without any instruction or suggestion, 
 preparations are made to meet It. A few demonstrated 
 cases of this, which we may distinguish as spontaneous 
 application, would be sufficient to decide the whole 
 question before us ; but for animals below monkeys 
 evidence on the point is, as we have hinted, not wholly 
 satisfactory. 
 
 5. However this may be, we have seen some ground for 
 thinking that the more intelligent animals have knowledge 
 of surrounding objects which they apply in action ; that 
 they are capable of learning to act in accordance with physi- 
 cal changes which they witness ; that they can be influenced 
 by the general similarities which unite individuals of the 
 same class, and can guide their action in dealing with any 
 object by the relation in which it stands to that which they 
 desire. Further, evidence has been brought that In the 
 process by which they learn, not repetition of instances, but 
 concentration of attention is the important point. Lastly, 
 it is suggested that in some cases, they not merely learn to 
 meet a given perception with a certain motor reaction, but 
 also to combine and adapt their actions so as to effect 
 physical changes which, as they have learnt, aid them in 
 
XI KNOWLEDGE OF CONCRETE OBJECTS 269 
 
 gaining their ends. We have thus gone through all the 
 points enumerated on p. 1 68 as distinctive of Concrete 
 Experience and the Practical Judgment, and have seen 
 some ground for imputing each and all to the higher 
 animals. At no one point, perhaps, is the evidence con- 
 clusive ; but it is to be remembered that these functions 
 are interconnected, so that evidence of capacity for one is 
 indirect evidence of capacity for another. We have, there- 
 fore, a set of independent arguments all pointing in the 
 same direction, and it is on this convergence of evidence, 
 rather than on decisive proof at any one point, that our 
 hypothesis must rest. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 ARTICULATE IDEAS 
 
 I. We have seen evidence in animal behaviour for the 
 operation of what we called practical ideas, but they were 
 ideas of a very crude and unanalysed character. Evidence 
 of more articulate ideas is much more restricted, and so 
 far as decisive experimental tests are concerned, confined, 
 I believe, to monkeys. By a more articulate idea, is meant 
 one in which corriparatively distinct elements are held 
 in a comparatively distinct relation. Thus, that a bolt 
 ■^ must be pushed back is a crude idea ; that it must be 
 ^ pushed back so as to clear a staple, a relatively articulate 
 one, implying a distinction between the parts of the object 
 perceived (the bolt and its staples), and an appreciation of 
 the relation between them. As ideas become more articu- 
 late, the results of experience are more freely combined or 
 modified to suit practical needs. Something like originality 
 begins to show itself, and we have instances of what we 
 > have called "spontaneous application." Of this also, it is 
 difficult to find experimental evidence for animals lower 
 than the monkeys. Whether this is because the intelligence 
 of all other mammals is lower, or because monkey intelli- 
 gence lends itself more readily to the kind of experiment 
 which human intelligence most readily devises, is not so 
 clear. There is, in fact, a good deal of evidence of the 
 anecdotal kind suggesting the existence of intelligence of 
 this grade below the Primates. Before considering the 
 value of such evidence, I may illustrate the kind of . 
 
 270 
 
CHAP. XII ARTICULATE IDEAS 271 
 
 articulateness and originality of which I speak from some 
 experiments which I made with the monkeys at Belle Vue. 
 
 My principal dealings were with two monkeys. One was the 
 >^ little Rhesus Jimmy, which has already been mentioned more than 
 once, and which came to stay with me for several days. Jimmy 
 was not altogether a hopeful subject for experiments. His 
 attention was terribly dissipated. In the monkey house, every 
 noise distracted him, and he would break off in the middle of a 
 most promising experiment to run backwards and forwards in his 
 cage, in sympathy with the monkeys in the large cage opposite. He 
 seldom appeared to be hungry ; but I found at last that he would 
 do almost anything for a baked potato. After that discovery, we 
 got on better.^ Nor can I praise Jimmy's temper. I have 
 already mentioned that he flew at all women and children ; and 
 though he tolerated me, and would climb about me as if I were a 
 piece of furniture, he never showed a trace of affection. In my 
 house, I found that his chief passion was for the fire. He would 
 sit on the edge of the fender, or stand on his hind legs, close to the 
 high, old-fashioned grate, with scarcely two inches between his 
 chest and the flames. But though I once noticed him touch a 
 bar, and draw his hand quickly away, he never burnt himself with 
 the hot cinders. The black cinders he ate freely, and packed his 
 cheek pouches with them. 
 
 The other monkey of which I saw most was the chimpanzee, 
 which for reasons of my own I called the Professor. The diffi- 
 culty with the Professor is his extremely retiring and unsociable 
 disposition. No one can approach him with whom he is not quite 
 familiar ; and after an acquaintance of two months, he will only 
 take a banana from my hand at arm's length, amid great trepi- 
 dation. It is therefore very difficult to show the Professor any- 
 thing. When, for instance, I tried to instruct him in the push 
 bolt, I had always to leave the box in the cage, and retire myself, 
 before he would come near it. 
 
 2. When I first saw the Professor, he had already elab- 
 orated a somewhat remarkable performance. He lives 
 for warmth in a cage enclosed within a larger cage or 
 house. Passers by threw nuts and other gratifying objects 
 
 > In this want of persistence, Jimmy contrasts strongly with the Cebus 
 described by Miss Romanes. Nor did Jimmy show any of that " tireless 
 spirit of investigation " which Dr. Romanes found in the same animal. 
 The only thing Jimmy investigated was his own person, and in this he 
 certainly did seem absolutely tireless. But he showed extremely little 
 curiosity, and no persistence in working at anything, except for the sake 
 of food. 
 
272 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 into the house, which would often fall too far from 
 his cage to be within reach of his arm. To deal with this 
 difficulty, he would retire to his bed, pull from it his rug, 
 stuff the rug with considerable effort, bit by bit, through 
 the narrow rails, and proceed to throw it like a net over 
 the desired object, which he would thus work towards 
 him. It was noticeable that he was always careful to pull 
 the rug in again. The first thing I taught the Professor 
 was to substitute a stick for the cumbrous rug. 
 
 I cut a small stick from a tree, pulled a bit of banana about 
 with it, and gave it to him. He tried to use it, though ineffectually. 
 The next day, I brought him up a stout walking-stick with a 
 crook, which he used awkwardly, and nearly succeeded in his 
 object. He then used his rug instead, with success. I then put 
 a piece of banana in a box. He tried ineffectually to reach it 
 with his rug, but did not use the stick. I pulled the box a 
 little about with the stick, and left it with him. When I came 
 back, he had got the box, and opened it. Next day, he used the 
 stick at once to get a lump of sugar. At first, he knocked it away, 
 but soon got the stick round, used the crook, and pulled it in. I 
 found, however, that he never really learned the use of the crook. 
 He would use either end indiscriminately. This, I think, was not 
 altogether due to stupidity. It must be remembered that he had 
 to work the stick with his hands through narrow bars. He was 
 awkward with it at the best of times, and when the heavy crook 
 was at the remote end, he could not place it accurately enough to 
 be of real use to him. 
 
 Next day, the chimpanzee learnt to use a short stick in 
 order to reach a larger one, with which in turn he could 
 reach the banana. 
 
 I put my stick out of his reach, and a piece of banana beyond 
 it again, while I gave him a short stick. He did not, however, 
 use it until I first pushed the big stick about with it. He then 
 made an attempt to reach my stick with the short one, but with- 
 out success. I gave him rather a larger stick, with which he at 
 once tried to reach mine ; but instead of getting hold of it, he 
 knocked it slantwise, so that one end was further off from him 
 than before, and one end nearer. He now directed his stick to 
 the nearer end, pulled mine in, and with its aid reached the 
 banana. Another day, he was given a big broom handle to use. 
 As he drew the banana in, the end of the handle knocked against 
 the partition door of his cage, which was behind him. He at 
 once shifted it so as to clear the door. 
 
XII ARTICULATE IDEAS 
 
 273 
 
 In general, he had two chief movements with his stick. 
 The banana was generally given him inside a cigar box. 
 He would reach out with his stick at the box, and sweep 
 it round by a radial motion, so that it came up to the 
 side of his cage. It will be observed that in so doing 
 he was not obeying the natural impulse to draw it straight 
 towards him, but merely was bringing it to a point to 
 which he could afterwards go and get it. One half of 
 his cage, however, was covered with plate glass, so that 
 if in describing a quarter circle he swept the box up 
 against the glass, he could not reach it at once with 
 his arm. He would then alter the motion, and rake 
 with the point of the stick, drawing the box in in a 
 straight line. When he had to fish for a box close by 
 the wall, he would take trouble to get his stick in between 
 the wall and the box, showing that he was quite aware of 
 the way in which he had to push it. On the other hand, 
 he not only, as I have mentioned, failed to learn the use of 
 the crook ; but I have seen him sweep at the box with 
 the crook downwards, so that the stick passed over the top. 
 
 On one occasion, when I borrowed a child's hoop, and gave it 
 him in place of a stick, he used it very unintelligently. Instead of 
 getting the hoop round the banana, he made sweeps with it, so 
 that the curvature kept driving the fruit away. I should like to 
 have made further experiments to see how he would have learnt 
 the proper use of the hoop, but its small owner became alarmed 
 for its safety. The Professor sometimes tried to find remarkable 
 substitutes for a stick. On one occasion, when he was trying an 
 experiment with a rope, which he could not understand, he spied 
 a long, heavy iron bar lying by his cage. He dragged this up, and 
 it came over the rope, of which he had one end in his cage, while 
 the other end was fastened to the box outside. He tried to push 
 the bar out towards the box, and failing, tugged at the rope, lift- 
 ing it up, and the bar with it. The bar of course ran down the 
 rope, and nearly reached the box. How much of this was 
 intentional, the reader may determine for himself. In any case, 
 I am not going to infer that the chimpanzee understood the 
 principle of the inclined plane. 
 
 One day I gave him a rope with a noose to throw over 
 the box in place of his stick. I did not give him any hint, 
 but he soon tried it in a vague way. He did not, how- 
 
274 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 ever, understand the matter very well, for when he suc- 
 ceeded in getting the rope round the box, he did not seem 
 aware of his advantage, flung it away, went off for his 
 shawl, and used it very sucessfuUy. I then tied a block 
 of wood to the rope to assist in throwing it. He attempted 
 this spontaneously, at first without success. Presently, 
 however, he happened to pitch the block right into the 
 box, which to-day was open, pulled it in, and got the 
 banana. Notwithstanding this signal success, he never 
 took to this trick. 
 
 At the next trial, he tried to use his rug, until I confiscated it ; 
 but after one or two unsuccessful trials, he succeeded in throwing 
 the block beyond the box, and roping it in. At the next trial he 
 failed again, and tried a smaller shawl, which I was also compelled 
 to confiscate. Bereft of all other means, he threw the block once 
 more, but hit the wrong side. One more failure stirred my com- 
 punction, and I gave him the banana, and restored his confiscated 
 property. The next day he would not throw the block, but used 
 the rope with success. At length, however, he refused to go on 
 with this method. Evidently he had considerable physical diffi- 
 culty in throwing at all well.^ 
 
 In another connection, however, he would also use the 
 rope with some ingenuity. In the experiment to which I 
 have already referred, when the box was tied to a rope, 
 the further end of which was passed over a stanchion 
 several feet from the cage, he failed, as I shall mention 
 later, to find the right method, but was fertile in devising 
 wrong ones. He would shake the rope violently, so that 
 the banana would fall out of the box. He would then 
 swing the rope to and fro, swishing the banana about from 
 side to side, until by degrees it would come within his 
 reach, in a way which I should have thought beforehand 
 to be quite impossible. 
 
 Jimmy was much slower in learning the use of the stick, 
 but he had probably had no previous experience like that 
 with the rug. I began by placing a nut in the crook of a 
 
 1 Pechuel-Losche (Brehm's Thierleben, I., p. 50) has given reasons 
 for repudiating the common view that many monkeys in the natural state 
 use stones, nuts, etc., as missiles. Miss Romanes' observations, however, 
 show beyond doubt that her Cebus threw things at people deliberately. 
 {Animal Intelligence, p. 485, etc.) 
 
XII ARTICULATE IDEAS 
 
 275 
 
 little stick, the whole resting on a board which I arranged 
 outside Jimmy's cage at Belle Vue. He at once pulled 
 the nut in, but made no attempt that day to get the stick 
 into position for himself. The next day I arranged it 
 again, and also dragged the nut about outside. At the 
 fourth trial on that day, he waved the stick about as 
 if vaguely trying to hit the nut. I append the remainder 
 of the notes taken on that day, and the next. 
 
 4. Stick being placed near nut, he swishes it sideways, and gets 
 nut. 
 
 5. Swishes about persistently with stick. Knocks nut away 
 once, and we replace. Then by deliberate casts gets it. 
 
 6. Pushes stick out from cage. Hits nut away. Sulks. 
 
 7. Great struggle to get it. Throws stick and picks it up again. 
 At last gets nut. 
 
 8. No effort, till we go away. Then at once tries, but knocks 
 nut away. 
 
 Next day. 
 
 1. Swishes stick about vaguely. Swipes at nut. Vexed, and 
 throws stick away. Gets stick over nut, and pulls a little. Gives 
 up again. Throws stick over it, and pulls by crook. At last 
 gets it. 
 
 2. Swipes about, knocks nut further away. New stick sub- 
 stituted — T shape. Examines and bites at it. Gets it into cage. 
 Apple substituted for nut. Stick lies near. He gets apple at once. 
 
 3. After long time with no effort, makes awkward casts at apple, 
 handle of stick getting mixed up with netting. Throws stick 
 away again in vexation. Does not understand drawing it in like 
 Professor. I give it back, putting it under bar. Tries to throw 
 it over apple sideways ; fails. 
 
 4. After an interval, I shorten stick. He fishes about for small 
 pieces, and gets them. 
 
 5. Gets a big bit better. 
 
 As long as he was in his cage, Jimmy showed himself much less 
 handy with the stick than the Professor. He had to operate 
 through a wire netting, which however did not reach to the floor 
 by an interval of more than an inch. He seldom made use of this 
 interval for getting the stick in and out, though it was much 
 handier than working through the railing. If the stick was put 
 inside the netting, he had great difficulty in getting it out. The 
 crosspiece with which the stick was fitted was too long to go 
 through the mesh of the net without a Httle manceuvring ; and in 
 this, he very often failed. He would push it so violently that the 
 stick would get through and fall out of his reach ; and once he bit 
 
 T 2 
 
276 MII^D IN EVOLUTION chap- 
 
 the cross off, probably out of annoyance. Nor did he manage the 
 pulling in as well as the chimpanzee, frequently getting the end of 
 the stick involved with the meshes of the net. In fact, in the 
 whole matter of manipulation, the chimpanzee is the more 
 dexterous of the two. In handling the boxes, for example, in 
 which his fruit was placed, he always turned them edgewise if he 
 wanted to get them through the bars. Similarly, the child's hoop 
 mentioned above was passed by him in and out of the bars edgewise 
 without difficulty. Jimmy's comparative failure in this respect 
 must be ascribed largely to impatience. To say the truth, if he 
 did not succeed at once, he lost his temper. 
 
 Jimmy pretty soon learnt to use a short stick in order 
 to reach the longer- one. If stick and fruit were both too 
 far from him, he would try to help himself by pulling the 
 whole board on which they lay towards him ; and he 
 seemed quite clear as to the necessity of getting the stick 
 beyond the thing that he was pulling. If it lay just on his 
 side of the apple or nut, he would be careful not to knock 
 the apple away, but to get the stick well beyond it. When 
 Jimmy was staying in my house, he was kept on the cord ; 
 and, being unembarrassed with netting, would use a stick 
 very freely. It is also interesting that without any in- 
 struction he rapidly learnt to use substitutes. 
 
 I first gave him a child's skipping-rope. He took no notice to 
 begin with, but when I placed the rope suggestively near the 
 bread, which was out of his reach, he made a cast at it with 
 the wooden handle. At first he lost the rope. I returned it to 
 him, when he threw it again, and worked the bread within his 
 reach. After this, he would use a cord ; and, after some hesi- 
 tation, a wire. If other things failed, he would pull off the large 
 dust sheet which covered his chair, and use that, as the Professor 
 did his rug. Here is one note which shows his resourcefulness in 
 trying one thing after another. I put a piece of onion in a basket 
 within reach of his stick. After first refusing any effort, he tried 
 to reach it with the stick, and failed. In reaching towards it, he 
 found the big box (one of Jack's boxes, which he also used) lying 
 across his chain, and preventing his reaching forward. He threw 
 the box off. Having failed with the stick, he will not try it 
 again, but makes wild efforts to throw the rope. Then he actually 
 rolls his box at the food ; then goes off and gets down the dust 
 sheet from the chair, and tries unskilfully to sweep at it ; finally, 
 makes a longer stretch, and just reaches it with his own claw (his 
 elasticity was really remarkable). 
 
XII ARTICULATE IDEAS 277 
 
 Both these monkeys, then, clearly learnt to use sticks, 
 ropes, or anything else that came handy, to reach at things 
 outside the range of their claws.^ It is instructive to com- 
 pare their behaviour with that of the dog and the elephant. 
 I chained Jack up, put a biscuit out of his reach in the 
 crook of a stick, and he rapidly learnt to pull it in. But 
 of any attempt to get the stick into the position in which 
 he could use It, I never saw a sign.^ It was the same with 
 the elephant, who time after time would pull the stick in to 
 her, getting the bun if it happened to be placed exactly 
 right, and missing it if it was possible to do so.® Thus, 
 the elephant and the dog remained In the first stage of the 
 trick. It would of course have been far less easy for them 
 to have got the stick into the right position, but for the 
 elephant, at least, it would not have been impossible. She 
 confined herself, however, to repeating what she had done 
 herself with success, or seen done for her. But to get the 
 stick Into position, and use it with eiFect, involved rather 
 more than this. It Is true that the monkeys had seen me use 
 it, and that Jimmy had also seen me place it in the right 
 position for him to use ; but it was no mechanical imitation 
 by which they learnt to use the stick for themselves. It 
 was necessary that they should grasp how the stick 
 and the food stood in relation to them ; that they should 
 get the stick at the food and beyond it. If we regard 
 imitation as the basis of this performance, it is Imitation 
 of the higher order, that we have called Reflective or 
 Analogical. A form of " analogical extension " is also 
 strongly marked in the use of substitutes differing very 
 widely In appearance and the manner of use from the 
 
 ' Mr. Bates's Cebus also used a stick for similar purposes, and on one 
 occasion is recorded to have flung a swing at some skins which he wanted 
 so as to get them on the return of the swing (Romanes, p. 480). Miss 
 Romanes records similar facts. Two other monkeys at Belle Vue failed 
 to learn the use of the stick in the few lessons which I gave them. It 
 would seem to be a feat which must be learnt by the animals. 
 
 * I did not, I must admit, repeat the experiment many times, because 
 Jack strained at the chain so much in his excitement, that I was afraid of 
 his hurting himself. 
 
 ^ When she missed it, she got excessively annoyed with the stick, and 
 would try to break it by stamping on it, or would throw it away into her 
 cage, if I did not intercept her. On such an occasion she returned it to me 
 on being ordered, with a very bad grace. 
 
278 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 object first employed. Another point illustrated besides 
 the " articulateness " dwelt on above, is the combination 
 of movements frequently observed, — a good case of the 
 sort of adaptation of one act to another in a series which 
 we have taken as differentiating Desire from Impulse. 
 There was indeed in their whole proceeding a degree of 
 articulateness which I havenot seen in experiments with any 
 other animals. Mr. Small's epithet " crass " would have 
 to be modified before it was applied to the perceptions or 
 ideas of monkeys. Their handling is indeed much less 
 dexterous, and — if I may use the expression — refined, than 
 one would suppose an untaught man's to be, but far more 
 discriminating than that of any other animal that I have seen. 
 Perpetually exploring objects, pulling them to pieces, and 
 pushing them about, they get to understand better than 
 any other animal how things will act, and what they can 
 do to things. Their hands are far finer organs of tactual 
 discrimination than anything which lower animals possess ; 
 but equally, they seem inferior in this point to the human 
 finger ; and with this tactual discrimination, the degree of 
 their appreciation of objects, their behaviour and relations, 
 seems to be closely correlated. 
 
 3. Tied rope. (See above p. 192.) 
 
 The elephant, dog and cat were easily taught to 
 pull beyond the knot of a tied rope. The monkeys 
 may be said rather to have shown an appreciation of 
 the knot. 
 
 The Professor was enclosed in his inner cage, as shown in the 
 diagram. I tied a box to a rope, passing one end straight through 
 both bars to him, while the other was passed round beyond the 
 bars, and also given to him. It was natural that he should pull 
 the straight rope, and this he did, reaching through both bars to 
 get at the box. I then twisted the straight rope round one of 
 the bars. He at once put his hand beyond the bar, and pulled 
 the rope in.i I then moved the knot to a remoter bar. After 
 once pulling on his side of the knot, he again reached beyond, 
 and I found the next day that he would either claw beyond the 
 
 ' Mr. George Jennison, an experienced and very judicious observer, 
 who was with me, thought this attributable merely to the effort to reach 
 as far as possible. The subsequent trials, however, suggest that the 
 chimpanzee recognised the knot as the critical point. 
 
XII ARTICULATE IDEAS 279 
 
 knot at first, or after one trial at his end of the rope. He would 
 also sometimes claw slightly at the knot itself. When, finally, 
 I moved the knot to a bar beyond his reach, after a slight trial at 
 the straight cord, he would pull the other.^ For Jimmy, I ar- 
 ranged a cord knotted to the handle of a writing-desk. He was 
 tied to a heavy chair, by moving which I could let him reach 
 beyond the knot, or prevent him, at pleasure. When I let him 
 do so, he at once reached beyond the knot, even if he had to 
 make a great stretch for it. When I put the chair back, he did 
 not try to use a stick to rake in the free cord, but at first pulled 
 the tied part fruitlessly, and then taking it in both hands, pulled 
 so hard as to drag his chair forward, whereupon he immediately 
 
 Bed 
 
 
 
 
 Outer Cage 
 
 
 
 Inner Cage 
 
 d. 
 
 
 
 
 
 1 « a 
 
 b 
 
 ?S:Tr\ 
 
 \ '^z ''-3 \ • 
 
 Plate -glass 
 
 
 
 
 
 V J -''''^ 
 
 
 House 
 
 
 
 Box with » * 
 Banana „ ' 
 
 d^, inner railed door ; rfj, outer door ; ii, k^, k^, knot in different positions. 
 
 jeiched out, and caught the cord beyond the knot. This was 
 repeated, and if at first accidental, certainly became deliberate. 
 On the other hand, if the chair was held fast, he would not at 
 first try to use the stick to fish for the string, but would pull 
 irrationally at the tied string.^ The next day, however, he took 
 to the stick, and thereafter used it freely. He would now wholly 
 disregard the tied string, unless he wished to pull himself forward 
 by means of it. 
 
 ' There followed two trials in which he attempted the wrong rope first 
 and then pulled the right. He then pulled the right five times running. 
 The ends of the rope lay close together, and were indistinguishable in 
 appearance. 
 
 2 The stick was placed in position for him several times, and then he 
 used it, but he only once that day made an effort to get it into position 
 himself. 
 
28o 
 
 MIND IN EVOLUTION 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 4. Bolt fastened by hook. 
 
 I took the box with the push-back bolt, tied a string to 
 the knob, and, passing it round the box, fastened it by a hook 
 to a nail at the back. The string now held the bolt 
 forward in the staple, so that unless the hook was removed, 
 the bolt could not be pushed back. Jimmy at first failed 
 to find out how to open this box, but one day appeared to 
 learn it, as it were, in a flash. 
 
 A. Diagram showing box with hook fastened to wire netting. 
 
 B. Diagram showing hook fastened to nail at back of box. 
 
 At the first trial, he worked a good deal at the bolt, bit the 
 string a little, and after a time, took the hook ofF. He then 
 began to work at the bolt, and might have found it all out, but 
 that his attention was suddenly distracted. After this, though he 
 two or three times took the hook ofF, the action was purposeless, 
 as he would go away again, and perhaps not try the bolt until a 
 minute had passed, or perhaps not at all. Two or three days 
 afterwards, however, I was putting my hand to the hook, mean- 
 ing to take it off without letting him see. Apparently this called 
 his attention to the hook. He at once took it off, and almost 
 immediately, came round the box, pushed back the bolt, and 
 opened it. He repeated this five times, and when the hook was 
 too tight to come oil, he would pull the string till it slackened. 
 To baiHe him, I now turned the box up so that the hook was 
 underneath. At first, not finding the hook, he pulled at the string 
 and worked at the bolt ; but at length he turned the box over, 
 the hook fell off, and he opened. 
 
 I then further varied the experiment by fastening the hook to 
 the netting of his cage, pulling the box away from it so that the 
 string was taut. After trying the bolt a little, he attacked the 
 hook ; but it was too tight to come off. He then threw the box 
 about, until he turned it into a position in which the bolt fell.^ 
 After another trial, in which he failed to remove the hook, I 
 
 ' He had an amusing struggle to keep the lid up while he got under- 
 neath it. Finally he threw the lid right back. 
 
XII ARTICULATE IDEAS 281 
 
 fastened it again so that the string was slack. He then quickly 
 pulled the hook off. His record for the rest of the day is as 
 follows : — 
 
 12. I re-fasten tight. He tries bolt, works to and fro, and 
 leaves it more forward, so that string is slacker. Then at hook. 
 Gets it off and opens. 
 
 13. Slightly at bolt ; then at hook. String works slack, and 
 he opens. 
 
 14. String too tight for movement of bolt to let it slacken. 
 He tries hook hard, finally gets bodily on to string, so as to pull 
 box in towards fastening and make string slack. Then gets 
 hook off, and opens. 
 
 15. After trying hook, pulls string down hard at once. Tries 
 bolt slightly, which nearly goes back. Then takes off hook. 
 Then opens. 
 
 16. Same. Tries hook well. Then bodily on to string. 
 Pulls in. Then gets hook off, and opens. 
 
 The next day he was indifferent, and I did not try him again 
 till ten days after, when I tied back the catch of the other box 
 in a similar manner, fastening the hook first to a chain. He ap- 
 peared at first to have forgotten this experiment, and began by 
 biting through the string ; and when I replaced the string by 
 wire, he pushed the box about until he got it into a position 
 where it could be opened. I then fastened the hook on to the 
 box itself again. He watched me doing this, and attacked the 
 hook at once, but it was too tight for him. I then gave him six 
 more trials with the hook on the chain, each time taking it off as far 
 as possible without letting him see me do so.^ It was not, however, 
 till the sixth trial that he made any attempt at the hook.^ So I 
 took the hook off, and put it on to the fender. After this he 
 succeeded at once, and repeated his old performance of jumping 
 on the string, or giving it a vigorous pull if it was too tight for 
 the hook to come off. 
 
 Taking this experiment as a whole, three things are 
 noteworthy. 
 
 (i) First, the monkey showed no systematic endeavour 
 to trace out the nature of the obstacle to his 
 pulling the bolt. He did not follow the string round, and 
 get the hook ofF, but 
 
 ' He may have seen me at the third trial. 
 
 2 Instead of trying the hook, he bit the string through once, and another 
 time broke it in jumping on the box, the cord by which he was held 
 catching in the string and pulling it violently. It was noteworthy that he 
 repeated this jump, which he had found successful, 
 
2S2 
 
 MIND IN EVOLUTION 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 (2) He did recognise obstacles when, so to say, they 
 stared him in the face ; and then devised means of his own 
 for dealing with them. This was particularly noticeable 
 in the slackening of the string. He must in some obscure 
 fashion have felt that the string was pulling against him 
 when he tried to unfasten the hook ; and for this he 
 found the appropriate remedy. This was therefore a good 
 case of " original application." 
 
 (3) His first success was one of the most striking 
 examples that I have seen of the effect of a sudden turn of 
 attention. Though he had pulled off the hook before, and 
 also pushed back the bolt, he had clearly never put two 
 and two together. For some inscrutable reason, the move- 
 ment of my hand suddenly seemed to bring the whole 
 
 thing into his mind. He 
 at once took off the hook, 
 pulled back the bolt, 
 opened the box, and did 
 not fail again, 
 
 5. On the other hand, 
 both monkeys failed in 
 another experiment with 
 a hooked rope. I passed 
 a rope round a stanchion 
 outside the chimpanzee's 
 cage, tied a box to one 
 part of it, and gave the free end to the chimpanzee. 
 The other end I hooked to a bar of his cage. The result 
 was that he could pull the free end as hard as he pleased, 
 but it would have no effect unless he took the hook off. 
 In this he failed, though I repeatedly took the hook off 
 myself, thinking that he might learn to see the difference 
 which it made. Jimmy failed equally in a similar 
 experiment which I arranged for him. Both monkeys, 
 after trying one rope, would try the other ; and it was 
 interesting to note how, on at least one occasion, the 
 chimpanzee, after having lost the free end of the rope by 
 pulling hard at the other, kept both ropes in his hands 
 while he pulled. The same monkey showed consider- 
 able, but from the experimenter's point of view perverted, 
 
XII ARTICULATE IDEAS 283 
 
 ingenuity in getting the box within his reach by switching 
 the rope about from side to side. Why did neither of 
 them learn to take ofFthe hook ? Imitation was excluded, 
 because I concealed the operation as much as possible, and 
 it would seem that they failed to compare the two 
 situations (hook ofF and hook on) so as to draw an 
 inference. This failure is to be connected with the very 
 short-sighted want of attention to my operations while ad- 
 justing the experiment. Such attention was rare. Had 
 the monkeys any degree of forethought going beyond the 
 satisfaction of their felt desire, one would suppose that they 
 would take note of what passed in one experiment with a 
 view to success in the next. They would therefore fix 
 their minds on the nature of that change in the situation 
 which enabled them to get the coveted prize. I never 
 saw in a monkey any trace of a prevision of this 
 kind. 
 
 6. Working stick within tube. 
 
 I noticed the Professor one day trying very ineffectually 
 to use a small stick as a lever to open a box. I did not 
 further test his powers in this direction, but thought of a 
 slightly different experiment. There was a large iron 
 pipe lying in the cage, into which I stufFed a piece of 
 banana, and gave the monkey his little stick with a tin 
 tack at the end, by which I thought he might fish it out. 
 I did not show him this at all ; but he at once used the 
 stick, working it in with ease, and though he failed to get 
 the banana out bodily, he seemed to derive satisfaction 
 from sucking the end of the stick each time he drew it 
 out. As I thought this was meagre sustenance for him, 
 and a poor reward for so much merit, I secured a shorter 
 piece of piping, and a long iron rod, one end of which 
 would pass easily into the pipe, while it was long enough 
 to go right through. The Professor meant to use this in 
 the same way as the stick, but he very soon found that he 
 pushed the banana right out at the other end. He then 
 always looked for it at that end, and moreover, finding 
 that it was apt to get lost in his hay, he transferred his 
 operations to the part of his floor which was covered with 
 sawdust. Moreover, one trial was enough to show him 
 
284 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 that only one end of the rod could be used.' I wondered 
 whether anything could have suggested this operation to 
 the chimpanzee, and I found afterwards that when drink- 
 ing his water at lunch, he had a way of dipping straws in 
 and then sucking them. This, or the use of his finger in 
 searching, would perhaps be the point of departure for 
 this burrowing in a hole with a stick. But the analogy 
 seems somewhat remote. For the rest, the degree of 
 exactitude required in the execution was the most inter- 
 esting feature of this performance. 
 
 Jimmy, on the other hand, absolutely failed to learn 
 this trlcic. Though repeatedly shown it with a hollow 
 bamboo, and either a stick to push the food out, or a 
 wire to fish it up with, he never made the slightest effort 
 to push the food out for himself. If I gave him the tube 
 with the stick inside it, he would pull it back instead 
 of pushing, though if the next moment I took it 
 in my own hands, he would look anxiously at the 
 opposite end to see the potato come out. It was a 
 remarkable and by no means isolated case of failure in 
 imitation.^ 
 
 7. Use of stool. 
 
 The first evening that Jimmy was with me, I observed 
 him pull a box towards him, climb on the top of it, and 
 thence jump to the top of the table. This can hardly 
 have been by design, as he could climb the table without 
 such aid with the greatest ease. But the next day I 
 made a series of experiments to see whether he would 
 learn to place a box or chair for himself, with a view to 
 standing on it. 
 
 The experiment was not very easy to arrange for so 
 agile a climber, but I managed it by putting a piece of 
 potato on a table at such a distance from the point to 
 which his cord was fastened that he could just reach it if 
 
 ' If he made a mistake on the point on subsequent days, he speedily 
 corrected himself. 
 
 2 Mr. Shepherd also obtained negative results in this case with his 
 monkeys {Some Mental Processes of the Rhesus Monkey, p. 35. Mr. 
 Shepherd, apparently by an oversight, speaks of his results as differing 
 from miiie. With regard to the Rhesus they agree. My positive result 
 was obtained with the chimpanzee only). 
 
XII 
 
 ARTICULATE IDEAS 
 
 285 
 
 his body and the cord ^ made as nearly as possible a straight 
 line. Thus he had not law enough to climb the table, 
 nor to reach to the top as he stood on the ground ; but 
 if he stood on the stool and stretched forward, he could 
 just reach it. I did not, to the best of my remembrance, 
 let him see me bring the box to the table for him, 
 but rather brought the table and adjusted it to the 
 box. After he had got it in this fashion, I moved 
 the box away. He did not try to move it back, but 
 began exploring the box, and threw it open. The lid, 
 being thrown back, came near to the table, and after a 
 little time spent in investigating the box and himself, he 
 
 jumped on to the lid and got the food. When I put 
 another piece of bread on the table, he did not try to 
 repeat this performance, but tried to pull the table towards 
 him. He then jumped on to the box, and tried to open 
 it in a futile way while sitting on the lid. After a long 
 interval, I attracted his attention to the bread again, and 
 he once more opened the door of the box ; but this time 
 it opened at right angles to the direction required, and so 
 did not help him. He pushed the box a little towards 
 the table, but did not persist. After another trial, in 
 which he circumvented me, by extraordinary litheness of 
 body, he began pulling a chair towards the table, but 
 found it too hard work, and gave up. I then noted as 
 follows : — 
 
 Pulls at box. Takes up brush and makes a vague lunge with 
 it, then takes rope, and similarly half tries to throw it. 
 
 1 The cord was tied to a belt of sacking, which went round the nar- 
 rowest part of his body above the thighs. 
 
286 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 I put a lighter chair within his reach. He tumbles it over 
 box, and finally down by table — it lies lengthwise. He then 
 climbs on it and tries to reach biscuit, but his rope has got 
 twisted, and is too short. I lengthen it, and push table nearer. 
 He gets biscuit. 
 
 I now put chair in another place, upright again. He climbs 
 about it, but instead of using it, pulls table near him. Ultimately 
 gets food by reaching from chair. 
 
 Food replaced. Fairly pulls box to within reach of table — gets 
 on to it and reaches food. Replaced. Tries to reach from chair 
 as it stands, and to pull table. Gets on to chair through back, so 
 that rope is passed through, and will get twisted unless he goes 
 . back. I show him a bigger piece. He jumps down through 
 back of chair, goes to box, opens it, and pulls it a little way to- 
 wards table, then jumps on top and gives up again. Finally, 
 through my moving biscuit a little nearer to encourage him he 
 gets it. I nowr place it on top of high chair. He tries to climb 
 chair, but fails. He catches curtain, and swings by it to chair, 
 and gets biscuit. 
 
 After lunch, I place potato in basket hung from ceiling. He 
 gets it by jumping, and reaching from screen which he climbs up 
 and along. At length, other things being made impossible, I put 
 chair near. He pulls at this, and finally turns it over so that it 
 falls underneath. He then climbs on it and gets potato. 
 
 Replaced. He does not try to use chair, but after some efforts 
 by other means, drags box underneath, jumps on it, and gets 
 part. As I write above, he tried to draw box towards table 
 where bulk of potato is left. It is too far. He also tries to throw 
 rope. Finally I move table a little nearer, and he gets potato, 
 standing on box. Replaced, and box put out of way. He lugs it 
 up. Pushes it too far. Then brings it back, opens lid. Stands on 
 it, and tries to reach. I push table nearer him, and he gets potato. 
 
 I now put box so that by opening lid and throwing it back he 
 can reach. He gets on top, and so prevents himself from opening 
 until he gets near hinge. He then opens, tumbling right over. 
 He climbs on lid to reach, but the whole thing overbalances. 
 The same evening he pushed the box towards the table, but 
 rolled it over too far. Tries to reach and fails. Sits on box and 
 opens lid (at side) quite uselessly. Apparently tries to get it to 
 stand out at right angles.^ No further effort though I draw table 
 a little nearer. On my going out of door, reaches food from 
 corner of box. 
 
 ' I mention this as suggesting that he had a confused remembrance of 
 getting the food before by opening the lid, which he now applies quite 
 absurdly. He seemed to try to make the lid stick out at right angles, as 
 it does when thrown back from the top. 
 
XII ARTICULATE IDEAS 287 
 
 The next day, he failed to use the box as a stool. The 
 day after, I placed the box in its old position while his 
 back was turned. The result was as follows : — 
 
 No notice till I go out of room. He struggles as I watch 
 behind door. Chain is too short, and box is only in his way. 
 He removes it. I lengthen chain, and move table slightly and 
 raise onion, placing it on a piece of bamboo rested on some 
 object on the table. He goes at it, fails to reach, pulls oak chair 
 towards him, gets on it, reaches out, drags at corner of oak table 
 so that onion, which is on bamboo, swings round over chair ; 
 then just manages to knock it over on to floor, jumps down 
 and gets it. After two miscalculations of mine, in which he 
 gets it without chair, he again pulls chair into line, and 
 gets food, reaching over it with great stretch, and knocking onion 
 down. 
 
 His success in this experiment indicates a power of 
 fairly precise adjustment of one thing to another ; and it 
 is one in which neither accident nor imitation can be sup- 
 posed to have played much part. I do not think that he 
 ever saw me adjust the stool to the table,^ nor co\ild chance 
 play much part in aiding him to place a thing which, if to 
 be used at all, had to be brought into one particular posi- 
 tion and no other. I only once saw him make a complete 
 mistake upon this point ; ^ when he dragged a large basket 
 into the line between his fastening and the food, but much 
 too near to the fastening. One must admit that in this 
 case the animal judged, from memory or otherwise, that a 
 certain arrangement would help him, and set about to 
 make that arrangement. What is principally remarkable 
 is that the arrangement involved a certain adjustment 
 of one thing in relation to another. If we explain 
 it by reference to an idea, we must conceive the idea 
 as having much less of that "crassness," of which we 
 have spoken.^ 
 
 ' Nor, if he did, did he begin by a similar movement, but by throwing 
 open the lid. 
 
 ^ I.e.^ as to the direction in which the stool had to be moved. It 
 sometimes happened that the heavy box would roll too far or not far 
 enough. 
 
 "* Cuvier's Orang would place a chair for himself to stand on, according 
 to Romanes. {Animal Intelligence, p. 481.) Mr. Shepherd's monkeys, 
 on the other hand, failed completely in this test {pp. cit., p. 53.) 
 
288 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 8. Removing obstacle from chain. 
 I arranged matters so that the monkey's chain was 
 shortened for effective purposes by passing round a corner 
 of his box. 
 
 I then put a piece of potato on the floor, just beyond 
 his reach. After a little hesitation, he came back, moved 
 the box out of the way, and after a little fiddling with it, 
 went back and got the potato. This was repeated a 
 second and third time without hesitation.^ The next day, 
 he pushed the box, and later, the fender, out of the way of 
 his chain ; and when, later, I put the fender right over 
 his chain so as to shorten it to two or three inches, he 
 pushed it back, gaining a foot, and then turned it com- 
 pletely over, thereby freeing himself. I do not infer that 
 Jimmy knows that the diagonal is shorter 
 ftpasjening than two sides of an oblong, but I think that 
 fifiidllll ^^ '^^^ clearly appreciate that the box pre- 
 Ifllllflf vented his chain from running out, and 
 EiMJlillflj this is what I mean by an articulate idea 
 ^°^ \ of concrete objects in their relations. The 
 ■ same may be said of Miss Romanes' Cebus, 
 which would take great pains to push the 
 marble slab to which his chain was fastened 
 nearer to the object desired. 
 
 Potato • " It is too heavy for him to pull along by his 
 
 chain without hurting himselfj so when he desires 
 to do any mischief which is beyond the reach of his chain, he 
 deliberately goes to the marble and pushes an arm down between 
 an upright part of it and the wall, until he has moved the whole 
 slab sufficiently far from the wall to admit of his slipping 
 down behind the upright part himself. He then places his 
 back against the wall and his four hands against the upright 
 part of the marble, and pushes the slab as far as he can stretch 
 his long legs." ^ 
 
 A still higher perception of " concrete relations " is 
 implied in the account of a Barbary ape in Brehm's Thier- 
 lebetiy^ which found a niche into which it could squeeze its 
 
 ' Each time he acted furtively, apparently fearing that I should prevent 
 him. This, I think, accounts for the fiddling with the box in the first 
 trial — a characteristic performance when he meant to do something which 
 he thought forbidden. " Romanes, p. 487. ' I. p. 147. 
 
XII 
 
 ARTICULATE IDEAS 
 
 289 
 
 Wall 
 
 ^^ 
 
 rope_ and so fasten it. The rope thus became a swing, 
 and if it was either too short or too long, the monkey is 
 said to have climbed up and altered the fastening. 
 9. Unwinding chain. 
 
 In dealing with his chain generally, Jimmy was far less 
 clever than Miss Romanes' Cebus. He could never be 
 relied on to undo any serious tangle ; ^ and he con- 
 stantly got himself twisted by wandering to and fro. 
 He would, however, as a rule, undo a single twist by 
 
 retracing his steps ; and some- 
 times would undo a more com- 
 plicated one by a developed 
 form of the method of trial and 
 error, which consisted in this : 
 that each time he felt the cord 
 \ ■■! 1 shortening on him, he would go 
 
 JFire ^ ■^^"^JIIIIJ back the way he had come. In 
 
 this way, by successive trials, he 
 was likely to get free. He did 
 not, however, improve in this 
 respect in the course of a con- 
 siderable number of experiments. 
 It would take up too much 
 space to relate the whole of this 
 series. I will mention one or two 
 points that seem significant. After the knotted string 
 experiment, when I had the potato in a basket attached by 
 a cord to a handle of the bureau, which he could reach by 
 a stick if he had the full length of his chain, I passed the 
 chain round an oak table,^ thereby shortening it for prac- 
 tical purposes. (Fig. I.) The first result was as follows : — 
 
 ]P 
 Fig. I. 
 k, knot ; /, basket with potato. 
 
 ' Contrast Miss Romanes : "When his chain becomes twisted round 
 the bars of a ' clothes-horse ' (which is given him to run about upon), 
 and thus too short for his comfort, he looks at it intently and pulls it with 
 his fingers this way and that, and when he sees how the turns are taken 
 he deliberately goes round and round the bars, first this way, then that, 
 until the chain is quite disentangled" (p. 486). From what Jimmy did, I 
 think he could have learnt this if he were a little more persistent and 
 attentive, but after seeing his failures, I can realise better the high degree 
 of " articulateness," both of perception and purpose, implied in the 
 description given by Miss Romanes. 
 
 2 There had previously been two or three untwisting experiments. 
 
 U 
 
290 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 He darts at tied end, and tries to pull himself up by it ; does 
 move table in this way and gets nearer. Tries to grab at string 
 beyond knot. Tries wildly. Tries to catch it by throwing other 
 string over it, and nearly succeeds. Never attempts to come back 
 and walk round table, nor to move table out of way, nor to 
 use stick. Finally, being encouraged by extra hard pull at tied 
 string, manages to shift table and so reach. No mistake about his 
 going for string beyond knot. 
 
 In the second trial, he used the stick ; in the third, he 
 gave up. 1 then picked him up, and took him round the 
 table to untwist him, but he was much frightened, and 
 presently got twisted again. I soon found that he was 
 really after the remainder of the potato, which had 
 been left carelessly in another part of the room. At 
 length, in the course of his wanderings, he got free 
 from the legs of the table. I quote the following from 
 my notes : — 
 
 He still does not think of going round table, but makes another 
 fainthearted attempt to reach the food directly. Presently wanders 
 round to fire, and then sees strings ; goes at string beyond knot, 
 and gets. 
 
 I again put cord round table. He tries to reach ; then comes 
 slowly but steadily round table, and back to fire. Then goes and 
 gets. 
 
 Food, etc., replaced. After once straining towards string, goes 
 round table, straight to string, and gets food. 
 
 Replaced. Same ; but cord has got twisted round foot of table, 
 so he pulls at tied string, pulls table nearer, and gets food by 
 pulling string beyond knot. 
 
 After lunch, replaced. After short pull, i.e.^ straining at his 
 cord, goes round at once. 
 
 I now pass chain through legs of table. He goes back through 
 and round at once. 
 
 It will be seen (i) that it did not occur to him to go 
 round the table at the first trial, but (2) that having once 
 done so in casual fashion with satisfactory results he 
 repeated the process. 
 
 After this, I tried the more complicated untwisting 
 experiments to which I have referred. The next day, I 
 
XII ARTICULATE IDEAS 291 
 
 varied the experiment by passing the chain round a 
 high "grandfather's chair," standing in the corner of 
 the room. (Fig. i.) The way round would be quite 
 dark and unobvious, but I wished to see whether he 
 would draw the analogy from the table. The result was 
 as follows : — 
 
 He makes great efFort to reach potato, tries to use hammer as 
 stick to reach it, tries to move chair, turns and pulls with hands 
 at rope, makes (for first time that I have seen him do it) a sort of 
 dash at a point where his chain is fastened, but does not think of 
 going round chair. 
 
 I take chain from chair and put it round table. As I arrange, 
 he is excited, wanders, and gets entangled. Cannot disentangle 
 himself. I do so, and let him have some potato. Then I replace 
 round table. After trying straight at potato, he at once darts 
 back, but instead of going outside, leaves one leg to the right, 
 table standing thus : 
 
 kFastening 
 
 Fig 2. 
 r, route : c, chain ; /, legs. 
 
 He then gets entangled, but disentangles himself by stages, and, 
 getting free, goes somewhat hesitatingly round table and gets 
 potato. 
 
 Replaced. He makes exactly same mistake, but rapidly 
 disentangles himself through three or four turnings, runs round 
 table and gets. 
 
 Total time can only have been a few seconds. 
 
 u 2 
 
292 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 Replaced. He rushes round right way before I have time to 
 put potato down. I give him some bread. 
 Replaced. No hesitation. 
 I now placed chain thus : 
 
 ® Potato 
 
 Fig 3. 
 
 He starts wrong, but rapidly gets out between legs, perhaps by 
 chance, then goes round table and gets. 
 
 Replaced. He untwists himself (though starting wrong) while 
 I am placing bread. Then comes round table and gets food. 
 
 These experiments give a fair measure of his accuracy 
 in disentangling himself. 
 
 Some more untwisting experiments followed, and then I placed 
 the chain round the high chair again. 
 
 He tries a little at potato (i.e., to reach it directly), but does not 
 attempt to go round chair. Jumps on it once. Very little 
 effort. After interval, tries again, wanders a little. The clank 
 of his chain seems to strike him, and he starts off, goes round 
 chair deliberately, and gets potato. 
 
 Replaced. Tries (direct method), then back, and after one 
 false start, goes round at once. 
 
 Replaced. Does not even try to go straight, but goes round 
 at once. 
 
 In this experiment again, the thing seemed to strike 
 him all of a sudden. Just as in the hook experiment, the 
 
XII ARTICULATE IDEAS 293 
 
 movement of my hand, so, in this, the clank of the chain 
 seemed suddenly to set the whole thing before him. For 
 the rest, one may regard his getting round the chair as a 
 kind of analogy from his experience with the table, and 
 one not so easy to draw in fact as it may seem from its 
 description upon paper. For round the table the lie of 
 the chain when once attended to was obvious ; round the 
 chair it was hidden in the darkness of the corner. 
 
 10. Attempted theft. 
 
 My reasons for suspecting Jimmy of trying to deceive 
 me are not only a certain f urtiveness of manner that came 
 over him at times ; but the use of methods the object of 
 which was unmistakable. It often happened that when 
 I was giving him bits of potato, I would leave the bulk 
 of the potato carelessly somewhere within his reach. On 
 such an occasion the first symptom I noticed of anything 
 wrong was a loss of interest in the experiment. I would 
 then see him wandering off to perch on some table or 
 chair, or investigate some harmless object. Looking for 
 a reason, I would see that he was almost within striking 
 distance of my potato, and then, a stern, " No, Jimmy, 
 no ! " would send him scuttling back to the fire, and to 
 the investigation of his person. On one occasion in par- 
 ticular, as I was going out of the room, having left the 
 potato on a table, as I thought, out of his reach, I saw 
 him walking quietly, not to the table, but towards a box 
 near by. As I looked back, I saw him sliding from the 
 box to the table, and I stopped him just on the spring.^ 
 
 People ask whether animals use deception. I do not 
 for a moment suppose that Jimmy has any clear con- 
 ception of a lie. I do not suppose that he troubles 
 himself about my mental state. But I do think that he 
 could form a pretty shrewd estimate of the way in which 
 I was likely to act under given circumstances. He was 
 perfectly certain that if I saw him making a dive for the 
 whole potato, I should stop him ; and I do attribute to 
 him, further, the idea — I do not know how else to express 
 it — that if he avoided going straight at the prize, he 
 
 1 Of a baboon described in Brehm's Thierleben (I. p. i77) it is said 
 that she " stahl meisterhaft." 
 
294 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 might get near enough to it for a spring. I doubt 
 whether Jimmy's state of mind can, with due allowance 
 for the facts, be reasonably analysed into simpler terms 
 than these ; and the use of these terms clearly implies 
 both an " original " application of experience, and a fairly 
 complex adjustment of one consideration to another. 
 
 II. 1 have imputed " practical ideas " to animals lower 
 than the monkeys, to express the fact that they not merely 
 respond in a uniform manner to a certain physical situation, 
 but appear to direct their actions to the production of a 
 certain physical change. Keeping to the same terminology, 
 I should say that what distinguishes the ideas of monkeys 
 from those of other animals in so far as experiments like 
 mine can measure them, is an increase in elaboration and 
 articulateness. By increased elaboration, I mean that in 
 experiments of this kind, the monkey is less the slave of 
 the perceptual order. There is more work of the mind in 
 the plans which he lays on the basis of his experience. 
 And this is principally shown in the increased articulateness 
 of the plan itself. The monkey can apply one object to 
 another ; that is why he can use a stick, a stool, a poker.^ 
 It may be said, so could the dog, if he had a hand. I am 
 not prepared to deny this hypothetical statement ; but I 
 would rejoin that if the dog had a hand, his intelligence 
 would be developed in a different way. He has not the 
 empirical data at the disposal of the monkey ; and there- 
 fore, in experiments of the kind which one can institute in 
 a house or a laboratory, experiments depending principally 
 upon the manipulation of objects, the ape appears head 
 and shoulders above other animals. Whether we speak of 
 ideas or not, we cannot refuse to allow to the ape actions 
 
 * The reasons why animals do not use tools are partly physical, partly 
 mental, and the two reasons are correlated. The use of tools implies a 
 certain articulateness of ideas — the grasping of different objects in rela- 
 tions not given by perception. This articulateness again implies a power 
 of tactual discrimination only to be gained by the use of the hand. Hence 
 the employment of tools is almost unknown below the apes, and rare 
 among them. Of the making of a tool, I only know one authentic 
 instance. A chimpanzee formerly at Belle Vue would not only pick the 
 key of its cage out of a bunch, but could make itself a key out of a piece 
 of wood. This is less marvellous than it sounds. The key was a simple 
 square (like a railway key), and the monkey had only to bite the wood 
 till it would fit into the square hole. 
 
XII ARTICULATE IDEAS 
 
 295 
 
 in which one point is correlated with another, and this 
 perhaps with a third or fourth, on the basis of past 
 experience and present perception, yet without being 
 dominated by either, with a certain degree of precision, in 
 such a way as to bring about the gratification of an 
 impulse. The empirical basis of such a plan is often more 
 or less indirect. In the use of the stick as a rake, there 
 was for the chimpanzee his own experience with the rug, 
 and the hint which I gave him by using the stick myself. 
 To transfer the act, and apply it to himself and his own 
 needs, was, at lowest, a strong case of "reflective 
 imitation." But the use of the term imitation in this 
 connection is really misleading. At most, my act served 
 as a hint. It would be impossible to use a stick under 
 such circumstances with success merely from seeing another 
 do it, and without grasping for one's self the way in which 
 it is to be done. And all the detailed adjustments by which 
 the use of the stick was perfected, were worked out by the 
 monkey for himself. The same animal's use of the stick, 
 and afterwards the iron rod, in the pipe, is another example 
 of a very accurate adjustment of means to ends, to the 
 latter of which it is difficult to think that there could have 
 been any close parallel in his previous experience. One 
 must rather imagine his general knowledge of objects 
 reacting on his immediate perception and desire, and 
 together engendering an essentially novel kind of act.' 
 
 In the case of the little monkey, the adjustment of the 
 footstool, and the removal of obstacles from his chain, 
 seem again to rest rather on a kind of common sense than 
 on any specific experience, and to imply a tolerably 
 accurate judgment of the spatial relations of the objects 
 concerned. The furtiveness which I have discussed above 
 suggests similarly a certain power of combining inferences 
 as to how I should act, and how he could act, and how the 
 potato might be the result. 
 
 ' Cf. Kinnaman. As his experiments proceeded " it appears that there 
 was improvement in dealing with fastenings in general. All locks towards 
 the last were attacked with definiteness, and as if the animals had a dim 
 realisation that they were the proper objects for attack, a thing which was 
 not true at first {Amer. Journ. Psych., XIII. 122). Cf. his account, too 
 long to quote, of the plan by which a monkey obtained a piece of apple in 
 a difficult position {op. at., p. 208). 
 
296 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 Does a similar power of selecting and combining 
 results of experience under the stimulus of desire exist 
 among other mammals, or is it confined to monkeys? 
 Systematic observation and experiment, of which in com- 
 parative psychology there is a plentiful lack,' does not 
 enable us to answer this question decisively. In my own 
 experiments, the difference between monkeys and other 
 animals appeared strongly marked. But I was experiment- 
 ing in a field much more suited to the ways of a monkey 
 than to those of other animals. Suppose one were to take 
 a dog, for example, on his own ground ; in a hunting 
 problem, for instance. Is it not possible that he would 
 show an equal power of applying the results of experience 
 in a novel manner ? If we are to trust to ordinary 
 observation, and "anecdotal evidence," the answer is 
 undoubtedly in the affirmative. The question for 
 psychology is as to the value of such evidence. Much 
 of it, everybody knows, is consciously or unconsciously 
 invented or exaggerated. And even where the facts are 
 faithfully reported, we can never be sure that we know all 
 the circumstances. What appears when complete to be an 
 act of great sagacity, may, when its genesis is carefully 
 traced, reveal itself as the outcome of accident, or perhaps 
 of training.^ 
 
 1 Notwithstanding the body of laboratory experiments which has grown 
 up since this was written. Such experiments give very little scope for 
 anything like originality on the part of an animal. Till this defect is 
 overcome anecdotal evidence cannot be wholly ruled out of our subject. 
 
 ^ See, for example, the delightful and instructive story of Mr. Lloyd 
 Morgan's fox-terrier Tony, and the crooked stick, with the passing 
 remarks thereon of the countryman who had watched the proceedings for 
 two minutes. It is superfluous to add that a trained animal may exhibit 
 apparently marvellous intelligence, with a very moderate amount of the 
 real article. There was formerly an elephant at Belle Vue which would 
 take a penny from a bystander, put it into the slot of an automatic 
 machine, and get a biscuit from the other end of the machine. If a 
 halfpenny were offered instead of a penny, the elephant would fling it 
 back angrily. " Marvellous intelligence ! " is the enthusiast's comment. 
 " Rather too tall a story," is the sceptic's. The simple truth is, that every 
 stage in the performance was a matter of careful training. The elephant, 
 as the keeper explained to me, was taught the use of the machine by 
 having its trunk guided ; and, having learnt this, was taught, by between 
 two and three months' labour, to distinguish between the penny which 
 would and the halfpenny which would not set it working. A modicum of 
 intelligence remains when the explanation is given in full, but nothing 
 beyond the ordinary performance of an elephant. 
 
XII ARTICULATE IDEAS 
 
 297 
 
 On the other hand, comparative psychology cannot 
 aiFord altogether to neglect the casual observation. It 
 must be borne in mind that the little combinations of 
 experience which are in question, are, to the animal, if 
 they exist at all, what a new invention is to the human 
 being. When sufficiently clear and pronounced to strike 
 the observer, they would naturally be rarities, occurring 
 only now and then under favourable conditions, internal 
 and external. Such conditions are likely to occur only 
 when the animal is at work on its own ground. They 
 are less probable when we set the animal to work at a task 
 of our choosing. Lastly, it must be added that the body 
 of evidence of this kind is too considerable to be 
 altogether ignored. There appear to be in the ordinary 
 works on natural history and animal psychology, a great 
 number of instances of " animal sagacity " which are 
 impossible if we suppose the learning of animals limited 
 to the formation of habits or associations, but are readily 
 intelligible if we grant them the power of forming practical 
 ideas on the basis of experience, and of appropriately 
 selecting and combining such ideas to meet the pressure 
 of practical needs in the circumstances of the moment. 
 
 I will not go through the mass of this evidence, but 
 may take one or two cases as typical. 1 have referred 
 above to stories such as those given in General Hutchin- 
 son's book Dog Breaking^ of dogs running round 
 game when they found that the game, instead of rising, 
 ran before them. Clearly, this is a violation of habit, and 
 is unintelligible if we suppose the dog to act without the 
 purpose of making the birds rise. On the other hand, no 
 abstract idea : no general plan : no universal conception 
 is required. Grant that the dog wants to get these birds 
 up, and that past experience will enable him to form a 
 concrete judgment as to how they will act, and we have 
 all the conditions that we need. What is postulated is, 
 concrete experience, present purpose, and the interaction 
 of the results of experience with present perception to 
 form a combination or adaptation of actions suitable to 
 the needs of the moment. 
 
 ' See p. 264. 
 
298 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 To recognise what I have called the practical judgment 
 as something not identical with the association of ideas, 
 but as intermediate between habituation on the one side, 
 and general reasoning on the other, is, as it seems to me, 
 to find the key not only to the ordinary behaviour of the 
 higher animals, which we witness from day to day, but 
 also to those little acts of invention and ingenuity which 
 occasional observers recount. The observer who is not a 
 psychologist is apt to translate the animal's action into 
 abstract terms, as if it were the animal who made the 
 abstraction, and not the observer. The psychologist, 
 whose duty it is to prune the exuberance of imagination, 
 resolves the proceeding into an instance of association, 
 where it may be that association, if the term is to remain 
 distinct from what I have called the Practical Judgment, 
 cannot be made to cover all the facts. Thus Mr. Lloyd 
 Morgan writes as follows : — 
 
 " A well-known writer, Dr. Andrew Wilson, describes the case 
 of a dog which used to hunt a rabbit nearly every morning down 
 a curved shrubbery, and each time ran it into a, drain at the end. 
 ' The dog then appears to have come to the conclusion ' — I quote 
 Dr. Wilson's words — ' that the chord of a circle is shorter than 
 its arc, for he raised the rabbit again, and, instead of following him 
 through the shrubbery as usual, he took the short cut to the drain, 
 and was ready and in waiting on the rabbit when he arrived, and 
 caught him.' It is here assumed that the dog perceived the 
 relation between a chord and its arc. I do not myself believe that 
 he did ; — but that is not the question ; it is merely an ex- 
 pression of individual opinion. The question is : — Can we or can 
 we not explain the dog's action as the outcome of sense-experience, 
 as indicative of intelligence profiting by association ? I do not see 
 how this can be denied. The terrier used to start the rabbit 
 nearly every morning, and each time saw it escape into the old 
 drain. There were thus ample opportunities for establishing an 
 association between rabbit and drain. That the sight of the 
 rabbit should suggest the drain into which it daily escaped, and 
 that when the idea was suggested, the dog should run there 
 directly, is a sequence not impossible, one would think, to sense- 
 experience." 
 
 ' Comparative Psychology, pp. 301, 302. It should be said that Mr. 
 Lloyd Morgan has in his latest work, Animal Behaviour, practically 
 given up the use of the term Association from a sense, as I gather, of its 
 ambiguity. 
 
XII ARTICULATE IDEAS 
 
 299 
 
 I do not, any more than Mr. Lloyd Morgan, suppose a 
 dog to know that a chord is shorter than its arc, but 
 neither do I think an association of the idea of the drain 
 with that of the rabbit adequate or even relevant to the 
 case. Why should an " idea of the drain " cause the dog 
 to run to it .'' The dog does not want to catch a drain, 
 but a rabbit. What is needed is the idea of the "rabbit at 
 the drain," and that, moreover, as an event that will shortly 
 take place. In fact, as we analyse the idea, it turns into 
 the judgment, " The rabbit will run to the drain " as it 
 did yesterday, and then it becomes an intelligible basis for 
 the dog's action in taking the nearest course. In any case, 
 whether we call it association or judgment, we have to 
 admit that the dog acted, not as he acted before, but with 
 a difference, and this difference is explained if we conceive 
 him as applying the results won from previous experience 
 to present circumstances in subservience to his desire. I 
 do not suppose that the little monkey Jimmy is aware that 
 a straight line is the shortest between any two points. 
 What I imagine is, that he found that if he had something 
 to stand on at a particular point, he could reach the 
 potato ; and he therefore brought things to stand on at 
 that point.^ 
 
 I will add one more dog story, which seems to me to 
 indicate the intelligent use of experience as distinguished 
 from mere association, on the authority of Mr. Lloyd 
 Morgan himself. 
 
 1 Many stories are told by animal psychologists, and referred to 
 association, when the whole point of the story is that the ordinary 
 associations of the act are not present, that is to say, the act is performed 
 under new circumstances, or in a new form, where everything but that 
 which is essential to the purpose is altered. Thus Wundt, who refers 
 everything to association, tells a story of his poodle, which frequently 
 crossed a river with his master, and if left behind, was compelled to swim. 
 The poodle much preferred going dryshod, and on one occasion, after 
 running up and down the bank " whining dismally," he suddenly saw a 
 strange boat pushing off to cross, jumped in, and crossed without wetting 
 himself. In joining the strangers, the dog was of course violating his 
 habits, and if we say that he had an association between boats putting off, 
 and crossing the river, we tend to overlook the central fact, that it is not 
 the idea of crossing the river that he needs, but the idea of getting into 
 the boat. This idea is associated with the presence of his master or his 
 friends, and the event shows that instead of being at the mercy of his 
 associations, he picks out what is essential, and drops the rest. 
 
300 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 "When I was at the Diocesan College near Capetown, a 
 retriever, Scamp, used to come and sit with the lecturers at 
 supper. He despised bread, but used to get an occasional bone, 
 which he was not, however, allowed to eat in the hall. He took 
 it to the door and stood there till it was opened for him. On 
 one occasion he heard outside the excited barking of the other 
 dogs. He ran round the hall, picked up a piece of bread which 
 one of the boys had dropped, and stood with it in his mouth at 
 the door. When it was opened, he dropped the bread and raced 
 ofF into the darkness to join the other dogs."^ 
 
 The associationist's explanation of this piece of craft 
 must evidently be cumbrous. He must plead that the dog 
 had got accustomed to connect being let out with having 
 something in his mouth, and that now, wanting to be let 
 out, the familiar associate turned up. But in ordinary- 
 circumstances, the dog had a bone, and not bread ; he 
 wanted to eat, and not to get out ; he did not drop his 
 food ; and so forth. In short, the circumstances are as 
 different as possible, except in regard to the particular 
 relation between taking food in his mouth and getting out, 
 which happens to serve the dog's purpose. The ordinary 
 associations were not present. But out of past experience, 
 the animal picks a way of satisfying its desires. The 
 practical judgment is not independent of associations, for 
 association supplies the whole of its material. But out of 
 that material, it selects what it wants, and shapes it as 
 required. 
 
 As more observers and experimentalists enter the field, 
 it should be possible to cover the ground now left to 
 casual observation in a more systematic manner. In the 
 meantime, if by a self-denying ordinance we restrict our- 
 selves entirely to laboratory experiments and to the 
 comparatively few observations which have been made 
 consecutively, like those of Dr. Wesley Mills, we shall 
 have to draw a marked line between the apes and the 
 lower mammals,^ allowing to the former a power of 
 combining the results of experience which is not provable 
 for the latter. If, however, taking the whole evidence 
 
 ' Lloyd Morgan, Comparative Psychology, p. 95. 
 
 ^ Though even here we should not forget Mr. Cole's raccoons. 
 
XII ARTICULATE IDEAS 
 
 301 
 
 now available, we ask what Is the conclusion pointed 
 to with the greatest probability, it is, that on their own 
 lines, and in their own way, some at least of the more 
 intelligent mammals have powers equivalent to those of 
 the ape. 
 
 Intelligence, we shall recognise, develops in different 
 forms, and in divers directions. It originates within the 
 sphere of instinct, and in its earlier stages Is shaped by 
 the Instinct which it subserves and expands. We must not 
 expect to find dog Intelligence to be quite the same thing 
 as cat Intelligence or ape intelligence. It is not only a 
 question of difference in degree, but also, in a sense, of 
 difference in quality, arising from difference In origin. 
 Among men, we know that a, who is clever at languages. 
 Is incredibly stupid at mathematics, while with b. It Is just 
 the opposite. So, a dog may show not merely a highly 
 developed hunting instinct, but real cleverness In the 
 adaptation of past experiences, when It Is a question of 
 catching a hare, but he may be also an Intolerable dullard 
 about opening a box.^ 
 
 ^ We must guard against the assumption that every novel adaptation 
 to special circumstances implies a knowledge of means and ends. What 
 looks ingenious and original may involve only a slight variation of 
 pre-existing impulse in response to a unique stimulus. E.g., Dahl ob- 
 served a spider, which habitually cut the thread holding its fly when 
 carrying the fly off to the hole, fighting with another spider over a 
 prey which was claimed by both. Both spiders were fastened by threads 
 to their own point of support, and the first spider won the victory by 
 severing the thread of the other. If this was not merely a happy blunder, 
 we may regard it as a modified application of a habitual impulse. The 
 rival spider's thread occupied the place ordinarily taken by the meshes 
 entangling the fly, and being so far similar, awakes the cutting impulse. 
 
 Perhaps a similar explanation may be applied to the action of a 
 caterpillar which tried to mount three different sides of a pit in succes- 
 sion (Weir, Dawn of Reason, p. 206). Here, and in a somewhat similar 
 application of the method of exhaustions by a snail (Romanes, p. 26), we 
 shall probably find the key in the habitual moving of the head for pur- 
 poses of exploration. The animal is accustomed to try different directions 
 in succession and adapts the habit very neatly to its special difficulty. 
 
 In some cases selective modification may be at work. Thus an octopus, 
 having been stung by the anemones with which hermit-crabs arm 
 their shells (with an eye to this very result) will cease to seize the shells 
 but will feel inside them instead, and draw the victim out with its 
 tentacles. The same impulse is at work, and its first line of discharge 
 being blocked, it finds another. But it is, of course, possible that the 
 action belongs to the higher type. 
 
 The beetle seen by Mr. Lloyd Morgan (^Animal Life and Intelligence, 
 
302 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 Summary and Conclusion 
 
 12. The question with which we set out at Chapter VII. 
 was, whether the second grade of intelligence was 
 realised in the animal world. That grade of intelligence we 
 called the grade of Concrete Experience and the Practical 
 Judgment. It was marked by the appearance *of several 
 functions in close interconnection. The primary function 
 is that of concrete experience itself ; i.e., the power of per- 
 ceiving surrounding objects or passing events as wholes of 
 distinguishable parts. Where such an experience exists, 
 and is " reproducible " in the form of ideas guiding action, 
 we have all the characteristics of the second stage. We 
 have memory, in the form of the idea t)f a past event ; 
 anticipation, in the form of an idea of something about 
 to come attached to present circumstances through the 
 relation suggested from the past. Anticipation, with the 
 impulse to avoid or attain, is again Desire. "Where there 
 is desire, i.e., the idea of the end, there may also be an 
 idea of the means, and choice of means with a view to the 
 end. Such a choice from the material presented by re- 
 produced experience, is the Practical Judgment. Lastly, 
 out of the combined results of perceptions and the concrete 
 ideas reproduced in connection with them, is built up the 
 knowledge of individuals, localities, and the whole concrete 
 surroundings of the organism : surroundings including a 
 multitude of related facts, any one of which relations is at 
 the disposal of the practical judgment to serve its ends. 
 
 p. 368), which could not lift its ball out of a hole, and butted down the 
 side so that he could roll it up, was perhaps less intelligent than it looked. 
 To us it was converting a perpendicular wall into an inclined plane. To 
 its own consciousness perhaps it was merely butting away an obstacle. 
 
 Lastly, one impulse impinging on another may result in a happy com- 
 promise by which both are satisfied — in the manner discussed in relation 
 to instinctive adjustments (above, Ch. VI). 
 
 It remains that in many of these cases, we must end for the present 
 with a confession of ignorance. We cannot understand them until more 
 is known of the whole life and character of the animals concerned. What 
 is important for the present is that we should not impute a knowledge of 
 the relation of means and ends unless we see action resulting from an 
 experience of that relation, and then only under the conditions and with 
 the limitations that have been discussed in the last two chapters. 
 
XII ARTICULATE IDEAS 
 
 303 
 
 In a word, concrete objects are known in their relations, 
 and the knowledge is applied in action. 
 
 These functions being thus closely interconnected, the 
 possession of any one makes the possession of others a 
 matter of some probability. And if there is independent 
 evidence, of some probability, for the possession of each 
 function by the higher mammals, the probabilities stand to 
 strengthen one another. Now, the only evidence to be 
 found for the performance of these or any other functions 
 by animal intelligence, is evidence derived from animal 
 behaviour. Having this in view, we laid down certain points 
 of behaviour by which the practical judgment might be dis- 
 tinguished from the lower stage of intelligence in which 
 action passes out of the control of instinct to come under 
 that of habit. These points were as follows : — 
 
 (i). The single Instance. 
 
 Habit except in the direct modification of an impulse 
 is built up by a large number of repetitions. One clear 
 perception of a relation should have a permanent effect. 
 
 On this head, we found abundant evidence that the 
 higher animals frequently learn by a single instance, and 
 normally by what I have called a critical instance, in which 
 their attention seems to be for the first time definitely 
 directed to the facts. 
 
 (2). The Perception of objects in their relations. 
 
 The relations given in concrete experience and guiding 
 subsequent actions may be relations between any objects of 
 perception — and are not (as in the case of Assimilation) 
 confined to those between sensation and the motor excite- 
 ments immediately attendant upon them. 
 
 The simplest evidence of the appreciation of such 
 relations is Learning by Perception of Results. A habit 
 can only be acquired by previous action. The practical 
 judgment can be formed on the basis of a perception that 
 the change a leads to the desired result b. 
 
 Of the power of animals to learn in this way, probable 
 though not conclusive evidence has been given. In many 
 cases in which accidental success seems improbable, animals 
 repeated what they had seen done, and in some instances, 
 actions were so co-ordinated as to bring about the physical 
 
304 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 or external change a, which the animal had observed to 
 lead to the end e. This implies a function coinciding with 
 that of a practical idea a, the essential features of which 
 would be, on the one hand, its power to direct the minor 
 adjustments of action towards the production of a physical 
 event, and on the other, of being correlated with and 
 subordinate to another idea. 
 
 Further evidence tending in the same direction is to be 
 found : 
 
 a. In the appreciation of that general similarity of rela- 
 tions in which objects of a class resemble one another. We 
 saw reason to think that in inferring from one person, 
 animal, or complex inanimate object to another of the same 
 class, an animal shows itself to be guided by similarity of 
 this kind. 
 
 b. In the absence of a uniform reaction to a known 
 object, and the choice on the contrary of a reaction deter- 
 mined by the relation in which the object may stand to the 
 thing desired. On this head, we brought evidence to show 
 that an animal's knowledge of locality could not be resolved 
 into a series of motor reactions to the things which sur- 
 round it, but that its movements may be guided by Desire 
 to find what is out of the range of perception. 
 
 (3). Application of Experience. 
 
 The results of experience are applied in action in a 
 manner not predetermined by the experience itself. 
 
 Such application appears in an elementary form even in 
 " perceptual learning," where what is first a passive obser- 
 vation is utilised as a guide to action. A much higher 
 case, in which the contrast with habit and association is 
 decisive, is that of " spontaneous application," in which an 
 inference is drawn from experience, and an act not done or 
 seen before is performed to meet the case. 
 
 Of such use of experience there seems to be sufficient 
 evidence in the behaviour of apes.^ Among lower animals, 
 the evidence at present is sporadic and " anecdotal." 
 
 ' I would refer to the action of the Rhesus in loosening the string 
 which held the hook, in its attempts at " theft," and as a probable case 
 in the use of the footstool. The use by both chimpanzee and Rhesus 
 of one stick to reach another seems a slightly more complex case of 
 " application." 
 
XII ARTICULATE IDEAS 305 
 
 With the higher forms of application, we must class 
 " reflective imitation," in which the act of another, which 
 produced no direct result to the observing animal, is by it 
 copied and applied to its own ends. Of this there is also 
 sufficient evidence among monkeys, and some evidence, 
 though less copious, among other animals. 
 
 Lastly, greater freedom in the application of the results 
 of experience to one another, combined with more nicety 
 of perception and clearness of reproduction, yield results of 
 which we have found experimental evidence in the be- 
 haviour of monkeys. Such are the relatively articulate Ideas, 
 involving a relatively accurate and detailed appreciation of 
 the relations of objects (as in the use of the stick, the stool, 
 the removal of obstacles from the chain, the insertion of a 
 stick into a tube). Such are again the intelligent combin- 
 ation of distinct methods of effecting a purpose, seen, for 
 example, in the efForts of the chimpanzee to swing a banana 
 out of its box, and then swish it in by lateral movements 
 of the rope. The same thing appears in many details of its 
 use of the stick. To the same mental factors we may 
 refer such analogical extension of experience as the use by 
 the Rhesus of a rope or a sheet instead of the stick which 
 it had learnt to handle.^ 
 
 It thus appears that so far as experimental evidence is 
 concerned, both the Application of experience in its higher 
 forms, and the power of forming and combining ideas of a 
 fairly articulate type appear in the behaviour of apes, but 
 not of lower animals ; but the tendency of a mass of anec- 
 dotal evidence would suggest that in a different sphere 
 corresponding powers might be found among the more 
 intelligent mammals below the primates. 
 
 Putting all the evidence under these heads together, I 
 think it may be held that the cluster of functions here 
 grouped together under the head of the Practical Judg- 
 ment, are to be found in the animal world below man. 
 That is to say, that animal intelligence at its highest point 
 
 ' Mr. Shepherd, summing up on his Rhesus monkey, writes : " Of the 
 higher powers of the mind the monkey has only rudiments. He has a 
 something which corresponds in function to ideas of a low order and 
 which serves practical purposes. This something we call, with Hobhouse, 
 practical ideas." Op. cit. p. 60. 
 
 X 
 
3o6 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap, xii 
 
 of development effects a correlation between related 
 elements of experience and action. As applied to the apes, 
 this conclusion appears very probable indeed ; and as 
 applied to some other mammals, it is, I think, a better 
 provisional hypothesis than any other that I know. As a 
 provisional hypothesis, its truth will be assumed in the 
 rest of this work.^ 
 
 ' The considerable body of investigation undertaken in America since 
 the above was vifritten by such observers as Yerkes, Watson, Haggerty, 
 Berry, Cole, and many others, has yielded very diverse results in different 
 cases, but as a whole has tended to confirm the hypothesis here put for- 
 ward, with the limitation that intelligence on the higher level is the excep- 
 tion, so that only the most alert individuals will give clear signs of it, and 
 that only under favourable circumstances. With the questions raised by 
 accounts of the Elberfeld horses I deal in the Appendix. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 INTELLIGENCE AND THE SOCIAL INSTINCTS 
 
 I. We have already seen that instinct and intelligence, 
 though opposed in idea, are so far from being incompatible 
 in fact, that it is within the sphere of instinct that intelli- 
 gence first arises. The first function of intelligence is to 
 define the proximate ends of instinct, and thereby to render 
 experience available in the choice or revision of means. 
 Hence, the higher the intelligence, the greater the 
 complexity of which instincts are capable, and the more 
 readily are they adaptable to meet a novel situation, and 
 the individuality of changing circumstances. We have, 
 unfortunately, no means of precisely measuring the com- 
 plexity of which pure instinct is capable. But about the 
 higher instincts, two things are noteworthy. 
 
 (i) It is in those Orders or Classes where we find most 
 evidence of intelligence, that instincts chiefly arise which 
 are adaptable to very complex conditions. It is here, for 
 example, that we find attention to the young, the rudiments 
 of social life, and of mutual help ; the provision of a 
 temporary or permanent home. 
 
 (2) We have direct evidence that operations of which 
 the basis is instinctive are modified in detail according to 
 experience of results. It is to be inferred that instinct, at 
 least among the higher animals, is not wholly blind. 
 There must be some consciousness of the purpose, where, 
 as the result of experience, means are taken to avoid its 
 frustration. Thus the foundation of mutual help is no 
 doubt instinctive. The cry of the young excites the 
 mother to come to it, or to hunt for food for it, as the 
 
 3°7 X 2 
 
3o8 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 case may be. The mother cat is moved to lick and clean 
 her kittens as unthinkingly as they are moved to suck her. 
 When they pair, birds doubtless feel an impulse to build, 
 which the sudden gift of language would no more enable 
 them to explain than it would help to teach them the art 
 of nest-building. Nest-making, complex as it is, is mainly 
 the result of instinct.^ Yet in these matters experience 
 also plays a part. Whether it is experience of the higher 
 or lower grade is difficult to determine. But when we find 
 that birds which have built their nests on the ground learn 
 on the introduction of cats into their island to move house 
 to the more salubrious quarters of the tree tops, we must 
 recognise that in animal behaviour there are well-developed 
 schemes of action in which intelligence has its share. 
 They are frequently modified by experience, and suitably 
 adapted to peculiar or to changed circumstances. They 
 are not instincts of the complex-mechanical type. Though 
 certainly not due to intelligence alone, they are not executed 
 altogether without intelligence. The adaptability of be- 
 haviour in the main based on heredity is well illustrated 
 in the case of nest-building. The oriole, according to Dr. 
 A. R. Wallace,^ endeavours ordinarily to conceal its nest 
 from snakes and hawks, but in villages where it does not 
 fear these enemies, it builds openly. The orchard oriole 
 builds a shallow nest upon the stiffer branches, but upon 
 the slender twigs of the weeping willow builds deep, so 
 that the young may not be thrown out by the swaying of 
 the nest. The house sparrow, which makes a domed nest 
 in a tree, is content with loose building in a hole in thatch. 
 Schneider' states on the authority of Brehm that a tame 
 Cardinal finch which was bringing up a Cowbird, brought 
 it a cricket to eat. The nestling finding the insect too big, 
 the nurse tore and chewed the prey, and gave the softened 
 pieces to its charge. Many habits, which seem too complex 
 to be wholly due to intelligence, are nevertheless gradually 
 learnt. Thus, though the basis of nest-building is indubit- 
 
 ^ Dr. A. R. Wallace maintained the contrary view {Natural Selection, 
 p. lo et seq.), but the evidence given by Mr. Lloyd Morgan {Habit and 
 Instinct, p. 232 et seq.) appears conclusive. 
 
 ^ Natural Selection, pp. 114, 115. Cf. Romanes, M.E.A., p. 210. 
 
 3 P. 374 ; Brehm, IV. p. 373. 
 
XIII SOCIAL INSTINCTS 
 
 309 
 
 ably hereditary, perfection in the art is acquiredby practice. 
 One might, as Schneider says,^ attribute the opening of fir 
 cones by the woodpecker to get at the seeds inside, to an 
 inherited method of reaction to a certain perception ; but, 
 in point of fact, it appears that the old birds bring the 
 young, first the seed itself, then partly opened cones, and 
 then the complete cones. Thus the method of preparing 
 the family dinner is at least as much a tradition as an 
 instinct. 
 
 Such instances suggest that in the higher instincts, while 
 the ground plan is no doubt determined by heredity, many 
 of ^ts points are grasped by intelligence. Instinct prompts 
 the building of the nest, but intelligence notices a casual 
 defect, and makes it good. There is hereditary impulse to 
 feed, clean, and protect the young, but there is a sufficiently 
 clear understanding of what the young wants at any given 
 moment — sufficiently clear to enable a special need to be 
 met by methods not provided for by heredity. Thus, at 
 this stage, pure instinct tends to disappear, or, more strictly, 
 to become suff^used with intelligence. Intelligence grows 
 in power of grasping the purposes which instinct sets before 
 the individual, and in carrying them into effect by means 
 suggested by experience or the perception of special 
 circumstances. 
 
 The use of " sentinels," which is widely diffused among 
 birds and mammals, is another practice which, though 
 perhaps more uniform in its working, is very difficult to 
 understand, without allowing a measure of intelligence 
 to eke out habit and instinct. Mr. Cornish (pp. 48, 49) 
 quotes from Mr. St. John a vivid description of the manner 
 in which a flock of wild geese coming to a field of newly 
 sown grain " make numerous circling flights " before 
 alighting, " and the least suspicious object prevents them 
 from pitching." If they do alight they remain motion- 
 less a minute or two with head erect reconnoitring. 
 They then leave a sentry who " either stands on some 
 elevated part of the field, or walks slowly with the 
 rest — never, however, venturing to pick up a single grain 
 
 ' Wallace, loc. cit., Lloyd Morgan, Habit and Instinct, pp. 234 ff. ; 
 Romanes, M.E.A. pp. 209-212. ^ P. 298. 
 
3IO MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 of corn, his whole energies being employed in watching." 
 Mr. St. John says : " When the sentry thinks that he has 
 performed a fair share of duty, he gives the nearest 
 bird to him a sharp peck. T have seen him some- 
 times pull out a bunch of feathers if the first hint is not 
 immediately attended to, and at the same time uttering 
 a querulous kind of cry." Mr. St. John was constantly 
 baulked by sentinel geese, and found that whole flocks of 
 swans would have their heads in the water except one — 
 "who was relieved from time to time." Sentinels have 
 an alarm note. " Ibex, marmots, and mountain-sheep 
 whistle, prairie dogs bark, elephants trumpet, wild geese 
 and swans have a kind of bugle call, rabbits stamp on 
 the ground, sheep do the same, and wild ducks, as the 
 writer has noticed, utter a very low caution quack to 
 signal 'The enemy in sight.' " 
 
 The response to the alarm cry is no doubt an ordinary 
 case of an instinctive method of reaction perfected by ex- 
 perience, but the position and behaviour of the sentinel, 
 and in particular, the change of sentinels, are difficult to 
 explain without crediting the birds or beasts concerned with 
 some power of understanding one another and the purpose 
 they are fulfilling. Moreover, according to Brehm,^ at 
 least one case has been observed in which the sentinels were 
 set as the direct result of experience. A marabout having 
 been shot in visiting a slaughter house, the survivors there- 
 after instituted a guard. There is surely a marked contrast 
 between such a use of experience and the mere pruning of 
 impulsive tendencies by pleasure and pain. In the latter 
 case a reaction is checked or encouraged by what an animal 
 has itself felt. In the former, a special contrivance is 
 adopted to avoid a fate which it has witnessed in the case 
 of another. 
 
 2. The appearance of sympathy and attachment between 
 the higher animals may doubtless, in many cases, be ex- 
 plicable as the effect of hereditary methods of response to 
 stimulus as perfected by experience. Just as the smell may 
 direct the young to the udder, so the sight of the calf may 
 stimulate the cow to go towards it, or run after the cart 
 ■ Quoted by Schneider, p. 352 ; Brehm, VI, p. 522. 
 
XIII SOCIAL INSTINCTS 311 
 
 which is carrying it away, and the cry of the young bird 
 may stimulate the parent to go worm-hunting. But here 
 again we find a "particularity" in the behaviour of animals 
 which could not be provided for beforehand by a class- 
 response. When a monkey — and a male, moreover — 
 comes back from a general flight to rescue a young one 
 which has been cut ofFby dogs,^ the notion of an instinctive 
 adjustment, or an action acquired gradually by practice, is 
 ludicrously out of place. We are forced to speak of the 
 ape as acting with a purpose, and if we allow it purpose 
 in this case, we must grant it sympathy or fellow feel- 
 ing of some kind. It is not merely mothers that feed 
 their young, but companions or " friends " that upon 
 occasion feed others in distress.^ A cat no doubt suckles 
 its young by instinct, but it is not by instinct that when 
 her milk has run dry, she will coax her mistress to the hay- 
 loft where the kittens are, and bring them to her.^ A 
 young mammal will doubtless follow an older one more or 
 less blindly and uniformly, but what can we say of the 
 following incident described by Mr. Cornish * on the 
 authority of Lord Lovat ? 
 
 "Three stags had been moved in a young plantation. The 
 two best jumped the three ft. wire fence, but a third, a two year 
 old stag, got frightened, and refused. The two waited for him 
 for some time, while he walked and ran up and down ; at last 
 the larger of the two — a good royal — came back to the fence. 
 The little one ran towards him and the royal trotted away ; 
 but no, the little one could not make up his mind to jump. 
 Back came the royal over the fence, went close up to the little 
 fellow, and actually kissed him several times. With the glass not 
 500 yards away, we could see them rub their noses together. 
 Then the royal led down to the fence, but still the little stag 
 would not have it. At last the royal tossed his head in the air, 
 and seeming to say " Well, you are a fool," went off up the hill 
 to join his companion. When out of sight the little one took 
 courage, got over the fence in a scramble, and followed." 
 
 The ordinary reader would infer from this that the 
 
 ' See Brehm's Thierleben, I. p. i86. 
 
 2 See Darwin, Descent of Man, I. p. 77 ; and Lloyd Morgan, Animal 
 Life and Intelligence, pp. 397, 398. Cf. Romanes, p. 473. 
 ' Brehm, Thierleben, I. p. 438. 
 * Animals at Work and at Play, p. 26. 
 
312 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 older stag wanted to encourage the young one and get him 
 across the fence, and substantially, the ordinary reader is 
 right. The stag cannot analyse or describe his own 
 actions, and it would be a fallacy to impute the descrip- 
 tion to him. Nevertheless, it may be, and I think is as 
 nearly as possible the right description as given by a 
 looker on. It is of some interest in this connection to 
 contrast the abundant prima facie evidence of attachment 
 and aiFection among Birds and Mammals with the com- 
 paratively rare cases among the Lower Vertebrates. Apart 
 from one or two isolated stories of snakes, the evidence 
 for attachment to individuals among these classes is in 
 fact somewhat dim. Many that can be tamed — tortoises, 
 for example — do not appear to distinguish individuals, and 
 according to the statement already quoted from Brehm's 
 Thierkben, the crocodile does not distinguish between the 
 white man who shoots him and the black man who does 
 not.^ Yet the distinction, if difficult, is material. In care 
 for the young, reptiles and amphibia appear for the most 
 part to be on a level with the higher Fish. The majority 
 of fish pay no attention to their very immature ova, and 
 accordingly enormous numbers are spawned to main- 
 tain the equilibrium of the species.^ The most rudi- 
 mentary form of attention is shown, for example, by the 
 female Aspredo, which sticks the eggs to her, and so 
 carries them about. She hatches two thousand annually, 
 as against sixty thousand in the nearest species.^ 
 Similarly the females of Solenostomata and Doryrhamphus 
 carry their eggs in pouches. In other cases the male 
 carries the fertilised eggs in his mouth or in a pouch. 
 The dump-fish, again {Cyclopterus lumpus), carries 
 its young, which adhere to it, into places of safety, and 
 the Angel-fish (Squatina) takes them if threatened into 
 its mouth.* Without fuller information than I have 
 found, it is very difficult to judge whether there is any- 
 
 1 Brehm, VII. p. 24. 
 
 2 According to Mr. Sutherland (Vol. I. p. 27), in 75 species represent- 
 ing 8 out of the 10 orders, the yearly average is 646,000 per female. It must 
 be remembered, however, that these are unfertilised ova, and are scarcely 
 comparable to the fertilised and well-protected egg of higher vertebrates. 
 
 2 Loc. cit. p. 31. * Schneider, p. 379. 
 
XIII SOCIAL INSTINCTS 
 
 313 
 
 thing more than instinct in these actions, which, if 
 effective, must at any rate be fairly well adjusted to 
 the presence of real danger. The semi-intelligent Para- 
 dise-fish makes a rude nest of bubbles, and is said to make 
 a special provision for the weakly, yet when its young are 
 old enough to fend for themselves it frequently eats 
 them.^ The highest development of nest-building is 
 found among sticklebacks, to which we have already 
 referred,^ and we must not forget the conscientious care 
 shown by some species of sharks in fixing their eggs in a 
 safe position. Careful choice of place for oviposition is 
 indeed characteristic of this grade, and some rough 
 preparation may go along with it. Among reptiles, 
 tortoises scrape holes for their eggs, and some measure 
 of care for them is shown by crocodiles, lizards and 
 snakes. All these actions, however, along with the nicely 
 adapted oviposition of many insects, and the choice of 
 suitable spots by cephalopods, we must set down to 
 instinct. More interesting are cases of protection attri- 
 buted to parents in this grade. Thus the cayman is said 
 to defend its young,^ and the guana to defend its 
 mate.* Upon the whole, the parental behaviour in 
 these classes is no higher than we should expect from 
 the general level of their intelligence. The gregarious- 
 ness of fish and other animals in this stage would seem 
 to be purely instinctive, and the alleged instances of 
 attachment too few to lay stress upon. There is little 
 if anything of that close attachment to individuals and 
 many-sided attention to their needs that we find so 
 conspicuously among birds and mammals.* 
 
 A broad comparison of the different forms of parental 
 care, from its germ to its highest development in the 
 animal world, is given by Schneider.® From this it 
 
 1 Brehm, VIII. pp. 187, 188. 
 
 2 See Sutherland, I. p. 36, and a good description in Romanes, p. 243 
 et seq. 
 
 3 Brehm, II. p. 536. * Romanes, p. 255. 
 
 ^ The summary account of reptile intelHgence in Brehm's Thierhben 
 (VII. pp. 24, 25) states explicitly that their care for the young is not 
 to be compared with that displayed by birds and mammals. It is "meist 
 wohl nur Folge eines mit der Geschlechtsthatigkeit zusammenhangendes 
 Reizes " — a significant description, ® Op. cit. p. 372 ei seq. 
 
314 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 would appear that the operations implying attachment 
 to the young as an individual are peculiar to classes 
 of animals in which there is independent evidence of the 
 higher grade of intelligence, i.e., the higher insects, birds, 
 and mammals. In the lower grades, as among some 
 molluscs, the eggs are so far attended to as to be 
 fastened to an appropriate spot.' And among some 
 fish, there are ' cases in which this is done with a 
 certain adaptive skill and care.^ But the feeding of the 
 living young is confined to the higher classes mentioned ; 
 and in these classes, and in these exclusively, are found 
 instances of the more complicated parental care implied 
 in the training of the young, and their protection at 
 the risk of the parent. 
 
 These facts when put together appear significant. It 
 is in the classes which appear most intelligent, and there- 
 fore most capable of recognising the young, and of 
 understanding their needs, that we find the rudiments 
 of an individual attention first appearing ; and we know 
 that this individual attention, though instinctive in its 
 basis, is not wholly blind in its operation. Is it too 
 much to infer that the working of the parental instinct 
 implies a recognition of the young which is something 
 more than an automatic reaction, and a desire to satisfy 
 them which is not wholly blind .'' 
 
 3. Animal morality. 
 
 The higher animals lead a social life, not only in the 
 sense that they congregate together like swarms of 
 gnats or shoals of fish, but in the sense that they have 
 social or family relations with one another. In these 
 relations, acts of mutual help or forbearance are involved, 
 and it is out of acts of mutual help and forbearance 
 that morality as we know it among men is built up. 
 Are we then to attribute morality to animals .'' Have 
 we a right to praise or blame them, to apply to them 
 epithets carrying a moral significance ? This question, so 
 far as it is not a question of words, will be found to 
 resolve itself into the question of the degree of intelli- 
 gence which we impute to animals. Their behaviour 
 1 Op. at, p, 267. 2 E.g. sharks ; op. cit. p. 273. 
 
XIII SOCIAL INSTINCTS 
 
 315 
 
 has frequently the external character of an act of 
 sympathy, forbearance, courage, self-restraint. The 
 question whether these terms are rightly applicable 
 depends on the question, how much the animals know 
 of what they are about. If we decide to apply them, we 
 do not mean that animals act in obedience to any 
 conception of right or any principle of duty. We mean 
 in final analysis this — that the apparent end of the 
 *' social " action for the sake of which we human beings 
 give it its name and assign its character is also its real 
 end. This end of course is concrete and particular, not 
 abstract and universal. The animal shows sympathy not 
 because sympathy is a virtue, but because it sympathises. 
 On the other hand, the show of sympathy is not merely 
 an inherited or habitual method of reaction to a certain 
 kind of stimulus. It is not merely an unthinking 
 response to the cry of a hungry animal or the sight of 
 one that is in distress. It is directed to the relief of the 
 distress, and guided accordingly by what is required 
 therefor. The little monkey, famous through Darwin's 
 description, that rescued its keeper, is justly called brave, 
 for it knew the danger, and overcame its fear. Such 
 bravery requires no knowledge of general principles to 
 make it admirable. 
 
 We move in this matter between two sources of fallacy. 
 If we say that consciousness of its purpose is not necessary 
 to make an act praiseworthy, we end by making praise 
 and blame meaningless. If we praise a fly for the 
 unselfishness which it shows in providing for young which 
 it will never see, and of which it cannot be supposed to 
 have the most rudimentary idea^ we must end by 
 lauding the self-sacrifice of the microbe which ends its 
 own existence by splitting into two or four young 
 microbes. What an excess of parental devotion ! May 
 we not even, while we are about it, call it rather devotion 
 to the welfare of the species and the interests of posterity ? 
 Clearly the purpose must govern praise and blame, or the 
 attribution of any of those qualities which carry a note 
 of praise or blame. We must not go by the result which 
 ' See Weir, The Dawn of Reason, p. 104. 
 
3i6 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 the action is adapted to produce, but by the psychological 
 nature of the adaptation. 
 
 But here an opposite fallacy awaits us. If there is to 
 be consciousness of purpose, can moral purpose be some- 
 thing attributed to any animal ? Does an animal do a 
 brave or kindly act because it is brave or kindly .'' The 
 difficulty in this form arises from a misconception of the 
 purpose of an act. A kind act is one that is done for 
 the sake, say, of relieving suffering. It is not one done 
 for the sake of being kindly. That would be a quite 
 different purpose, implying a general principle of action, 
 and the act which it dictates would rather be an act of 
 duty than of kindness. A kindly act in the strictest and 
 most direct sense is one which purposes the help that it 
 gives. It may well be that even of this end the animal 
 has a much less clear conception than the man. He 
 probably cannot realise the feeling of the sufferer, but he 
 sees him in want or danger, and purposes to see him safe 
 or satisfied. There is a distinction of degree here, not of 
 kind. The distinction of kind arises, as we shall see, when 
 in the human world emotions and impulses are named, and 
 their actions and objects generalised into rules, while the 
 rules in turn are subordinated to principles. The man 
 may then act by rule or on principle, and if this is essential 
 to morality, then morality is rightly confined to man. 
 But the rules of human conduct are in turn based on 
 purposes which they do not create, but rather systematise, 
 and thus in a measure remodel. The moral judgment is a 
 reflection on the purpose, and the higher animal, if the 
 view of the preceding chapters is correct, has the purpose, 
 though it has not the judgment upon it. The lower 
 animal, on the contrary, has neither the judgment nor the 
 purpose, but merely the impulse to react which heredity 
 or experience has shaped in a fashion which simulates 
 purpose. If this is granted, it becomes a matter of words 
 where we shall draw the line of " morality." 
 
 Perhaps the strongest reason for so drawing it as to 
 include the higher animals is to be derived from the facts 
 of self-control. In lower stages, one instinctive impulse 
 may inhibit another, — fear, for example, may overcome 
 
xiii SOCIAL INSTINCTS 317 
 
 hunger, or, as in the case of Mr. Lloyd Morgan's chicks, 
 the experience of a repulsive taste may operate so as to 
 overcome subsequently the general tendency to peck. In 
 the higher stage we find action dictated by purposes. We 
 also find the natural reaction to a sensory stimulus subor- 
 dinated to some remoter end in which the animal's general 
 habits of life are concerned. That is to say, we have 
 purpose controlling impulse, and such a form of control is 
 the germ which, as purposes are widened and systematised, 
 develops into the rational self control of human morality. 
 Pathetic stories are well known of dogs impelled to bite 
 under the extreme pain of the dressing of a wound, and 
 checking the impulse, or converting it into a caress. The 
 self-restraint of a pointer is the result of severe training, 
 but we must not regard it as the work of mere blind habit 
 superseding blind impulse, for as Diezel remarks,^ the 
 same dog that will refrain from following a hare in his 
 master's presence, will eagerly chase it if unobserved. The 
 impulse is not extinct, but is controlled by knowledge of 
 results. There is no need to multiply instances, as the 
 broad fact is generally admitted, and the only question is 
 as to its proper analysis. I will not here discuss whether 
 the appearance of self-control in the observed instances is 
 itself enough to prove the higher degree of intelligence of 
 which we have been speaking. It is at least something 
 of a corroboration. 
 
 1 In Brehm's Thierleben, II. pp. 144, 145. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 THE CONCEPT 
 
 I. If the conclusions reached in the preceding chapters 
 are sound, the highest animals have as much capacity for 
 dealing with the practical exigencies of their surroundings 
 as can be attained by an intelligence limited in its scope to 
 the concrete and the practical. Intelligence as we conceive 
 it in this stage is capable of forming what we have called 
 Practical Judgments. Its Impulses are transformed into 
 Desires by consciousness of their objects, and are regu- 
 lated in action by the perceived relation of means to end. 
 Its experience is no longer of the dim, semi-conscious kind 
 which slowly remodels impulse by inhibiting one tendency 
 and augmenting another. It is an explicit experience of 
 concrete objects with their attributes, and of events in 
 their relations. There is no reason for denying it a certain 
 memory of the past, and there is strong ground for grant- 
 ing it anticipation of the future. In short, at this stage 
 intelligence grasps events in concrete series so far as they 
 are relevant to immediate practical interests. 
 
 To understand the next stage of mental evolution, we 
 must inquire in what ascertainable way such an intelligence 
 falls short of ordinary human achievement. We may 
 suitably attack this problem by inquiring first, what pre- 
 cisely the use of language adds to the practical intelligence 
 which we have described. An intelligent dog or ape can, 
 if the evidence which we have quoted is sound, use ex- 
 perience intelligently, and even plan an adjustment of 
 means to ends with a certain measure of inventiveness. 
 
 318 
 
CHAP. XIV THE CONCEPT 
 
 319 
 
 But it cannot describe what it does to us, nor, so far 
 as we know, to another individual of its own species. In 
 many respects, a child of three shows less practical 
 capacity and intelligence than a dog, but it has one great 
 advantage : that it can describe what it is doing, or what 
 it wants, and can learn to do fresh things, not only by 
 imitation, but by having them explained to it. Now, the 
 description of a concrete fact or action proceeds, as we all 
 know, by combinations of simple words each expressing a 
 general idea. The free use of language supposes a stock 
 of general ideas, and description of particular facts is a 
 means whereby those facts are brought into relation with 
 the store of ideas. It is in the existence of such a store 
 at its disposal for use in practice that human intelligence 
 is broadly distinguished from that of the highest animals. 
 
 If we grant the highest animals concrete experience, the 
 power of grasping perceived relations and applying them 
 afresh to new and different circumstances, we grant, I 
 believe, enough to explain the most intelligent action 
 which can be attributed to them on any substantial 
 authority. Caution, cunning, and sagacity of the kind of 
 which " animal stories " are so full do not as a rule imply 
 anything more or less than the " concrete experience " 
 that we have described. How much readiness may be 
 shown in the use of past experience, how much cleverness 
 and originality in the adaptation of means to ends, is a 
 question purely of degree. How much of these qualities 
 we are to grant to animals is a question of fact. The 
 evidence by which it is to be decided is at present in a 
 very unsatisfactory condition. But the same general 
 powers with which we have credited the higher animals 
 would explain alleged instances of sagacity and cunning 
 which one would certainly not rely upon to prove the 
 possession of such powers. Nor by going further in this 
 direction, and attributing to animals more of the kind of 
 intelligence in question, do we bring them sensibly nearer 
 to the distinctively human intelligence the specific character 
 of which consists, as we have hinted, in a distinct method 
 of organising or correlating its experiences. 
 
 To take an illustration. I have referred to the chim- 
 
320 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 • 
 
 panzee Consul, at Belle Vue, which made a key for itself 
 by biting a piece of wood till it would fit into the square 
 keyhole. The animal had been taught to use the key. It 
 found that some pieces of wood would act instead, and 
 then, when a piece was of the wrong shape, it bit ofF the 
 excrescence which hindered it. There is here a clear 
 appreciation based on experience of the relations of one 
 object to another, and what we have called a " spon- 
 taneous application " of this experience prompting an act 
 which is in no way imitation, but is cleverly adjusted to 
 overcoming a practical difficulty. All this falls readily 
 within the lines already laid down. But supposing that 
 we could find a monkey that had never seen a key used, 
 and supposing that the circumstances forced us to infer 
 that he had been told all about keys, and how to use 
 them, by a companion ; then we should have to revise our 
 view altogether, and admit that monkeys, like men, can 
 forms ideas which are communicable in the absence of the 
 sense impressions to which they relate. 
 
 2. If we consider how such communication is effected 
 by human language, we shall be able to measure the 
 difference. If the key were used, not by a man to confine 
 an ape, but by a white man to confine a savage, any 
 savage who had seen it work would be able to make the 
 matter sufficiently clear to his friends by the use of words 
 drawn from the common objects of their experience. If 
 keys were unknown in the tribe, the narrator would fall 
 back on simpler and more general ideas, which he would 
 combine so as to convey a description accurate enough for 
 the purpose, and the white man would soon have to fall 
 back on some more recondite device for the "benevolent" 
 control of his " contract labour." 
 
 Now much controversy may be raised on the question 
 whether animals can have " ideas." We have attributed 
 to the higher animals " practical ideas " in the sense of a 
 function which does for them that which practical ideas do 
 for human behaviour. The nature of the inner conscious- 
 ness that we impute to them cannot of course be matter of 
 direct observation, and our conception of it rests on an 
 analogy which is admittedly not perfect in all respects. 
 
XIV THE CONCEPT 
 
 321 
 
 Our present point, however, is that whatever ideas we 
 attribute to an animal, they are ideas of the concrete, the 
 particular object of desire, the relation impressed by past 
 experience. Thus, the chimpanzee may have an idea of 
 the key and the door, and the fruit that he will steal if he 
 can escape. Our difficulty in representing, or at any rate 
 in trying to set forth his presumed state of mind in words, 
 is precisely that in clothing it in words we do what he 
 cannot do. We put it into general terms — rendering the 
 content of a consciousness which is concrete and particular 
 in terms of its elements, which are general and common 
 to many experiences. If the chimpanzee could so break 
 up his perception, analysing it into elements common to 
 the experience of other monkeys which knew nothing of 
 keys, if he could re-combine the several elements as we 
 put general terms together to form the unique meaning of 
 a sentence, and if his companions could follow such a com- 
 bination — then he would be able to communicate to them 
 the precise nature of an operation which they had never 
 witnessed. He would be able to speak. 
 
 3. Language rests on the combination of general terms,^ 
 and its use therefore implies at least two things. First, 
 the general content, idea, meaning, or whatever we may 
 call it, which the term expresses, must be analysed out of 
 the perceptions of experience ; and secondly, it must be 
 capable of combination, performed apart from the compul- 
 sion of perception, with other and similar ideas. In his 
 dealings with the key we have attributed to the monkey 
 a clear consciousness of distinct elements — the key, the hole, 
 the opening of the door, and so forth. These elements and 
 their relations he recognises clearly in the particular case. 
 He has seen them, and in some form he retains the im- 
 pression. But to be able to communicate the impression, 
 he would have to do something more first. He would 
 have to be able to single out the elements and identify 
 each of them with its class. This could only be done if 
 
 ' More strictly, of terms expressing elements common to the experience 
 of speaker and listener. The same individual object may present itself 
 in many experiences and in the experience of many people. The proper 
 name which denotes it is then intelligible to them. But it is not a general 
 term since it refers to a single object, not to a character common to many. 
 
 Y 
 
322 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 some conception of the class, a conception operating 
 independently of present perception, were already formed, 
 and expressed by a class name. This brings us to the 
 first stage in the formation of language. The process 
 of naming implies, first, that the common elements in 
 different experiences are attended to. There is not very 
 much in this as it stands, because in the lowest types of 
 inference, the common element in different cases is what 
 is operative. If a child calls out " Mam-mie " at sight 
 of its mother, this is a simple reaction to a familiar 
 percept not differing in principle from other reactions, 
 such as that of running towards the mother, or smiling in 
 response to her. The action of the common character or 
 the " universal " is no peculiarity of human intelligence. 
 It begins with intelligence itself. 
 
 What is new is perhaps better seen when we turn to 
 the second element in the use of language. If language 
 consisted of baby talk — of exclamations Dad-da ! Gee-gee ! 
 Puff-puff ! at the sight of the appropriate objects — it would 
 not serve as a basis of communication. Baby talk in its 
 first stage has only an element of language, viz., the word. 
 It is a second stage, and in the case of infantile de- 
 velopment distinctly later and more difficult to com- 
 pass, when distinct words are put together, especially 
 when they are put together to express something which 
 is not present to perception. When this can be done, 
 even in the simplest way, it shows that ideas can be 
 detached from their context, and pieced together newly. 
 Even in the narration of an event, this is true of the 
 hearer, though not perhaps necessarily of the narrator. 
 When a child of two comes in and relates some little 
 event of its walk, it may be regarded as merely reviving 
 the impression. But when the child itself understands a 
 story, the higher stage is clearly reached. The different 
 words must each carry a meaning. It is the word which 
 gives rise to the idea, which must therefore be independent 
 of perception. If the monkey could communicate the 
 secret of the key, not only would it have to possess a set 
 of terms to express each point in the description, but the 
 other monkeys would have to be endowed with an intel- 
 
XIV THE CONCEPT 323 
 
 ligence in which each of these words would give rise to a 
 definite idea which they could combine as they followed 
 the story into an intelligible whole. It seems to be this use 
 of the elements of experience as ideas that can be detached^ 
 from the perceptions in which they are first given, and in 
 their detached state brought at will into any sort of com- 
 bination which is the psychological basis of language. 
 
 4. It may serve to make some of these points clearer if 
 we examine the analogies or approaches to language that 
 we find in the animal world. First of all, then, the cries 
 and other sounds made by animals under the influence of 
 various feelings and emotions are significant in two ways. 
 They express the feelings of the animal in the sense of being 
 physiological results, responses produced by or attendant 
 on those feelings. In this sense they are no more and no less 
 expressive than tears or laughter, or the arching of a cat's 
 back, or the stiffening of her hair. But they are also expres- 
 sive in a sense which brings them much closer to language. 
 They are "understood" by other members of the same or it 
 may be of other species, in the sense that they act upon other 
 individuals in a determinate manner, which we may presume 
 moreover to be the manner desired by the animal who 
 utters the sounds. Thus the love call of bird or mam- 
 mal acts as invitation to the opposite sex, the " danger- 
 cluck " of a hen calls the chicks under her wings, and the 
 angry barking of a dog frightens away an intruder. There 
 seems no reason to deny that sounds of this kind are 
 uttered not merely as the reflex effect of the emotional 
 situation, but with intention, as they certainly are uttered 
 with effect. The cries of animals form a true rudimentary 
 language, in so far that they are sounds uttered in order 
 to affect the behaviour of others, and successful in their 
 object. The limitation of this sort of language is that it 
 is concerned with immediate feeling and the appropriate 
 action, expressing the one, and inciting to the other. It 
 is in no way disengaged from the concrete experience of 
 which we have spoken. Its utterances are indeed in a 
 sense " universals." The " danger-cluck," for instance, is 
 a sound uniformly evoked by circumstances differing in- 
 ' Or, as psychologists call them, " free " ideas. 
 
 Y 2 
 
32+ MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 definitely in detail, but agreeing in that they are terrifying. 
 But they are utterances which only concern the present, 
 the objects or circumstances immediately perceived or 
 desired. 
 
 The function of the instinctive cry may be performed 
 among domestic animals by the spoken word. The dog's 
 name called out in a tone of reproof, approval, or 
 exhortation, as the case may be, excites him to appropriate 
 actions. The parrot goes a step further, and undoubtedly 
 uses words with intention. Of a learned grey parrot, it 
 is said : — 
 
 " As soon as the dinner bell rang he called the waitress louder 
 and louder until she appeared. If a knock came at the door, he 
 said, ' Come in,' but was never deceived by any one in the room. 
 If he saw preparation made for uncorking a bottle, he made the 
 noise long before the cork was out. . . . When the green parrot 
 standing near him screamed, he first tried to quiet her with a 
 reproving ' Pst ! ' but if that did not avail he called out in a loud 
 voice, ' Hush, hush, you ! ' He loved to talk to himself late in 
 the evening, and regularly closed his monologue with the words, 
 ' Good night, good night, Jacky.' " ^ 
 
 In one sense, probably the parrot does not understand 
 the meaning of what he says. He knows " good night " 
 or "come in" as sounds appropriate to certain occasions, 
 and, it may be, as producing certain effects on others. 
 But there is, I imagine, no reason to suppose that he can 
 analyse, that he knows the meanings of good and of night 
 taken severally, so that he might at need construct such a 
 phrase for himself. Without such knowledge, it seems 
 clear that the words are only a more refined and subtle 
 development due to education of the cry or scream, which 
 also is a definite sound used appropriately and with 
 effect. 
 
 Closely analogous to parrot talk is the speech of a child 
 about, and for some time after, the close of the first year. 
 Before that time, syllables really meaningless are uttered 
 often with many vain repetitions. This babblement 
 seems to represent the really instinctive element in language. 
 Darwin noted the syllable " Da" pronounced clearly but 
 
 ' Groos, Play of Animals, p. 204. 
 
XIV THE CONCEPT 325 
 
 without meaning by his child at five months.^ The same 
 child, like other children at a later date, invented 
 words to express his wants.^ Indeed, Darwin places the 
 invention of words before the imitation of words spoken 
 by others in the development of speech. I have noticed 
 that the sounds " Dad, dad, dad," " Mam, mam, mam," 
 are often repeated long before they are used with any 
 meaning, but how far this is due to the child's hearing the 
 sounds, it is impossible to say.* Preyer * gives a very clear 
 account of the linguistic powers of his child at this age. 
 
 " Of these syllables [a number of meaningless sounds already 
 used by the child], na-na regularly denotes a desire, and the arms 
 are stretched out in connection with it ; mama is referred to the 
 mother perhaps in the fifty-fourth week, on account of the 
 pleasure she shows at the utterance of these syllables, but they 
 are also repeated mechanically without any reference to her ; 
 atta is uttered now and then at going away, but at other times 
 also. His joy — e.g., at recognising his mother at a distance — the 
 child expresses by crowing sounds, which have become stronger 
 and higher than they were, but which cannot be clearly desig- 
 nated ; the nearest approach to representation of them is ahija. 
 Affirmation and negation may already be recognised by the tone 
 of voice alone. The signification of the cooing and the grunt- 
 ing sounds remains the same. The former indicates desire of 
 food ; the latter the need of relieving the bowels. As ni to 
 exercise the vocal cords, extraordinarily high tones are now pro- 
 duced, which may be regarded as signs of pleasure in his own 
 power. An imperfect language has thus already been formed 
 imperceptibly, although no single object is as yet designated by a 
 sound assigned to it alone." 
 
 The understanding of words was somewhat more 
 advanced, but Preyer notes that the word " give," for 
 example, " operates almost like a reflex stimulus, 
 'mechanically.'"^ He taught his child some little tricks 
 in response to certain questions, etc., and just like a dog, 
 whose education is imperfect, the little fellow would 
 
 ' Mind, Vol. II. p. 292. 
 
 ^ lb. p. 293. Taine {Mind, Vol. I. p. 253) also suggests that the effect 
 of example and education is to call a child's attention to the sounds it has 
 already made, i.e., so that it selects sounds appropriately. 
 
 ^ Taine {loc. cit. p. 254) notices that " papa " is used without meaning 
 at first, and is associated with the father later. 
 
 * Preyer, II. p. 114. ^ P. 120. 
 
326 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 occasionally get confused, and substitute one response for 
 another. On the whole, we may say that there is a well- 
 marked stage in a child's development, falling roughly 
 between the twelfth and eighteenth months, in which 
 it responds to certain perceptions with a word, and to 
 certain words with an act. At this stage it cannot be 
 placed above the parrot, nor on the side of understanding 
 above the dog. It is well to mark out this stage in which 
 isolated words are clearly developed from the later stage 
 in which words are put together to form language proper. 
 The use of language at the level which we have been 
 considering does not as such rise above the stage in 
 which, whether by inheritance, or as the result of 
 experience, a sound or a sign produces a certain reaction. 
 It becomes Purposive only when used with intention and 
 even this would not raise it above the level of the 
 Practical Judgment. It may be strongly questioned 
 whether there is any evidence of the communication of 
 complex facts among animals. Thus, there is a well- 
 known class of dog-stories in which, for example, a little 
 dog is mauled by an enemy, and gets his big friend to 
 come and avenge him. Mr. Lloyd Morgan ^ relates'such 
 a story of a little dog and his big friend Boxer. As the 
 story is told, it gives the impression that the little dog 
 must have given a dramatic recital of his wrongs, but Mr. 
 Lloyd Morgan thinks, I have no doubt rightly, that all 
 the little dog said was " Come ! " In other words, 
 the little dog was able to incite Boxer to follow him, and 
 then to attack the enemy. Mr. Romanes ^ directly 
 observed a similar communication between two Skye 
 terriers, and interprets it in the same way. Similarly, in 
 the numerous games of animals in which somewhat subtle 
 and complex mutual understanding is involved,' we need 
 not postulate any explicit interchange of ideas. One dog 
 will entice another to play by taking up the appropriate 
 attitude ; * one action leads to another ; the playful mood 
 
 ' Animal Life and Intelligence, p. 344. 
 ^ Animal Intelligence, p. 445. 
 
 3 See Groos, op. cit, p. 124 et seq ; also 225, 245, 253, for numerous 
 instances among birds and mammals. 
 * See, for instance, a good description in Groos, p. 124. 
 
XIV THE CONCEPT 327 
 
 is readily aroused by the appropriate stimulus, and partly 
 by instinct, partly by training, the young animals scuffle 
 and race and make pretended bites, according to the 
 rules of the game. Finally, a cat or a dog can make us 
 understand well enough within certain limits what it wants. 
 Without saying, " I want to go out," a cat will make it 
 quite clear by stages. She will attract attention by 
 mewing and rubbing against one's legs. Then, looking 
 up, one sees from her face that she wants something. As 
 soon as she sees that her master is attentive, she will stroll 
 in a delicately insinuating manner towards the door, look- 
 ing round to see if she is followed, and, if not, coming 
 back again, and going to and fro from the door to her 
 master. Finally, if she does not get her way at once, she 
 will sit before the door with a gaze half reproachful and 
 half resigned, but wholly suggestive, towards the handle. 
 And as soon as she gets the door opened, she darts out 
 without the " thank you " which a good-natured dog 
 would be sure to express. 
 
 We shall probably not be far wrong if we take this 
 proceeding as typical of animal language. The cat knows 
 in the concrete what she wants, but she has no terms 
 common to her and her master into which she can reduce 
 it, and so make it clear in its completeness at once. What 
 she can do is to impel her master to take the successive 
 steps required, one by one. Her " language " is thus an 
 adaptation or employment of concrete experience and the 
 practical judgment. It is not an analysis of the concrete 
 into its elements whereby it is brought into connection 
 with a world of ideas common to two interlocutors.' 
 
 ' It is possible that by a combination of sensori-motor suggestions a 
 specially intelligent animal might be made virtually to understand a com- 
 plex situation. Such, for example, would be the case with the dog which, 
 according to Dr. Wesley Mills (pp. cit. p. 33) would fetch at command 
 any one of six different articles. A still stronger case is that of the dog 
 which, on the authority of Mr. Bastian [The Brain as an Organ of Mind, 
 P- 315)1 would fetch home the particular cow named to it, or keep cattle in 
 an assigned part of a field. These cases seem to illustrate the beginnings 
 of a transition to a higher stage, but they are clearly developments of the 
 process already described. The order to fetch, e.g., excites a set of motor 
 impulses which the name "hat" or "stick" defines by attaching it to a 
 familiar object. 
 
 If higher developments of communication are to be found in the animal 
 
328 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 5. The same results may be put in a slightly different 
 way by saying that language among animals, so far as is 
 known, and among children at the word-reflex stage, does 
 not assert facts, but is either exclamatory or hortatory. 
 With children, the word which is at first an exclamation 
 or a call becomes converted into a word-sentence during, 
 we may perhaps say, the latter half of the second year. 
 Preyer recognised the first spoken judgment in the case of 
 his child in the twenty-third month. The judgment 
 referred to the milk which the child was drinking, and 
 consisted of the word Heiss ! That this was a judgment 
 meaning "The milk is too hot," rather than an excla- 
 mation, could of course only be determined by the 
 circumstances and manner of the child. But the circum- 
 stances are often such as to leave no doubt upon the 
 matter. Thus, I have seen a little girl come down stairs, 
 display a new dress, and say, " Nannie," by way of con- 
 veying that Nannie (nurse) had put it on. But a decided 
 advance in articulation, mental as well as verbal, is shown 
 when two or more words are for the first time put together.^ 
 Preyer^ found the first significant combination during the 
 twenty-fourth month, in the command or wish, " Haim, 
 mimi," which is nursery-German for " I would like to go 
 home and drink milk." A month later, the same child 
 
 world, it will probably be among apes. Their chatter is said to contain 
 more distinct sounds than that of any other animals, if we except the 
 artificial case of birds trained to talk ; but, apart from the question of in- 
 telligence, it may be doubted if they have sufficient nicety of perception 
 to found a language. Indeed, Mr. George Jennison writes me : " In 
 four years' work with chimpanzees we could never notice any sounds not 
 marking distinct emotions, — pleasure, pain, anger. Almost any chim- 
 panzee will respond to the ' pleasure ' cry." 
 
 As to the social Hymenoptera, Lubbock's experiments {Ants, Bees and 
 Wasps, pp. 275-8, and 311, 312) are unfavourable to communication 
 among Bees and Wasps, while with regard to Ants, they appear to in- 
 dicate the kind of communication we have described as sensori-motor 
 (see p. 164). The further experiments described (pp. 172-177) do not 
 really seem to modify this result. Bethe {Ameisen, pp. 51-54) throws 
 doubt even on Lubbock's somewhat modest inferences, and attributes 
 all the apparent communication of ants to a marvellous co-ordination of 
 smells with motor impulses. But Bethe is defending a thesis. 
 
 ' I mean, of course, words that already have a separate use. An 
 independent-minded little girl of my acquaintance used the phrase Pitda 
 (put me down) almost before any other, but this was of course a mere 
 imitation of the total sound, not a combination made by the child 
 herself. - Op. cit. p. 151. 
 
XIV THE CONCEPT 329 
 
 attained the dignity of a five-word sentence, exhibiting its 
 " first attempt to relate a personal experience — " mimi 
 atta teppa, papa oi (Milk gone [on] carpet, Papa [said] 
 Fie).^ It was in the eleventh month that this child first 
 clearly used a word {atta, which apj)ears to be the German 
 equivalent of the English nursery ta-ta) with significance. 
 It is in the twenty-fifth that it first puts as many as five 
 words together to describe a past event. The length of 
 the interval, during which the child is rapidly developing 
 in every way, may serve to indicate the difficulty and im- 
 portance of the transition from appropriate exclamation to 
 articulate assertion of fact. 
 
 Listening to a little boy in the stage to which we have 
 now traced Preyer's child, chattering happily to himself as 
 he played, I have often noticed how his talk consisted of a 
 running commentary on what he was doing. For example, 
 if he was building a station, he would be saying, " Now 
 put dat dar, man go dar, pufF puff come in dar," and so 
 on, suiting in each case the word to the act, as though he 
 were practising the art of simple description, which indeed, 
 in an unconscious way no doubt, he was doing. As this 
 process advances, the child gradually builds up a true 
 world of " detachable " ideas, detachable because they are 
 applied in all manner of combinations, and serve as a link 
 between one percept and another, and between himself and 
 his hearer. 
 
 6. When an element common to many experiences is 
 not merely recognised when it appears, but (i) is thought 
 of without being perceived, and (2) is capable of being 
 combined in thought with other elements, it becomes a 
 concept of general meaning and application. To be a 
 general concept, the element must be something for con- 
 sciousness apart from its perceptual setting, and it must be 
 applicable to a different setting. The concept grows up 
 by a movement in which synthesis and analysis interact. 
 The most important form of synthesis concerned is 
 comparison by which analysis is guided. Now, analysis 
 of a kind may be imputed to the practical judgment, in 
 which there is undoubtedly a certain selection of the 
 1 Op. cit. p. 155. 
 
330 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 related elements within the complex situation of an 
 experience. If a cat, for example, sees that the lifting of 
 a latch has to do with the opening of a door, it is clear 
 that it has singled out certain elements in the perception, 
 it has distinguished the latch from the rest of the door. 
 There is, however, no reason to think that analysis in this 
 stage goes beyond the point of distinguishing one concrete 
 object or actual event from other objects or events. The 
 handle is still an object of perception : it might theoretic- 
 ally occupy the whole of a perception. Its movement is 
 an event seen, and seen to be followed by another event, 
 the opening of the door. So far as it singles out objects 
 or events in this way, analysis seems to consist in a move- 
 ment of attention towards one percept rather than others 
 that are within the range of the organs of sense at a 
 certain time. 
 
 In the formation of general conceptions, on the other 
 hand, analysis breaks up perception in a different manner. 
 It not merely isolates one object or one series of events 
 from others, but dissects an object or event into com- 
 ponent elements. The child, for example, as it examines 
 the latch, might measure its length and breadth, or learn 
 that it was a lever moving on a fulcrum in accordance with 
 certain mechanical laws. These properties of the latch are 
 no longer concrete percepts. They are certainly elements 
 in a perception, but unlike the latch, which conceivably 
 might fill perceptual consciousness to the exclusion of 
 anything else, they cannot any one of them be given in 
 perception except as elements in or attributes of the whole 
 which they characterise. When analysis breaks up a 
 percept in this manner, it follows a new line of cleavage. 
 In the previous case it merely divided a complex set of 
 percepts into components, each of which was as good a 
 percept as the whole. Now it breaks up the percept into 
 elements which in perception are mere attributes of the 
 whole, and dependent thereon. The object is always 
 concrete. It is the attribute of the object or a relation in 
 which it stands that is general. To distinguish such an 
 aspect or relation as a quality of the concrete whole is to 
 form a concept applicable equally to other concrete 
 
XIV THE CONCEPT 
 
 331 
 
 objects. In other words, generality rests on the attributive 
 relation, the fact that concrete wholes are qualified by- 
 attributes. The concept is the thought-function which 
 has mastered this attributive relation, and therefore can 
 construct what is not perceived, nor ever has been 
 perceived, as a whole. The analytic movement which we 
 have thus traced is under another aspect also a movement 
 of synthesis. Analysis rests on comparison, which is an 
 act of synthesis, since it brings different experiences into 
 relation ; and gains in explicitness, pari passu with the 
 common character on which the comparison turns. And 
 not only does the concept rest on a synthesis, but its 
 essential function is to make a further synthesis possible. 
 It must not be regarded as a kind of mechanical abstraction 
 which takes an attribute out of its surroundings and hangs 
 it up alone in mid air. The general attribute is nothing 
 if it is not understood as qualifying objects, and in its use 
 in thought — and explicitly so in the universal judgment — 
 it must be recombined with other elements of reality. It 
 is the power of entering into diverse combinations while 
 still recognised as the same content that constitutes 
 generality. And recombination does not mean that the 
 two elements are placed side by side, but that they are 
 fused or applied to one another in a certain definite 
 manner. The new combination, in short, is in a general 
 way parallel to that from which the elements were 
 originally taken by analysis. There is thus in the free 
 usage of detached concepts a synthetic process always at 
 work articulating what has been disarticulated by analysis. 
 To make the general concept a reality, the mind must be 
 able not merely to detach fragments of its experience, but 
 to follow that articulation of reality whereby attributes 
 qualify substances, enter into relations, are resolvable in 
 turn into more elementary attributes, and are united by 
 manifold and interwoven affinities. This articulation 
 is the broad basis of the conception and the judgment, 
 and analysis and synthesis are the processes by which the 
 mind comes to understand and track it out. 
 
 When we say that analysis is guided by comparison, we 
 do not mean that there is always an explicit mental syn- 
 
332 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 thesis of two distinct cases before the common element can 
 be selected and named. Such synthesis certainly exists, 
 and is expressed in the Comparative Judgment (Jem is as 
 tall as Jack. These two ribbons do not match). But 
 explicit comparison is not essential in the lowest stages of 
 the evolution of the concept. It is enough that similarity 
 is operative. Now similarity, the presence of a common 
 element in several experiences, is also operative in the 
 stage of concrete experience. The difference is that, not 
 necessarily the similarity relation, but the common element 
 which is the basis of the similarity is in this higher stage 
 made explicit. Here, as throughout mental evolution, what 
 is before operative without being recognised is now recog- 
 nised, and is more effectively operative than before. The 
 practical experience of the lower stage is really a form of 
 argument from particulars to particulars. Based on a re- 
 semblance, the foundation of which is not clearly brought 
 before consciousness, it is loosely and unsystematically 
 applied according as the resemblance happens or does not 
 happen to strike the mind. When the point of resem- 
 blance is analysed out, and a general proposition is founded 
 thereon, we get, in substitution for this loose and hap- 
 hazard procedure, a fixed rule, stating what we can and 
 what we cannot infer from our data. As the " major 
 premiss " becomes explicit, inference becomes exact. 
 
 It will be seen that the formation of the general concept 
 implies no new "faculty." It merely brings into clear 
 consciousness the common element in diverse experiences 
 which was already at work in guiding practical inference. 
 And in so doing it relies on the analytic movements of 
 attention which were equally necessary at the earlier stage. 
 But it does imply that analysis has taken a new turn, that 
 it is applied to distinguishing the qualities or attributes of 
 things, and it does bring into consciousness a new kind 
 of relation. The characteristic affinities of things form 
 the basis of the whole world of ideas, with its generalisa- 
 tions, qualifications, definitions, and classifications. These 
 affinities in a humble sphere are operative in guiding prac- 
 tical inference. But that stage is most easily understood 
 if we conceive the mind as actively occupied with the 
 
XIV THE CONCEPT 
 
 333 
 
 concrete circumstances in which it is placed, and the series 
 of events with which it has to deal. Affinities between 
 this series and others influence the mind in its choice of 
 means to the practical end, but the affinities are operative 
 without being brought before consciousness. It is this 
 cross-relation between the different series of events, the 
 affinities and differences which unite and separate them, 
 that the general conception and the universal judgment 
 bring out. In other words, we have reached a higher 
 stage of correlation, in which a new relation is brought 
 into consciousness, and one more of the operative factors 
 no longer merely influences the mind, but is recognised 
 as an influence. We are a step further on in bringing the 
 factors of knowledge into an articulate system. 
 
 7. The general meaning — the reference to a class or to 
 Reality at large — is potential rather than explicit in the 
 Concept. It is made explicit in the Universal Judgment. 
 The function of this judgment is to bring the contents 
 of two general conceptions into relation with each other, 
 whether as substance and attribute, cause and effect, or 
 in any other way, " Animal " is a general conception. 
 "All animals possess consciousness," a Universal Judg- 
 ment, true or false. The universal relation is asserted as 
 holding good apart from any special circumstances or any 
 particular perception. Its reference is to Reality at large, 
 and it asserts that wherever we find the one term 
 there we shall find the other which is predicated of it. 
 This is often expressed by saying that it attributes one 
 thing to another " as such." In our example, the fact 
 that an organism is an animal is taken to be of itself, or 
 "as such," a sufficient ground for crediting it with con- 
 sciousness. The universal deals with general terras, and 
 attributes one to the other without taking anything else 
 into account. It thus enables us to go beyond our own 
 experience, and build up a " world of ideas." ^ 
 
 ' We are not of course to suppose the rigidly defined universal of 
 science common to all human thought. The universal begins in the form 
 of the rough and ready rule of common sense, to which common sense 
 itself tacitly allows many exceptions and limiting conditions. But from 
 the first rough rule onwards, the assumption is the same, that one general 
 term may be used as a basis for inferring another. The conditions 
 
334 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 8. It follows that the true universal is a relation which 
 is not merely actual, but necessary. At least, it is grounded 
 on necessity. "We may say that a thing is so because we see 
 it, or because it must be so. In the first case our judgment 
 is based on perception, and ought not to go beyond per- 
 ception. If we go beyond perception legitimately, it is 
 because of some connection that we have reason to suppose 
 between the terms of our judgment, some necessity which 
 brings them into relation. Hence we can always convert 
 the universal into a hypothetical judgment, and instead 
 of All A is B, All murderers are hanged, say, If a thing is 
 A, then it is b- — -if a man commits a murder, he is hanged. 
 
 This necessity is clearly recognised in human thought 
 where two or more propositions are connected by means of 
 a " then," " therefore," " because," or whatever it may 
 be. The ordinary combination of a single premiss (the 
 minor premiss of formal logic) and a conclusion is, in fact, 
 a sort of translation of the universal into the particular case. 
 The universal All sugar is sweet, is, so to say, incarnate 
 in the inference " I have put plenty of sugar into this, so 
 you will find it sweet." The Syllogism of formal logic 
 writes down the universal in its abstract dress as its " major 
 premiss," and follows it up with a minor and conclusion 
 which merely repeat it in its concrete form. It thus 
 achieves a wholly unreal form of thought, a form corre- 
 sponding to no actual process. None the less, it sets out 
 what is implied in the actual process in which conscious- 
 ness advances from a single premiss to the conclusion. 
 
 This advance, which we now see to be the application 
 of the necessity contained in the universal judgment, has 
 its verbal expression in a connecting particle. Here again 
 we find a process operative at an earlier stage becoming 
 recognised in consciousness. From the first germ of 
 intelligence onwards, the mind is of course influenced 
 
 limiting a universal truth are themselves universals. The ideal universal 
 takes all these conditions into its scope, thereby evolving from a single 
 judgment into what is really a system of judgments. Common sense is 
 apt to leave the conditions unexpressed, and scarcely distinguishes the 
 strict from the Approximate Universal — the judgment of general validity. 
 Its " General truths " rest on the same principle as the scientific Uni- 
 versal but carry out its conditions less fully. 
 
XIV THE CONCEPT 
 
 335 
 
 by the connection between one experience and another. 
 The necessity whereby a follows upon b leads it when 
 it perceives b to prepare for a. But in the stage of con- 
 crete experience, this, we may believe, is an influence which 
 operates without being formed into an object of conscious- 
 ness. In the stage now under consideration, this influence, 
 always operative, becomes a sufficiently clear content of 
 consciousness to be expressed by a word. Thus in the 
 recognition of necessary connection by the Universal Judg- 
 ment, we have once more a mental achievement which 
 consists in forming into a distinct content of conscious- 
 ness an element which at an earlier stage is operative 
 without apparently being understood by the mind on 
 which it operates. 
 
 9. A no less important aspect of the Universal Judg- 
 ment is its reference to an indefinite number of cases, or, 
 if we prefer so to put it, to reality and experience as a 
 whole. This aspect of the universal has indeed been 
 something of a stumbling block to logicians from Aristotle 
 downwards. There is something of a paradox in a form 
 of thought taken to refer to a number of cases of which 
 no one is specified, and the vast majority may be utterly 
 unknown. A sense of the paradox has led many writers 
 to refuse any meaning to the universal as " taken in exten- 
 sion."^ They have failed to allow for a certain unavoidable 
 artificiality in the distinctions of Logic which seeks to 
 appraise functions of thought that cannot wholly be 
 understood in isolation from other functions to which 
 they are related. The universal judgment is not so much 
 a reference to an indefinite number of particulars as a rule 
 of reference. As a thought-function, it needs, in this re- 
 spect, completion by the "minor premiss," or again, it 
 forms the keystone of the arch in Judgments of Com- 
 parison and Classification. But however incomplete in 
 isolation, its function in thought is {a) to sum up the 
 result of a mass of experience in the shape of that which 
 pervades the whole whether as a continuous identity or as 
 
 * This is the point common to Aristotle, Post Anal., I. I, and Mill, 
 Logic, II. ch. 3. It led Mr. Bradley {Logic, p. 228) and Hegel {IViss. 
 der Log. Part II. Werke, Bd. V. p. 146) to find a contradiction in the 
 Syllogism " taken in extension." 
 
336 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 a common character, and (b) thereby, to form a guide in 
 dealing with a further mass of experience to come. Under 
 both aspects it brings the action of the moment into 
 explicit relation not merely with the immediate circum- 
 stances or the particular end, but with that which is of 
 enduring significance in the order of the world. 
 
 Under this aspect, once again, we find the universal 
 rendering explicit influences which have already been 
 operative without being expressly formulated. In both 
 the lower stages of intelligence, the influence of often 
 repeated experience appears in ways too manifold and too 
 obvious to need mentioning in detail. Indirectly the 
 same influence may be traced even in pre-intelligent 
 organic reaction — since even if we exclude any direct 
 transmission of " acquired qualities," it is the broad 
 average result of ancestral experience that goes to deter- 
 mine the constitution of the individual, and his reflexes 
 and instincts thereby. Thus, in an indirect, cumbersome, 
 and imperfect manner, with much loss of life and 
 efficiency, the actions of animals in the lower stages 
 become shaped by the preponderant results of great 
 masses of experience, and fitted to conform roughly not 
 merely to momentary ends, but to the general plan of 
 their lives. When the results of experience can be 
 succinctly summed up and communicated, it would seem 
 that this process should become far more speedy and 
 effective. There is evidently more scope for tradition and 
 training ; less necessity for perfection of instinct ; less 
 elimination ; less waste of life ; less time and energy lost 
 in learning. One sees how it is that with the growth of 
 intelligence in human life, the ready-made perfect instinct 
 tends to disappear, while yet the power of maintaining life 
 increases. 
 
 TO. Thus the "world of ideas" or of universals, which 
 is generally, and I believe rightly, taken as the distinctive 
 property of humanity, is built up by a special application 
 of that power of correlating its experiences which is the 
 universal property of mind. But the correlation follows 
 a diff^erent line and rests on a more articulate form of 
 experience. Experiences are now correlated not merely in 
 
XIV THE CONCEPT 337 
 
 their order of time or space, and in subservience to 
 immediate practical interests, but upon the basis of their 
 affinities, and the more remote connections that follow 
 therefrom. To arrive at these affinities involves a 
 measure of analysis and comparison whereby the character 
 of an experience, or any portion of its character, is 
 detached from its setting or surroundings, and becomes 
 free to enter into new combinations, or conceptions. 
 The combinations so formed may be taken as mere 
 products of the imagination, or they may be held to 
 express general truths, or they may form rules of conduct. 
 In any case, they go to make up the world of ideas. In the 
 second case — we need not here discuss the difficult logical 
 implications of the third — they form judgments held to 
 be possibly, probably, or certainly true, and affirming 
 relations as actual, contingent, or intrinsically necessary. 
 Such judgments sum up in general terms the results of 
 experience, and apply to the future with a reference that 
 is no less general. By tracing back experiences to their 
 underlying affinities, human thought is made capable of 
 grasping what is permanent and common to masses of 
 experience, and of ordering action towards comprehensive 
 ends. It is set free from the limitation of immediate 
 surroundings and the pressure of felt wants, and there is 
 no longer any permanent limit to the scope of its refer- 
 ence, or to the field within which it is able to bring 
 the chaos of experience into harmony and co-ordination. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 THE PRODUCTS OF CONCEPTUAL THOUGHT 
 
 I. The Self. 
 
 The universal is not the only form in which experiences 
 can be massed. Its function in this respect is fulfilled, 
 and fulfilled more definitely, by the Collective Concept — 
 which unites many individuals into a whole, and less 
 obviously, but no less certainly, by the Individual concept, 
 as distinguished from the Particular. The Individual 
 person and even the Individual thing is an object not 
 confined to a single experience, but common to many, and 
 probably not even exhibiting its whole character until a 
 long series of experiences is accomplished. To have a 
 conception of one's own Self, one must be aware of a 
 certain identity running through the mass of past 
 experiences, and inferentially prolonged into the future. 
 The genesis of such a conception seems therefore to 
 depend on the capacity for organising experiences in the 
 mass on the basis of their relations and affinities, the 
 particular relation which is the basis of this conception 
 being that of permanence or persistent identity. And the 
 case of the Self is typical. Generally, the Individual and 
 the Collective Concept resemble the true Universal in 
 detachment from any single sense experience, and in that 
 they group together a mass of experiences on the basis of 
 a common element pervading them all. This element, 
 which in the true universal is a common quality or 
 character, is in the individual or collective concept rather 
 some kind of persistent identity, or causal interconnection. 
 
 338 
 
CHAP. XV CONCEPTUAL THOUGHT 
 
 339 
 
 Concepts of all these kinds, therefore, are formed by the 
 same methods of correlation applied to different material, 
 and are thus to be referred to one and the same stage 
 in the growth of mind. Viewed as a correlation of life's 
 experiences, it will appear that the conception of self 
 must always be in varying degrees incomplete. " Know 
 thyself" was a precept of the gods, a precept therefore 
 which man cannot adequately fulfil. It might be regarded 
 as fulfilled sufficiently for human purposes if we had a 
 clear grasp of the essential structure of that being that 
 unrolls itself in the personal actions and experiences, and 
 true self-interest would be to act conformably to the 
 permanent requirements of that structure.-' In actual 
 life this is not realised. Indeed, at first sight, the actual 
 man is so inconsistent in his different capacities that we 
 often speak of him as having two or more personalities — 
 and psychology gives to popular language a certain 
 sanction. In a sense, it is scientifically true that the 
 business man, who has spent the day in besting a rival, is 
 not the same person as the father who comes home to 
 romp with his children. The outward and visible sem- 
 blance is the same, but within it there are two quite 
 different masses of thought, emotion, and will, each 
 forming an interconnected system by itself, yet standing 
 in no logical or moral relation with the other. When 
 the cleavage becomes extreme, we speak of " double 
 personality," of alienation or insanity. But the germ 
 of this sort of madness is in all of us. 
 
 If we could carry psycho-physical research far enough, 
 we should presumably find an ultimate unity in which even 
 these extreme differences come together. Meanwhile it 
 remains true for practical purposes, that is to say, for the 
 scientific evaluation of self-knowledge, that the practical self, 
 the self which a man considers when he is thinking about his 
 " interest," is rather a great fragment of his being than his 
 being's whole. A business man in his office has nothing 
 to do with " sentiment," but looks at things " as a business 
 man." At home he may be entirely swayed by the 
 
 ' Cf. the famous description of true and false self love in Aristotle, 
 Ethics, IX. ch. 8. 
 
 Z 2 
 
340 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 " sentiment " that elsewhere he disparages. Between his 
 home and his business there is probably the ultimate bond 
 of connection that the one is maintained by the other, but 
 this does not mean that the principles or ideas of the one 
 in any great degree dominate the details of the other. 
 Practically a man's action in any capacity is guided mainly 
 not by what he is in other respects, but by what he is in 
 that capacity. 
 
 What is true of self-knowledge applies of course equally 
 to self-interest. The self-interest which guides a man's 
 action can only be the interest of the self as the man con- 
 ceives it at the time. A man might act in the interest of 
 his true self, if he knew his true self. But for practical 
 purposes " enlightened self-interest " ordinarily means the 
 subordination of momentary considerations to the broad 
 ends or the general plan by which a man is dominated in 
 one or other of his different capacities. It seems necessary 
 to say this much in order to avoid exaggerating the co- 
 ordination of conduct which the conception of the self may 
 be held to introduce into life. In its theoretical complete- 
 ness, enlightened self-interest would mean the subordination 
 of each action to the whole system of purposes that make 
 up the self. This would also of course involve that the 
 experiences and the impulses of the personality were brought 
 into a system. To understand how far self-knowledge 
 would take us in the intelligent co-ordination of action, we 
 may usefully throw this ideal or "limiting conception" 
 into contrast with the fragmentary co-ordinations of the 
 "practical judgment." Here there is combination of 
 means to an immediate end. There may even be the 
 preference of one " end " over another, as when a dog, 
 after wavering between the principles of obedience and the 
 impulse to hunt, comes at last reluctantly to his master's 
 call. In this case of " self-control " we see the dog's per- 
 manent habits overcoming a momentary impulse based on 
 a deep-seated instinct, and we might say without much 
 straining that the dog's " truer nature," founded on his 
 fidelity, conquers the mutinous impulse which threatens its 
 harmony. But it would be a long step from this admission 
 to the suggestion that the dog on his part has any concept 
 
XV CONCEPTUAL THOUGHT 341 
 
 of the self, any broad principles or any conception of his 
 own permanent welfare to the test of which he brings his 
 action. No doubt the broad tendencies of his nature 
 operate unconsciously within the dog as they operate for 
 the most part unconsciously within us. But we can also, 
 with varying degrees of accuracy, understand and formulate 
 them, and this there is no evidence that the dog can do. 
 Thus, so far as the conscious co-ordination of action is con- 
 cerned, the Practical Judgment, resting on concrete ex- 
 perience alone without the power of summing up masses 
 of experience into general conceptions, is limited to the 
 adjustment of means to a desired end, or the preference of 
 one end over another. The judgment of Enlightened Self- 
 Interest in its theoretical perfection would subordinate all 
 immediate and even remoter ends to the requirements of 
 the self as a whole. In actual life, it guides its action 
 rather by certain broad purposes, each of which fills a great 
 part of life, but which are not brought into such system- 
 atic harmony with one another that we can speak of the 
 whole life as forming a rational unity.^ Just as masses of 
 past experience are summed up in the form of universal 
 judgments, so the broad purposes of life, masses as we may 
 say of future experiences, are summed up in the conception 
 of the self and of the various broad ends of life that fall 
 within it ; and actual conduct is correlated with both. 
 
 2. With the conception of Self comes the conception of 
 other Selves. Indeed, as many thinkers have been fond of 
 insisting, the two conceptions are in constant interaction. 
 We form our conceptions of others from ourselves, and of 
 ourselves from others. It follows that the conception of 
 Personality in another will tend to be of the same broken 
 and partial character as the conception of Self. We know 
 one person merely as a " good fellow " at the club, another 
 purely as a professional colleague. Even our nearest and 
 dearest, whom we think we know through and through, 
 we find, tragically, to be " strangers yet." As are the 
 
 ' It is perhaps superfluous to point out the obverse truth, that the 
 cheapest way of approaching unity is to starve the self by suppressing all 
 sides of it save one, as, e.g., by consistent asceticism, or sensualism, or 
 even professionalism. 
 
342 MIND. IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 limitations of self-interest as a practical guide, so are the 
 limitations of interest In others. The unity of the species, 
 of society within the species, and of many closer organ- 
 isations, of which the family is the chief, within society 
 imply a varying measure of interest benevolent or 
 malevolent in others. Confining ourselves to benevolence 
 — a serious restriction in the world as we know it — we 
 might repeat all that we have said of the direction of con- 
 duct by and towards the interest of Self, substituting for 
 self another or others. Action may be guided by the re- 
 quirements of another personality as well as our own, and 
 is so in the case of all actions of affection, benevolence, and 
 social duty other than those which spring from the impulse 
 of the moment. The relatively permanent happiness as 
 distinguished from the temporary needs or pleasure of 
 another is the end of sympathetic or social action at this 
 stage of intelligence. 
 
 This development of "altruism" is an elaboration of 
 impulses which are already well developed among the 
 higher animals. In one sense indeed many birds and mam- 
 mals recognise the personality of others in a very thorough- 
 going manner,since they give undoubted signsof permanent 
 and deep-seated attachment to individuals. This does not 
 necessarily imply, however, that they conceive the in- 
 dividual as a personality in the sense explained above in 
 dealing with the self. It means that the sight of the 
 beloved mate or child or master rejoices them, that absence 
 of the loved one depresses them, and stimulates them to 
 find him. If we were to look for a conception of person- 
 ality as something that persists and develops, we should 
 look for it first, perhaps, in the training of the young. 
 Such training undoubtedly appears among the more intel- 
 ligent birds and mammals, but it would seem to be limited 
 to three methods. There is first, punishment, the slap 
 which a mother ape or even a cat gives to the young one 
 which transgresses. This, if not merely impulsive, is 
 sufficiently explained by the desire of the mother to check 
 the young one in doing something immediately harmful. 
 There is secondly the method of stimulating the young to 
 exercise its faculties, as by bringing it its natural prey to 
 
XV CONCEPTUAL THOUGHT 
 
 343 
 
 play with, and there is, thirdly, the method of example 
 which the young is encouraged to imitate, as seen in the 
 practice of those Divers which hold a fish before their young 
 and then dive with it.' These methods seem to follow 
 very naturally from the parental instincts as developed by 
 concrete experience. The direct delight^ in seeing the 
 young ones do things may as readily be conceived to be 
 a part of the parental instinct among animals as it certainly 
 is among men. The means used are simple adaptation to 
 immediate practical ends all working on an instinctive basis. 
 We can hardly credit the mother-cat with a conception of 
 the future career of her kitten as a famous mouser or as a 
 household pet. Nor can we legitimately impute to her 
 that vicarious self-control which would subordinate the 
 immediate gratification of the kitten to the training of its 
 character. It is to be feared that whenever the mother- 
 cat's action has the appearance of such a refinement, it is 
 rather to her own comfort than to her ideas of moral 
 training that we must look for explanation. But these 
 conceptions of permanent welfare and character are the root 
 ideas of human education, and follow naturally from the 
 conception of personality.^ 
 
 3. If the conception of personality in Self and others 
 is dependent on the power of grasping masses of ex- 
 perience in comprehensive and inter-related conceptions, it 
 seems hardly necessary to argue that the same thing is true 
 of organised political society. Human society probably 
 in all forms, and certainly in the most primitive known, 
 rests on a mass of observances based on tradition, and 
 providing rules of conduct that continually thwart heredi- 
 tary impulse or instinct. Rights and duties in relation to 
 property, to sex, to a parent, to a chief, form a system, 
 and, as social life develops, a system so complex as to be 
 difficult even for the trained reasoner to apply consistently. 
 The finer differentiation of duty in the several relations of 
 
 1 See Schneider, p. 375. ''■ lb., p. 376. 
 
 ' Whether such a conception and the type of education founded on it is 
 universal among mankind, we do not here inquire. The foundation is 
 laid in the power of forming conceptions. What is built on it may vary 
 indefinitely, and extreme cases may vary down to zero. The savage con- 
 ception of personality is no doubt extremely rude and confused. 
 
344 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 life, though inherited tendency is its foundation through- 
 out, far outruns in subtle complexity any possible achieve- 
 ment of instinct. 
 
 One hesitates to dogmatise about animal societies until 
 they have been more thoroughly studied, but what we know 
 of them goes to show that the division of labour — the 
 most notable form of social differentiation in the animal 
 world — is based, in the cases where it is most elaborate, 
 on differences of structure. This is conspicuously the 
 case with the Social Hymenoptera, where the distribution 
 of functions between fertile females, infertile females, and 
 males is the basis of the whole order. The further 
 differentiations which appear among ants as between 
 " workers " and " warriors," " mistresses " and " slaves," 
 are also directly correlated with differences of physical 
 structure. The division of labour in these cases would 
 thus seem in its main lines to follow rather than to over- 
 ride the inherited tendencies to which physical structures 
 give rise. On the other hand, the rudimentary division 
 that we find among the higher vertebrates is not sufficient 
 to justify us in speaking of a social " system " at all. 
 The habit of fixing sentinels is the typical case. Probably 
 we must ascribe this to a kind of tradition as much as to 
 heredity, the habit once formed being kept up in each 
 flock or herd from generation to generation, by the simple 
 practice of forcing the younger members as they grow up 
 to take their turn at watching while the others feed. It 
 is a special adjustment to the needs of a gregarious life, 
 part instinctive, part traditional, part, very likely, intel- 
 ligent. One such adjustment, however, does not make a 
 system with a complex ramification of duties. Lastly, the 
 submission to a chief, which we find conspicuous among 
 apes, seems to be of the same habitual character. The 
 most active and capable member of a troop tends to 
 acquire a certain primacy. Here again there seems to be 
 something of habit, and perhaps something of intelligence, 
 operating on the hereditary tendency to follow and 
 imitate. If there were evidence that the chieftainship 
 became hereditary, and that apes would tolerate and 
 grovel before a roi faineant, we should have to consider 
 
XV CONCEPTUAL THOUGHT 
 
 345 
 
 anew whether the ape should not be put on a level with 
 Homo sapiens. 
 
 Human beings, from the' lowest known levels upwards, 
 live in organised societies, resting on a complexity of 
 relations maintained from generation to generation by oral 
 or written tradition. It is this complexity of organisation 
 in which many distinct and on the surface conflicting 
 obligations can be held together, which appear to dis- 
 tinguish human society and human morality from the 
 social life and morality of animals. It would be super- 
 fluous to dwell on the way in which this complexity 
 increases in civilised and particularly in modern civilised 
 life. The relations of a man to his family, his neighbours, 
 his town, his profession, class, country, church, his own 
 moral consciousness, and his duty to humanity, involve 
 him in a network of obligations about which the surprising 
 thing is that the cases of conflicting duty are so few. 
 Among the higher animals we seem to find traces of the 
 personal, family, and social impulses which form the basis 
 of human life and society. But to work these out into an 
 elaborate system in which every instinct is pruned and 
 reshaped by a mass of social observances, customs or laws, 
 would seem impossible without the machinery of general 
 rules, definitions, and exceptions provided by conceptual 
 thought. If moral impulse exists among the higher 
 animals, morality as a rule of life comes into being only 
 with the conceptual order of thought, and hand in hand 
 with a regular political society. 
 
 4. It should be added that with the power of working 
 with detached ideas the whole world of imagination may 
 be said to come into being. There is, if not art, at least 
 the potentiality of art as soon as there is free play of ideas 
 in detachment from practical interests. So certain does 
 this seem to be, that the existence of anything resembling 
 Art among any species of animals might of itself be taken 
 as suflicient evidence of the capacity of that species for 
 conceptual thinking.-^ Science and the technical arts rest 
 
 ' The analogue of Art among the lower animals is play in which ima- 
 gination, if it can be said to exist, takes the concrete form of immediate 
 frolicsome action. 
 
346 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 on the same basis. Though science arises out of and 
 remains indirectly connected with practical interests, these 
 are of course not the interests of immediate action to 
 which the "practical judgment" is limited. It is only 
 when men get interested in needs that go beyond the 
 particular purpose in hand, and begin to generalise and 
 reflect upon them, that they evolve out of their 
 practical skill a body of technical rules that can be handed 
 on and developed. Finally, like art and science, religion 
 is a system of conceptions built up by the aid of imagina- 
 tion out of inward and outward experiences. We do not 
 here inquire into the historical origin of religion. It is 
 sufficient to note that in all its forms its practical efficacy 
 and real meaning in the life of a people rest on the 
 adequacy and faithfulness with which it clothes, in a form 
 which appeals to the feelings, the experience, particularly 
 the moral experience, of the people who profess it. 
 Religion is one form in which experience, taking the word 
 in its most comprehensive sense, is organised. All true 
 revelation is from within. The only Sinai is a fresh 
 height of man's spiritual nature, and the missionary 
 attempts to preach religion can only succeed in so far as 
 an equation, so to say, establishes itself between the 
 doctrine taught and the minds of those who learn. Thus 
 it is the perpetual tragedy of the higher religions to be 
 vulgarised as they become popular, and to be ruined by 
 success. When the apostle has converted the crowd, he 
 becomes a bishop. 
 
 In the different forms thus cursorily enumerated, — in 
 traditional morality, custom, and law, in social organisation, 
 in the technical arts, in science, in religion, and even 
 indirectly in imaginative art — human experience organises 
 itself into systems governing human conduct. Past 
 experience, including now the accumulated tradition of 
 the race, is used in an organised form in guiding conduct. 
 Action is shaped and determined by some conception of 
 the permanent good of self, the family, society, and 
 possibly the species. The same factors have been present 
 all along, even before the germ of intelligence appears. 
 For instinct is shaped under the laws of heredity by the 
 
XV CONCEPTUAL THOUGHT 
 
 347 
 
 past experience of the species, and it is so shaped as to 
 contribute indirectly to the permanent maintenance of the 
 species. But in this early stage the process of shaping is 
 extremely slow, cumbersome, and wasteful, and it is only 
 in the course of a geological period that it can bring forth 
 a more many-sided, fuller life, that is, a higher organisation. 
 For the combination of many higher qualities in one 
 individual can only be a comparatively rare occurrence, and 
 even then, the survival of that individual, and the 
 preponderance of his descendants, is exposed to all the 
 accidents of untoward outward circumstances. Hence it is 
 that orthogenic evolution — the development of higher 
 types — is of geological slowness, and is only one course out 
 of many that evolution may take. At its best, biological 
 evolution finds the right path only by being constantly 
 turned back from the wrong one. Only when experience 
 is so far systematised that the future is read in the light of 
 the past, does a race begin to move towards the fulfilment 
 of its powers with the certainty of a man who knows 
 where he wishes to arrive, and how to find his way thither. 
 
 5. Psychological Aspects of the 'Third Stage. 
 
 Psychologically, the difference between this stage and 
 the preceding is entirely a matter of improved articulation 
 and wider comprehension. It is not that new faculties 
 are introduced, but that old faculties receive a fresh de- 
 velopment. The old question, whether animals reason, is 
 a question which people will go on putting for ever until 
 they arrive at a definition of reason which will satisfy 
 everybody. How far an animal or a man must be held 
 to understand the grounds of his action before we can say 
 that he acts rationally, is in one sense a question of terms ; 
 in another, a question of degree. We might parry the 
 question whether animals reason by asking whether man 
 reasons, and there would not be wanting plausible grounds 
 for answering the latter question with a negative. What 
 man has ever fully taken into account all the premisses of 
 any practical or theoretical conclusion to which he commits 
 himself .'' Philosophy is aware that common action rests 
 upon assumptions of which it is wholly unconscious, and 
 ghe is also aware that she herself can only analyse out and 
 
348 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 justify those assumptions in an incomplete manner. A 
 chicken avoids a caterpillar because he dislikes the taste. 
 We perhaps refuse to allow that the chicken reasons be- 
 cause he does not know what it is that makes the cater- 
 pillar taste bad. After the chicken follows the chemist, 
 who finds that the caterpillar secretes a certain acid. We 
 clap our hands and applaud him as a reasoner who has ex- 
 plained everything. But will the chemist explain why a 
 given acid should have an acrid taste, or show how the 
 experience of unpleasantness should modify subsequent 
 action ? A horse learns to lift a latch. We do not think 
 he reasons. He merely has found out how it is done, and 
 does it. A man explains to a child the action of the latch, 
 and shows how by pressing it at one point you lift it out 
 of a catch at another. He, we say, reasons because he 
 analyses the process and how it is done. But a physicist 
 might point out that the man knows nothing whatever 
 about it unless he sees that the principle of the lever is 
 involved in a simple form, and a metaphysician might add 
 that the physicist cannot be said to understand the prin- 
 ciple of the lever unless he is prepared to decide whether 
 it is a principle which holds true of reality, and if so, on 
 what epistemological grounds. 
 
 If we allow reason to the human species in general, and 
 yet restrict it to that species, it must be by identifying the 
 term reason arbitrarily with a certain grade in the develop- 
 ment of analysis. It would be true to say that abstract or 
 explicitly general reasoning emerges in the level of intelli- 
 gence under consideration, but we have seen that abstract- 
 ness is only one side of generality, and that the generality 
 of human as opposed to animal reasoning is once more 
 primarily a matter of explicitness. At bottom the function 
 of mind in this as in the lower stages is to organise life by 
 the correlation of experiences. As in every stage of mental 
 growth what is new is that the work of the mind becomes 
 on the one hand more explicit or articulate, on the other, 
 • more comprehensive in scope. That these two move- 
 ments, if not at bottom identical, are closely interwoven, 
 is seen in the relations of analysis to comparison. We 
 clear up our experiences by bringing them into relation, 
 
XV CONCEPTUAL THOUGHT 349 
 
 and being so cleared up, the thought that emerges is the 
 more truly universal in its application. It is this double 
 movement, then, which forms the world of ideas by trac- 
 ing experience to the underlying affinities on which both 
 universal and individual conceptions rest. In these affini- 
 ties we arrive at the basis of the more primitive inferences 
 of the practical intelligence, and in this sense we might be 
 tempted to say that human Reason gets at the ground 
 upon which animal intelligence works without knowing it. 
 But it will be better to avoid using the term Reason to 
 characterise any one stage in distinction from others. The 
 particular organisation of experience which we are now 
 describing rests on the detached idea or the concept as 
 its unit, and, if it is to have a name, may be best qualified 
 as the stage of Conception, the Conceptual Judgment and 
 Conceptual Reasoning. 
 
 What is true of the Reason is true also of Self conscious- 
 ness. A dog or ape looks after " itself." It has a self, 
 i.e., a pervading identity and permanent character, is aware 
 at least of its present needs and seeks to satisfy them. 
 What we miss is evidence that the self is present to it as 
 a persistent identity in such a way, for example, as to shape 
 the choice of immediate ends by considerations of lifelong 
 welfare. The self of which the animal is conscious is a 
 very small fragment as compared with the self of which 
 the man is aware. The light of consciousness reaches but 
 a short way before and after in the animal, and since there 
 is nothing to show that his conception of himself acts other- 
 wise than his conception of his present end, there is no 
 point in attributing to him knowledge of self. A man, 
 on. the other hand, who, for example, rejects a desired end 
 on the ground that it is unworthy of him, shows that his 
 consciousness of self is a permanent regulative force distinct 
 from the desires or plans of action which he forms from 
 day to day. 
 
 On the same ground, Will in a special sense may be 
 said to emerge along with Conceptual Reasoning. We 
 have wedded Desire to Concrete Experience and the Prac- 
 tical Judgment on the ground that the Practical Judgment 
 knows its concrete end, and that where the end is known. 
 
35° MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 the impulse towards it is rightly characterised as Desire. 
 Facts also compel us to admit a conflict of desires in that 
 stage. What then is there in Will beyond the victory of 
 one desire over another ? The true answer to this ques- 
 tion, which is of considerable interest in view of the 
 above discussions, seems to be given by those thinkers 
 who identify the will with the total or resultant 
 influence of character as a whole, while desire rests upon 
 some single and separate impulse. The will is not to be 
 regarded as an additional impulse, or as a force existing 
 outside impulses and operating upon them. It is rather 
 the system or synthesis of impulses, the broad practical 
 bent and tendency of one's nature. Now here as else- 
 where the development as we pass from a lower to a 
 higher stage consists primarily in a growing explicitness. 
 It is quite possible that even in animal life, when there is 
 a conflict of desires, that one tends to prevail which is 
 most intimately bound up with the animal's whole mode 
 of life. And at least among the domestic animals, we see 
 symptoms of shame and remorse when under the stress of 
 momentary excitement such an impulse is violated — and 
 remorse is precisely the tingling with which the permanent 
 character, the real self, comes to life again. The new 
 development is merely that those broad tendencies of the 
 character which before operated, if at all, obscurely and 
 unconsciously, have now a definite conception to guide 
 them. The nature of the self, its character, its duties, the 
 wider life of which it is a part, now become conceptions, 
 ideals, or principles which appeal to the personality as 
 a whole, just as particular satisfactions appeal to special 
 impulses. Just as the special impulse when it formulates 
 its end into an idea becomes Desire, so what we have called 
 the broad impulses of the personality when their end is 
 defined by conception constitute Will. The will, with its 
 broad, permanent ends, presents itself as overriding and 
 independent of impulse, and out of this appearance the 
 fiction of the motiveless Will has very naturally grown 
 up. We are aware of the Will often not as desire, but 
 as constraint overcoming Desire, and when Will and 
 Desire coalesce there is still something added to desire 
 
XV CONCEPTUAL THOUGHT 351 
 
 which we express as Resolve or Determination. The 
 reason is that even in human experience, the basis of the 
 Will is too wide and too deep to be brought within the 
 scope and limits of a single act of consciousness. The 
 Will is more than we can feel at any one moment, for it is 
 the whole self, or ourself acting as a whole. This action 
 of the self as a whole is called out and directed by 
 the broad ends of life, and things seen to be bound up 
 therewith. It therefore belongs to the grade of mental 
 development under discussion. 
 
 6. The development of moral impulses into the moral 
 will determines in principle the advance in the content of 
 morality — the objects on which the moral will insists — 
 in the human as compared with the animal world. One 
 side of this advance we have already found to be implied in 
 the growth of the conception of Personality (pp. 339-341). 
 On this side the change is a development rather than a 
 revolution. Most of the higher animals have rudiments 
 of a family life for which they labour and not infrequently 
 sacrifice themselves. Many of them are also capable of 
 a wider social life based on mutual help and friendliness. 
 More than this can hardly be said universally of all 
 races of men, and within all races numerous individual 
 exceptions would have to be made of those who are far 
 from being capable of as much. Yet the moral change 
 is no less profound than the intellectual, of which it is 
 indeed one expression. We attribute sympathy and 
 attachment to the higher animals. That is to say, we 
 credit them with desire to relieve the distress or satisfy 
 the wants of another, to feed the young, to defend a com- 
 panion, to gratify a master. Take them at their highest, 
 and these are still desires addressed to immediate ends. It 
 is true that in many, probably in most cases, they actually 
 serve the permanent good of the object of affection. But 
 if the feeding, warming, and protection of the nestling all 
 actually subserve its permanent health and growth, this is 
 merely a very familiar illustration of those co-ordinations of 
 instinct by which desires are brought into general harmony 
 with needs. We have no more right to credit the mother 
 bird with a conception of the future career of her nestling, 
 
25^ MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 than to suppose that she originally accepted the attentions 
 of her mate with a view to maintaining the numbers of 
 the species. In this grade, it is only so far as action is 
 instinctive that its ends are broad and permanent. So far 
 as it is intelligent and based on experience, its aims are 
 near and concrete. Obviously, this limitation of view 
 must apply to social action in this grade. 
 
 Now the characteristic of human intelligence as we have 
 defined it is that it widens out so as to grasp the permanent 
 in experience, and comprehend life in some sort as a 
 whole. Thus widened, the same impulses that we saw 
 before in the narrow concrete sphere develop into the 
 manifold relations of personality. Sympathy, for example, 
 becomes a regard not merely for the immediate needs, but 
 for the career, the character, the mental development of 
 another. The hen that clucks to her chick, and the 
 mother that plans out a child's education with a view to 
 physical health, growth of character, and the profession 
 that must be taken up twenty years hence, are both 
 moved by the parental impulse, but there is a difference in 
 comprehensiveness of aim. Conversely, in the same way, 
 we can conceive an animal — a sentinel deer, for example 
 — performing the service immediately necessary for its 
 herd. We can hardly conceive it as having the good of 
 the herd as a permanent object of action. Animals may 
 have selfish impulses, that is, desires for their own 
 gratification as opposed to that of another. Man alone is 
 swayed by self-interest ; that is, an intelligent subordina- 
 tion of desire to his permanent welfare as he conceives it. 
 And just as his own permanent welfare becomes an end to 
 him, so in proportion to his moral qualities does the 
 permanent welfare of other people. It is in this way that 
 the social qualities of animals are transformed in becoming 
 human. i 
 
 7. Morality is not ordinarily conceived as consisting in 
 the devotion to certain broad and comprehensive purposes 
 so much as in conforming to certain rules. Without in- 
 quiring here how far this conception is adequate, we may 
 point out that the mass of rules, traditions, customs, laws, 
 moral judgments, religious conceptions, which make up the 
 
XV CONCEPTUAL THOUGHT 
 
 353 
 
 accepted code of conduct in any society, naturally subserve 
 the broad end of the maintenance of that social system on 
 which they are dependent. They are the media axiomata 
 by which conduct is brought into relation to the broad 
 requirements of the welfare, or, at lowest, the maintenance 
 of society. Ordinary unreflecting morality is therefore 
 conduct adjusted to the maintenance of the existing social 
 type. It stands at a lower grade than the conduct delib- 
 erately regulated by some general principle, but in several 
 respects at a higher grade than the highest development of 
 the "Practical Judgment." For to begin with, though a 
 rule may not be referred back to the principle which under- 
 lies and justifies it, it is still a rule, still general; that is to 
 say, it is as such independent of impulse, and dependent on 
 a general conception recognised not only by the agent, but 
 by onlookers. In other words, it is a standard of conduct. 
 Thus it becomes relatively independent of the caprice of 
 the individual and the whim of the moment. The social 
 sanction is there to guide the errant individual, and the 
 moral sanction — the man's permanent conception of him- 
 self — to check the errant whim. To illustrate by a single 
 point : the difference is that between an act of kindness 
 based on an impulse of sympathy or affection, and an act 
 of justice, based on an acknowledged duty or right. It is 
 proverbially easier to be generous or kind than to be just; 
 and the reason is, that while kindness springs from an 
 impulse which its object, from whatever cause, happens to 
 have excited, justice is required, whether the impulse is 
 there or not. Such a requirement can only be fulfilled 
 where there is the recognition of a universal law applying 
 under specified conditions to all individuals, and under aU 
 circumstances, without reference to the feelings or desires 
 of the agent. Thus with the apprehension of general 
 rules, social relations cease to rest merely upon instinct 
 and impulse, and pass instead into a system of acknow- 
 ledged rights and duties. 
 
 Two corollaries follow from the standardising of conduct. 
 One is the possibility of adapting conduct to a highly 
 complex social structure. Of this something has already 
 been said. The other is, that while social behaviour be- 
 
 A A 
 
354 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 comes more stable, it is also more capable of development. 
 Social changes are on the average far more rapid than those 
 changes in the physical constitution of a species upon which 
 instinct ultimately rests. Change of behaviour through 
 modification of instinct must proceed with the same geo- 
 logical slowness which marks all the stages of physical 
 evolution. Through submission to the social standard, 
 conduct may be made to accommodate itself to the chang- 
 ing requirements of social life, without lagging more than 
 two or three generations behind the requirements them- 
 selves. 
 
 Thus by the standardising of morality a force grows up 
 outside of instinct to regulate conduct. In the end, this 
 force no doubt owes its origin to hereditary tendencies, but 
 it is a heredity modified, on the one hand, by tradition : 
 on the other, by the rational apprehension of what is 
 required, one may say of its own ultimate meaning. 
 What is recognised as right in accordance with this standard 
 may in many cases be very far removed from the inborn 
 impulses of the individual. Under its guidance, the 
 social impulses develop into a recognition of what is due 
 to others, placed above momentary caprice or personal 
 desire. Such a standard admits of development into a 
 code, adaptable to the thousand details of a complex 
 social structure ; while finally, as the needs of social life 
 change, the standard is capable of organic modification along 
 with them, in accordance with the reasoned appreciation 
 of necessity. 
 
 In this place, I am only concerned to contrast animal 
 behaviour with human morality taken in the rough and as 
 a whole. How morality as a contribution to the organi- 
 sation of life develops within the human race to the stage 
 thus roughly indicated, would have to be the subject of a 
 separate inquiry. To the same inquiry would belong the 
 consideration of the steps by which it further advances 
 to something higher. What the nature of this higher 
 stage is, will be briefly indicated in a later chapter. 
 
 8. The position of instinct. 
 
 It needs no argument to show that intelligence, when 
 developed to the point now reached, must very largely 
 
XV CONCEPTUAL THOUGHT 355 
 
 replace instinct as the guide of conduct. Indeed, the 
 tendency of ordinary thought is to exaggerate this effect, 
 and to contrast the reason which governs man with the 
 instinct that rules animals. But man is no more regulated 
 by pure reason than animals by pure instinct. As has 
 been indicated above in Chapter VI. ,1 the basis of human 
 conduct is hereditary character : the hereditary tendency 
 to feel, to think, to act in a determinate manner. 
 Properly considered, the impulse to reason is itself a 
 hereditary propensity ; and the methods by which we 
 reason, the " laws of thought," are, in the first place, in- 
 herited methods of reaction to the appropriate object. 
 They are indeed improved and refined under the guidance 
 of experience and reflection, but in this respect their history 
 is quite parallel to that of the humbler Instincts of animal 
 life. 
 
 But now if hereditary character, mental and moral, be 
 the ultimate basis of human conduct, can we say in 
 general terms how far it is remodelled by the rational use 
 of experience .'' What is principally important for our 
 purpose is to compare the remodelling as effected in this 
 stage with the corresponding process in the next lower 
 grade of intelligence. In that grade, we found, first of all, 
 that the instinctive use of means to an end might be re- 
 m'odelled, as when in the course of training a dog works 
 out a way of meeting the special tricks of different kinds 
 of game. We found, secondly, that out of random actions, 
 or out of mere observation, methods could be built up 
 which have no specific basis in instinct at all. We found, 
 thirdly, that even the ends of action might be in some 
 respects modified by the nature of the Individual objects 
 to which by instinct an animal's Interests are attached, as 
 when the dog Is said to take his character from his master. 
 In all these three cases, instinct on the one hand, and the 
 direct experience of the individual on the other, come Into 
 Immediate contact ; and a certain modification, whether 
 in the choice of ends or of means, results. What Is 
 peculiar to human intelligence — apart from the developed 
 influence of rational control in the individual — Is the rise 
 * Cf. especially pp. 99 — 106. 
 
 A A 2 
 
356 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 of tradition as a third force impinging upon the other two. 
 The innate propensities of each individual human being 
 are in contact throughout his life with the body of beliefs, 
 moral judgments, social institutions, rules of art or craft 
 that make up the tradition of the society into which he is 
 born. These enter into his character, interpenetrate his 
 hereditary impulses, not only encouraging and restraining, 
 but with more subtle power, prescribing to each impulse 
 the sphere within which it is to move, and the object on 
 which it may exercise itself. And the character so formed 
 is all the while in interaction with the results of experience 
 in the narrower sense of that which the individual finds 
 out for himself, as opposed to that of which he is told. 
 Tradition, in the broad sense in which it is here taken, 
 rests of course principally on language, and language, as 
 we have seen, is both the parent and the child of the 
 Universal. Hence it is that though there is a rudimentary 
 form of tradition among the higher orders of animals, it 
 cannot there fill the place which we here attribute to it. 
 The rudiments of instruction which an ape, a cat, or a 
 bird can furnish to its young, are limited to a few acts of 
 restraint and encouragement, supplementing, or, rather, 
 anticipating the lessons which individual experience would 
 teach. In human society, on the other hand, tradition 
 goes to the root-principles of action, both as shaping the 
 ends recognised as desirable, and as furnishing rules of 
 method of which but few could be found out in the course 
 of individual experience, and those only by exceptionally 
 gitted or exceptionally fortunate persons. In a word, 
 tradition as based on the Universal brings the experience 
 of the race to bear on individual conduct in a new 
 sense. If we are right in holding that instinct is due to 
 heredity, while heredity works through natural selection, 
 then, as we have already seen, there is a sense in which 
 instinct itself utilises the experience of the race to guide 
 the individual. What is performed at that stage by the 
 constant elimination of the majority of individuals born, 
 and by the stereotyping of the structure of those which 
 survive, is executed at this higher stage by the organisa- 
 tion of the experience of those who have lived, and rests 
 
XV CONCEPTUAL THOUGHT 357 
 
 upon the plasticity of those who learn by it. In short, at 
 this stage, we have organised racial experience largely 
 taking the place of that hereditary structure which 
 represents the result of an infinity of conflicting and 
 chaotic experiences in past generations. In fine, in the 
 highest animal species, instinct lays the ground plan of 
 conduct, within which details may be remodelled by 
 individual experience. In the human species, the ground 
 plan is itself reconstituted by the organised experience 
 of the race. 
 
 9. To bring together the main heads of our account, 
 we have suggested that human intelligence develops out of 
 a lower form by growth in those features of Comprehen- 
 sion on the one hand, and Articulateness on the other, by 
 which the higher stage of animal intelligence was marked 
 out from the lower, (a) Mind, it is suggested, diflFers 
 from mind in the degree in which these powers are 
 developed, in the area of experience which it can com- 
 prehend, and in the articulateness with which it can 
 comprehend it. But here, as elsewhere, there come points 
 in growth where change of degree becomes change of 
 kind. The constitution of a physical body is understood 
 to be determined by the energy of movement on the part 
 of its constituent molecules. Increase the vibration of the 
 constituent molecules, and a solid body gets warmer to the 
 touch, and expands in volume. Increase it still further, 
 and other physical characteristics are changed. The body 
 perhaps becomes soft and pliable. Presently there comes 
 a point at which the solid body becomes liquid, the energy 
 of movement having overcome the forces which cause 
 each swinging molecule to return constantly to the same 
 point. Increase it yet again, and the liquid becomes a 
 vapour, the energy of movement having altogether over- 
 come that of cohesion. Thus do successive increments of 
 quantity, as they pass certain critical phases, produce 
 changes of quality. In the instance just taken, the 
 change of quality is, as I understand, due to the disturb- 
 ance of the relation between the force that is increasing 
 and the force that remains constant. In the mental 
 world, the change may be explained in this way : that 
 
358 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 as the scope and clearness of mind increase, certain points 
 are successively reached at which quite new achievements 
 become possible. Those achievements, once possible, carry 
 with them a whole train of consequences. And thus the 
 species that has just succeeded in turning the corner finds 
 itself in a different world from that which has just failed. 
 
 To understand then the rise of the specifically human 
 intelligence, we have to suppose a mind capable of holding 
 together more elements of experience than the highest 
 animal can cope with, and of noting each several element 
 more clearly. Where separate experiences are thus held 
 together, they have an eflfect which we have already noted 
 in the animal world upon the movements of attention. 
 Common qualities and differences rise into notice. In 
 proportion as the elements of each experience become 
 conspicuous, they react upon association, bringing to mind 
 other experiences, partially but not wholly identical. 
 Through their influence in turn the points of identity and 
 of difference are thrown into relief. In other words, acts 
 of comparison and analysis aid one another, extending the 
 scope of judgment, and adding to its precision. 
 
 The first critical phase in this development, marking 
 the transition to human intelligence, is that in which the 
 common element obtains a firm enough hold over attention 
 to be responded to with a name of its own. How this 
 stage arose in the race we cannot tell, but it arises in the 
 individual as a rule between the tenth and fourteenth 
 month, by a process which seems to be at least in part 
 instinctive. At any rate, the instruction given by mother 
 or nurse has the instinctive babblement of the baby to work 
 upon, and as soon as a word is acquired, the child seems to 
 feel an instinctive satisfaction in its use. But this stage, 
 as we have seen, is only the rudiment of the Universal, 
 and the mere fact that a word is used after this fashion no 
 more proves intelligence than any other simple and 
 uniform reaction to stimulus. The importance of the word 
 lies in the part which it plays as mechanism in the further 
 stages. For just as the content first suggests the word, so 
 the word being learnt suggests the content ; and therefore 
 the combination of words the combination of contents. 
 
XV CONCEPTUAL THOUGHT 359 
 
 Now, it is not the mere disentangling of common characters 
 that is essential to the higher stage, but, as we have seen, 
 the power of recombining. "We are at the edge of the 
 plane of general reasoning as soon as the mind can make 
 for itself, without the aid of perception, an intelligible 
 synthesis of common qualities. It may then be said to have 
 a practical command of that attributive relation upon which 
 the general concept is based. This synthesis the child no 
 doubt learns to make largely from others. If, as is here 
 assumed, the evolution hypothesis is correct, the human 
 race must have learnt it step by step alongside with the 
 development of language. 
 
 (^) Given the power of operating with common qualities 
 as units, all that we have called the world of ideas becomes 
 possible. Henceforward the experience of each individual 
 dwells alongside with a body of thought distinct from but 
 related to it. For this body of thought is in large part a 
 heritage from others, and in turn helps to regulate the 
 direct experience of the individual. This perpetual cross 
 reference between acquired ideas and direct experience is 
 the fundamental feature of human thought, of the existence 
 of which in the animal world there is not the slightest trace. 
 
 (c) The contrast in explicitness and comprehension be- 
 tween this stage and the preceding sufficiently appears from 
 the nature of the Universal itself. We saw that logically the 
 procedure of the lower stage was an argument from particu- 
 lars to particulars. Such an argument implies the universal 
 truth ; i.e., it is the common character of the two cases 
 that operate within the mind to produce the inference, 
 while if the mind reflects upon its own process, it is com- 
 pelled to recognise that the process is only valid if the 
 universal truth holds. In the present stage the Universal, 
 we have seen, is recognised ; i.e., the implication of the 
 lower form of inference is now made explicit. And what 
 is true universally, is recognised as being true necessarily. 
 Logical sequence not merely directs the operations of mind, 
 but is recognised by the mind, and not merely by the 
 reflecting mind of the logician, but by every one who has 
 learnt the use of " therefore " and " because." We have 
 already compared the two lower stages of Intelligence to a 
 
36o MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 syllogistic process in varying degree of explicitness. In the 
 firststage we saw that what corresponds to the majorpremiss , 
 is a certain formed disposition, what corresponds to the 
 minor, a stimulus, what corresponds to the conclusion, a 
 response. The premisses in this case are antecedent con- 
 ditions from which the response follows, but there is no 
 evidence that either of them is grasped in relation to the 
 response or its results. In the second stage we held tha( 
 the starting point is a complex of related percepts — as of 
 action and consequence — an " observed particular," and the 
 result a judgment equivalent to the combination of minor 
 premiss and conclusion, the major being still represented 
 only by the mental habit which predisposes towards the; 
 combination. In the third stage the major premiss itself 
 becomes explicit and the syllogism complete. We have 
 the universal judgment, the particular,andtheir combination 
 in the conclusion. I do not mean that ordinary reasonings 
 are cast in syllogistic form, but that each of the three (or 
 including antecedent experience four) phases which are 
 formulated in syllogism is now a distinct mental content, 
 a distinct judgment. All along there were general 
 qualities and universal relations contained in the world of 
 experience. All along these guided the mind whether in 
 action or in the formation of judgments. Now they not 
 merely guide the mind, but are apprehended by the mind, 
 and they become in their turn units or terms which can 
 enter into higher combinations as the order of experience 
 and the laws of thought may determine. So far, then, 
 the apprehension of the Universal appears as a turning 
 round of the mind upon its, previous operations ; a bring- 
 ing into clear consciousness of what it was doing before. 
 
 ((/) But the Universal has another aspect. It sums up 
 in itself the results of a set of experiences when compared 
 and analysed ; and it refers to a whole class of facts, of 
 experiences actual or potential. Thus to reason in 
 Universals is to bring classes of facts into relation with one 
 another. Experiences already correlated by the affinities 
 which have led us to class them together become for us 
 now a unit which may be correlated with any other units 
 similarly constituted ; and this correlation may reach any 
 
XV CONCEPTUAL THOUGHT 361 
 
 degree of complexity. The characteristic of this stage, in 
 short, is the correlation of experiences in groups or masses 
 by the elements of permanence and universality pervading 
 them. The Universal is not the only form in which ex- 
 periences are grouped. The great Collective and Individual 
 concepts on which much of human thought is based are 
 arrived at on similar principles, and in great measure have 
 similar functions. They rest on pervading identities traced 
 by the comparison and analysis of diverse experiences, and 
 their reference covers indefinitely great masses of experience, 
 future and potential, as well as past or present. Of such a 
 kind are the substances of ordinary thought, the personality 
 of self and of others, the society to which the individual 
 belongs, to say nothing of the wider and deeper concepts 
 belonging to the higher stages of human intelligence. A 
 very little reflection shows that conceptions of this kind are 
 no less important than true universals in the correlation of 
 experience by human thought. 
 
 (e) It is in particular in virtue of the co-ordination of a 
 certain set of experiences under the conception of self, 
 that man is credited with self consciousness. In the deter- 
 mination of conduct by comprehensive ends or broad 
 principles answering to the permanent character of the self 
 as against the cravings of the moment he manifests Will 
 as opposed to Desire. 
 
 (/) But with the conception of Will we pass at once 
 into the ethical side of the development. The same co- 
 ordination which builds up the conception of self, builds 
 up the conception of other personalities, and the sym- 
 pathetic impulse of the animal world develops into a 
 rational regard for the wealth and welfare of others. A 
 similar development builds up the human society, with its 
 system of rights and duties in which each individual finds 
 his place. In such a system, again by a parallel develop- 
 ment, the social and selfish impulses of the animal are 
 elaborated into rules of conduct resting on the relatively 
 permanent character of human beings and their societies, 
 and recognised as superior to momentary impulse and 
 even to the individual will. In other words, conduct is 
 standardised. 
 
362 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 {£) It is an essential feature of the change described 
 that the part formerly played by instinct, as the basis 
 upon which individual experience has to work, is now 
 largely taken over by tradition. Instinct does not dis- 
 appear, but on the one hand, the individual becomes 
 capable of grasping and even criticising the ends to which 
 it urges him, and on the other, he is born into a society 
 with rules and principles of art and of life which in part 
 combat, in part fuse with and modify, the hereditary 
 impulses of common human nature. In the highest plane 
 of animal intelligence we found that the scheme of life 
 was still determined by instinct, though it might be modi- 
 fied by individual experience. In the present stage, the 
 outlines of the scheme itself are as much determined 
 by the organised experience of the race represented in 
 " tradition," as by its unorganised experience, represented 
 by the forces of heredity. In short, the organised ex- 
 perience of the race now enters into the principles and 
 bases of conduct, fusing with instinct or displacing it. 
 
 To conclude. In the present stage the affinities — be 
 they elements of common character or of continuous 
 individual identity — ^which link diverse perceptual ex- 
 periences, are analysed out and correlated in their turn. 
 This correlation, in which the concept Is the distinctive 
 psychological feature, 
 
 (a) makes explicit the connections on which correlation 
 in the previous stages depends, and 
 
 (/3) makes a comprehensive reference through the 
 medium of common character to masses of related experi- 
 ence. Thought in this stage may therefore be typified in 
 the completed syllogism with explicit major premiss as con- 
 trasted with the truncated syllogisms of the previous stages. 
 
 In scope, It effects a correlation of the elements of 
 permanence and universality in experience racial and in- 
 dividual. It organises given facts under connecting 
 principles and practical purposes under comprehensive 
 ends and general rules, the results of the first group being 
 subordinated to those of the second partly as contributing 
 to their formation, partly as guiding the choice of means 
 to the ends which they prescribe. 
 
XV CONCEPTUAL THOUGHT 363 
 
 Under its ethical aspects, this correlation appears as a 
 direction of conduct by Will guided by general con- 
 ceptions of the welfare of self, others, or the community, 
 as well as by the code of rules in accordance with which 
 the life of any given society is organised. 
 
 As a result, not only does individual experience (as in 
 the previous stage) modify the general plan of behaviour 
 resting on instinct, but the recorded experience of the race 
 is brought to bear on its hereditary tendencies, engender- 
 ing an explicit conception of the main ends desirable in 
 the life to be lived by man. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 I. The central feature of the stage of intelligence de- 
 scribed in the two preceding chapters is that comprehen- 
 sive reference to the permanent conditions of experience 
 which we know as the concept. We might regard the ideal 
 action of this stage as directed by generalisations which 
 embody vast masses of previous experience towards an end 
 which will comprehend vast masses of future experience. 
 And it is not merely the individual but the race whose 
 experience is thus organised. Through this organisation, 
 not merely the particular actions but the general setting or 
 framework of life comes to rest quite as much upon 
 tradition as upon instinct. A mass of social customs, 
 political obligations, religious beliefs, environ a child from 
 the first, and are often in marked conflict with his inherited 
 impulses. Instinct as modified by social tradition is now 
 the ground-work of life, while apart from simple reflexes, 
 there is very little in the detailed adjustment of means to 
 ends in daily life in which acquired knowledge does not 
 take the principal part. 
 
 But no words are needed to show how incomplete even 
 at this stage is the organisation of life. Man is man, but 
 not yet master of his fate. All that he has done by 
 centuries of progress is to reclaim a little garden plot out 
 of the vast wilderness of unknown and unmanageable 
 
 ' The substance of this chapter has been more fully dealt with in the 
 writer's Development and Purpose. I have thought it better not to 
 attempt to incorporate fresh matter, and have therefore left it with trifling 
 corrections as originally printed. 
 
 364 
 
CHAP. XVI SYSTEMATIC THOUGHT 365 
 
 forces of nature, among which the forces of his own 
 nature are not the least terrible and by far the most 
 incalculable. Nor if he could bend all nature to his 
 bidding would he yet understand fully to what end to use 
 his power. The world of human ends is not yet an ordered 
 community owning the sway of a single comprehensive 
 principle. It is a scene of bitter and perpetual strife, 
 where rival philosophies and fratricidal religions contend, 
 the crowd of ignobler passions often joining in the fight. 
 The reason that is within us forces us to hold that what- 
 ever is right and good cannot be destructive of other 
 things right and good, but rather must co-operate with 
 them to the same ultimate end. But human ethics as we 
 know them provide no such harmony. Half the energies 
 of the best men are taken up in combating others no less 
 well intentloned than themselves. It is no doubt right 
 provisionally that both should fight for their principles, 
 just as in war men on both sides, fighting for their own 
 country, are as individuals justified. So far the compre- 
 hensiveness of the modern spirit can bring in a certain 
 ethical harmony. But it is a harmony which deepens the 
 tragedy that it ennobles, and ennobles it only by pointing 
 to a still loftier harmony resting on the common nature 
 that underlies all differences and the greater far off end of 
 human kind which all actual eflfort but dimly apprehends. 
 
 Reason, as the impulse to harmonise and unify, keeps 
 constantly before us the ideal of a principle which should 
 explain the world, and a purpose which should rationalise 
 human effort. Man has not reached his goal, but he has 
 made some progress since the days when he chipped the 
 flint spear heads of the river-drifts. This progress is 
 most apparent on the side of knowledge, and we will 
 consider that first. 
 
 2. In what has been said hitherto of the organisation of 
 human experience, we have had in view thought as it 
 exists among men in general, not thought as specially 
 developed in art, religion, science, or philosophy. We 
 have in short been dealing with " common-sense " know- 
 ledge and common-sense ways of thinking. We may 
 now briefly contrast the characteristics of common sense 
 
366 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 with those of that higher organisation of experience which 
 constitutes science. 
 
 We have seen that in the third stage generalisations 
 are made explicit, and becoming explicit, they may be 
 further correlated with one another as well as with fresh 
 perceptions. As this correlation proceeds, loosely or- 
 ganised masses of thought arise. We know that common 
 sense abhors trains of reasoning and abjures close analysis. 
 Nevertheless in our common knowledge ideas already 
 exist in combinations. Tacit combinations they may 
 be, but they are real, as we find from the numbers that 
 rush to the defence when any cherished thought is assailed. 
 The ideas connected with our daily life, our homes, 
 belongings, occupations, politics, form combinations of 
 this kind. We do not reduce them to system, but we 
 might do so if there were an adequate motive to set 
 us to work. But though there are combinations at this 
 stage, they are loose and ill organised, as is sufficiently 
 shown by the contradictions which arise when the 
 generalities of common sense are taken literally as 
 universal truths. Common sense, indeed, tolerates a good 
 deal of contradiction. It does not distinguish very 
 carefully between " never " and " hardly ever," and tacit 
 saving clauses are part of its stock in trade. For the rest, 
 common sense admits that it does not know everything, 
 and is always ready to live and learn. 
 
 Suppose, however, that instead of tolerating contradic- 
 tions we seek to resolve or explain them. The explanation 
 will have to be found in the drawing of fresh distinctions 
 based upon a more thorough analysis. With this analysis, 
 we are already on the way towards turning our rough 
 generalisations into relatively exact universals. With 
 exact universals to work with, our loose inferences turn 
 into rigid proofs, and we find that we have passed from 
 common sense to science. 
 
 Character of Science. 
 
 The best single term for describing the general 
 character of Science as opposed to common sense is System. 
 Science works the data of experience into a whole of 
 interconnected facts. It may be objected that there is 
 
XVI SYSTEMATIC THOUGHT 367 
 
 interconnection of facts in all reasoning, and that the 
 distinction is therefore a mere matter of degree. But 
 even in the Third Stage systematisation is an underlying 
 principle, not the explicit object of mental effort. Com- 
 mon sense carries interconnection as far as is necessary for 
 the purpose in hand. But a new step is taken when the 
 purpose in hand is that of making interconnection com- 
 plete, and this is the step taken when we begin to inves- 
 tigate a subject for the sake of understanding it through 
 and through. In science system becomes the explicit 
 purpose. 
 
 Science is systematic in the first place because it seeks 
 to be complete. It takes a certain subject matter and 
 examines it not from the point of view of some practical 
 or imaginative interest, but for the sake of understanding 
 its essential nature as exhibited in all its developments. 
 Thus the beginning of science is the marking off, often by 
 a crude distinction which is afterwards revised, of a 
 department of experience for its field of operations. Next, 
 since the business of science is thorough understanding, it 
 must discover as well as it can the real connections of 
 things. This involves going beneath the generalities of 
 common sense, with their " practical certainty," to the 
 most definite and precise conceptions attainable. For 
 this purpose both terms and their relationships must be 
 accurately defined, and hence the saying — a one-sided 
 saying — that science is measurement. Hence also the part 
 played by definition, the true place of which is neither at 
 the beginning nor at the end of science, but all along its 
 march — the definitions being modified as knowledge of 
 the subject advances. To form some idea of the relation 
 between accuracy and systematic interconnection, we might 
 compare common sense to the implements of a handicraft, 
 and science to a modern machine. The parts of the loco- 
 motive or the printing machine must be adjusted with 
 the minutest accuracy to fit into a scheme of rigid wheels 
 and levers. The craftsman's tool may deviate from the 
 normal, and the craftsman himself will correct the 
 deviations. He gets to know his implement and accommo- 
 dates himself to its individuality. The slightest deviation 
 
368 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 stops the perfect but rigid system of the machine. In the 
 same way, common sense makes use of its rough generalities 
 without disaster, but for elaboration and system there 
 must be accuracy in each part, to the last millionth of an 
 inch. 
 
 It must be added that science goes more deeply than 
 common sense into the fact of connection itself. It does 
 not merely go beneath the practical efficiency of good 
 working rules to the strictly defined and conditioned 
 universal on which the rules rest. It goes beyond the 
 universal itself, seeking its why and wherefore by breaking 
 it up into elements and discovering further affinities. In 
 so doing, it tries to trace its way up to the central 
 point, what Aristotle called the essence of the subject, and 
 works from the centre outwards, drawing the radial lines so 
 as to preserve affinities and follow the lines of vital 
 distinction. The preparatory work of such a system is 
 that of classification, the final work, that of Explanation. 
 As the highest of the " systematic forms," Explanation 
 exhibits the fact explained not merely as dependent on 
 another fact, but as necessarily occupying its assigned place 
 in a system of connected facts. Whether it resolves 
 compound laws into their elements, traces derivative truths 
 to their origin, exhibits the character as a part as 
 dependent on its place in a structure, or deals with an 
 event or process as some special phase in the genesis of an 
 organic growth, the tendency of science seems always to 
 be to a systematisation of thought which shall not be 
 merely a connection of some one element with some other, 
 but rather the reference of all elements to a whole into the 
 plan of which they fit. 
 
 3. The beginner in science has been sometimes re- 
 presented^ as turning to a new method because of his 
 disgust with the contradictions to which he was brought 
 by following the unreflective, unanalysed workings of 
 common sense. However this may be, there must speedily 
 arise in science a tacit recognition of the divergence 
 between thought and truth, or between "truth" as it 
 appears to man, and Reality. At a certain stage of 
 1 E.g. by Plato, Rep. VII. 
 
XVI SYSTEMATIC THOUGHT 369 
 
 reflection, the mind begins to recognise that its opinions 
 are in a sense of its own making. The natural man does 
 not question that he is in daily and hourly contact with 
 reality ; he makes no question about the validity of the 
 conclusions which he draws from this seeming reality by 
 steps which appear no less self evident. Common sense 
 may be convinced of error as of illusion, but while it 
 revises its results, it neither calls its own methods into 
 question nor doubts its senses. It is satisfied to be right 
 in its own world. It does not ask about the limits of that 
 world, nor inquire whether its experience is the same thing 
 as reality. Yet the human mind, like the human body, is 
 the outcome of a long and highly specialised evolution. 
 It is a very elaborate structure, with determinate functions 
 of its own, and its every act and thought, every inference, 
 perception, and feeling depends as much upon this structure 
 as upon the outer world which acts upon it, and stimulates 
 it to reaction. We thus contribute to the making of our 
 own experience — that experience which at first we all take 
 as though it had a sort of absolute value wholly in- 
 dependent of ourselves. The full realisation and dis- 
 cussion of this difficulty is the central problem of 
 philosophy, but it is important to recognise that it makes 
 itself felt in one way and another even in the special sciences. 
 The world of science is not the same as the world of 
 common sense. The material universe as conceived by 
 molecular physics is not the universe as known to sight 
 and touch, only rather more completely known. The 
 conceptions of Life, of Personality, of Society are not 
 merely deepened and widened in scientific treatment, but in 
 great measure they have to be taken to pieces and thought 
 out anew. In many sciences, we get, by the use of 
 instruments, into a new world of perceptions, and are thus 
 forced to realise incidentally the relativity of our own 
 sense-experience. In all science we constantly find that 
 the conceptions which have grown up uncritically, and 
 which we began by using confidently as moulds into which 
 reality must fit, are spontaneous products of our limited 
 experience, which a wider experience would transform out 
 of all recognition. 
 
 B B 
 
370 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 But with this scepticism about fundamental conceptions, 
 we are thrown back on first principles. We shall need a 
 criterion of certainty, that is to say, a Logic. We shall 
 need an examination into the relation between the world 
 of our thought, and the world of ultimate reality, i.e., a 
 Metaphysic. And in these inquiries there is wrapped up 
 another which is, strictly speaking, a special science, but 
 yet is concerned with those mental processes which are at 
 work in building up science itself, i.e.. Psychology. Clearly, 
 if we want to evaluate the human factor in human 
 thought, we must understand the laws of growth by which 
 our ways of thinking have arisen. Historically, therefore, 
 Psychology has arisen in close connection with Logic and 
 Metaphysics. This is not the place to argue the precise 
 delimitation of the spheres of Logic, Metaphysics, and 
 Psychology. What I have to do is to call attention to 
 the work which these three branches of investigation have 
 shared between themselves. This work has a double 
 aspect. On the one hand, it is essentially an analysis of 
 the work of mind, and to many people this would seem to 
 be the differentiating mark between philosophy and 
 science. Thus, if we wish to contrast the highest stage of 
 mental development with all those that have gone before, 
 we might say that while in all the other stages the mind is 
 at work correlating its experiences, in this stage for the 
 first time it turns to analysing the principle and method 
 of correlation itself, the laws that govern it in its system- 
 making. On the other hand it is only by evaluating this 
 unknown quantity that we get a determinate relation 
 between thought in any sphere, and reality. That is to 
 say, this analysis is the primary condition of a completed 
 synthesis. If the partial systems of science can be con- 
 ceivably built up into a unified science revealing the true 
 nature of things, this analysis must be the keystone of the 
 arch. 
 
 4. This unification of experience is the ideal to which 
 philosophy points. For in the search for first principles, 
 philosophy finds itself brought up against something that 
 looks very like an insoluble contradiction. We cannot go 
 outside experience in order to j udge experience. We may 
 
XVI SYSTEMATIC THOUGHT 371 
 
 push a science back to its first principles, but may still 
 ask on what those first principles rest. We may distin- 
 guish true ways of thinking from false, and yet be 
 reminded that the true ways are only ways of thinking. 
 Are we then landed ultimately in pure assumption as our 
 starting point ? Or may we recognise that the search for 
 a peg outside the world of thought to which thought 
 may be hung, is the result of an illusion, by which we 
 transfer to thought as a whole methods justly applicable 
 only to a part ? If this is so, the ultimate justification of 
 thought and experience is to be found within the world of 
 thought and experience itself. As I have argued at length 
 elsewhere, it is to be found in point of fact in its character 
 as a coherent system, a whole in which the diverse parts 
 support and necessitate one another. The goal of philo- 
 sophy is therefore a system which should embrace all 
 experience. 
 
 There have been two views of the function of philosophy 
 which at first sight are difficult to reconcile. One is, that 
 philosophy is the unification of the sciences ; the other, 
 stated broadly, is that it is the analysis of the presupposi- 
 tions of thought. In the view here taken, these two 
 conceptions coincide, for it is in the possibility of harmonis- 
 ing the results of thought that the test of thought is ulti- 
 mately to be found, and such a unification is not possible 
 without taking exact account of the way in which thought 
 goes to work in building up its conceptions. The correla- 
 tion of the sciences on the basis of an analysis of experience 
 seems then to be the fuller statement of the work of philo- 
 sophy. It is by such a correlation, if at all, that we get back 
 from the world of thought which has arisen uncritically out 
 of human experience and human evolution to the Reality 
 which we still hope to be attainable. We find the need 
 of such a correlation obscurely felt in the special sciences 
 when in trouble about their elementary conceptions, ex- 
 plicitly recognised in modern metaphysics, but not yet 
 satisfied by any philosophic system. The ideal unity of 
 the philosopher, however far beyond the reach of human 
 attainment, may serve as a " regulative concept," indicating 
 the direction in which the advance of thought moves and 
 
 B B 2 
 
372 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 the principles by which it is guided. The prime feature 
 which distinguishes this movement from the work of 
 common sense is the emergence of the idea of systematic 
 interconnection from its position as an underlying principle 
 into the forefront of the struggle as the avowed object of 
 effort. The exactness of science and its disengagement from 
 practical interests are corollaries of this principle. But 
 secondly, the idea of system necessitates in the way 
 described a criticism of method, and thirdly, the result 
 of this criticism is a remodelling of the whole conception 
 of experience and the truth that can be built upon experi- 
 ence, in such a way as to evaluate the work of mind, and 
 determine the relation of thought to reality. Explicit 
 systematisation, criticism of thought processes, and the 
 consequent " return to reality," are thus the three factors 
 determining the philosophic movement of thought. In 
 other words, here, as in the other advances of thought 
 that we have traced, the methods of lower phases are 
 made explicit, and as a consequence the character of the 
 systematisation is remodelled. Ordinary human thought 
 makes explicit the universal that underlies animal ex- 
 perience. Philosophy makes explicit the principles of 
 correlation that underlie the use of the universal. And 
 thus, while the bodies of common-sense knowledge are 
 fragmentary and rough-hewn, the ideal philosophic system 
 is an accurate piecing together of experience into a single 
 coherent whole. Thus philosophy grows out of common 
 sense, and completes its work. But it completes it only 
 by taking it to pieces and putting it together again. It 
 is ordinary thought not merely extended, but in a measure 
 transformed. 
 
 Philosophy then, in its narrower sense as the analysis of 
 mind, may be said to deal with the conditions under which 
 the general truths and inferences of common sense arose. 
 Meanwhile the sciences deal with what is in a sense the 
 same problem in a different form. For, as we have seen, 
 they trace the rough rules of common sense to the true 
 universals that underlie them, and out of these universals 
 they make their system. Finally, philosophy in the wider 
 sense is the effort towards the ideal unification of these 
 
XVI SYSTEMATIC THOUGHT 373 
 
 processes, the system of adequately defined truths in which 
 contradictions are resolved, and errors and half truths alike 
 explained. Putting these points together, we may formulate 
 the work of systematic thought in general as the effort to 
 discover the conditions under which the general truths of 
 common sense arise, and by the correlation of these deeper 
 truths to complete the systematisation of experience. 
 
 5. Self-conscious development. 
 
 The ideal unity of thought is, as has been indicated, 
 rather a " regulative concept " than an attainable goal. 
 But there is a point in the movement which it guides 
 which may also be very remote, but whether remote or 
 near, seems to indicate the natural terminus of the whole 
 development which we have been following. We can 
 conceive as not indefinitely remote a stage of knowledge in 
 which the human species should come to understand its 
 own development, its history, conditions, and possibilities, 
 and on the basis of such an understanding should direct 
 its own future, just as an individual who thoroughly 
 understands himself and the conditions of his life may 
 mark out his career for himself. Such a development 
 must be intellectual on the one side and ethical on the 
 other. Intellectually, the whole progress of the sciences 
 and philosophy may be regarded as so many steps towards 
 it, the lower sciences as giving man control of nature, the 
 higher as yielding the requisite knowledge of human life, 
 physical, mental, and social. Moreover, as Comte and 
 others have shown, the lower or more abstract sciences lead 
 up to the higher or more concrete, — Mathematics to physics, 
 physics and chemistry to biology, biology to the mental 
 and social sciences. If we imagine the higher sciences as 
 complete as they are at present rudimentary, we should have 
 in them a general theoretical account of the conditions of 
 human development, physical and moral. Thus prolonging 
 in imagination the line of mental development traced in the 
 foregoing pages, we are led to the conception of a scheme 
 embracing the whole problem of human life and destiny 
 on earth. We start with a consciousness limited to 
 the reaction of the moment, and knowing nothing of the 
 past which determines its action, nor of the future which 
 
374 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 its action will affect. Step by step, as we advance, more 
 of the past and the future come within the scope of 
 intelligence, and we end at a point where all that has 
 made the race what it is is brought into the account and 
 made to prove what it has in it to be. At this stage the 
 mind of man is first fully self-conscious in the strict 
 sense — conscious of its own nature, of the conditions 
 under which it lives and works, of the future to which it 
 may aspire. 
 
 6. But " self-consciousness " of this kind is not attained 
 by scientific theory alone. It rests on a spiritual truth, 
 and must be applied by a moral force. Now moral force 
 is not a method of intellectual development, and spiritual 
 truth cannot be grasped by the intellect unaided. A race 
 devoid of moral feeling could not appreciate its own unity, 
 which is essentially a moral truth. Along with the intel- 
 lectual development of which we have spoken must there- 
 fore go a certain evolution of ethical conceptions which 
 we must attempt briefly to characterise. 
 
 The moral conceptions of men rest in the end on the 
 moral impulses of human nature. This does not always 
 hold of the individual, for the conceptions which a man 
 accepts intellectually and follows more or less involuntarily 
 are in great part worked out for him by society, and im- 
 posed upon him first by his spiritual pastors and masters, 
 and then by the requirements of social life. Thus in 
 ordinary life we are painfully conscious at times of the 
 divorce between moral theory and practice. Nevertheless, 
 if we take human society as a whole, the Aristotelian posi- 
 tion holds true, that the conception of virtue rests on the 
 practice thereof.-' That is to say, the whole system of 
 moral tradition governing the life of a society is evolved 
 from the practical impulses and feelings at work in the 
 past and in the present. It is from these as they operate 
 on each other, and are reacted upon in turn by the physical 
 conditions of life, that the social system with its complex 
 rights and duties and the moral traditions in which these 
 
 ^ Nic. Eth. VII. 8, 4. oiVe hr] e/cei (ck toTs fiadrjiiaTiKois) o Xoyos 
 SidatTKokiKos tS>v apxSiv, oiire iuravda, aW dperrj i) (jjvatKfj fj idurrfi tov 
 6p8obo^eiv irepl ttju apxfiv. ' 
 
XVI SYSTEMATIC THOUGHT 375 
 
 are formulated evolve. There is indeed one other regulative 
 condition, namely, the stage of intellectual development 
 reached. This has an important influence in more than 
 one shape, as we shall presently see, but it is not the basis 
 of the matter. 
 
 From a very early if not the earliest stages of develop- 
 ment onwards, the maintenance of the species rests on two 
 conditions, conditions often so closely related as to be 
 almost identical, but at times thrown into sharp contrast 
 and antagonism. The first of these is what we may call 
 the principle of self-maintenance, " the will to live." We 
 have observed this principle at work In the processes to 
 which we do not attribute consciousness at all, in the form 
 of that tendency to self-maintenance which we attribute to 
 organisms as such. It persists in the various impulses 
 tending not merely to the maintenance of life, but to the 
 maintenance of the individual in his own character, the 
 fulfilment of his impulses or desires, the realisation of his 
 individuality. But this principle is from an early stage 
 limited and controlled or modified in its action by another. 
 In all but the lowest stages, the life of a species depends 
 not only on the efforts of each individual to main- 
 tain himself, but on a certain unique relation between 
 different individuals composing the species. At least as 
 soon as distinction of sex appears, the individuals of a 
 species begin to have need of one another. They are not 
 complete each in himself, but need a complement, which 
 they find in another individual possessing the same funda- 
 mental specific character developed with certain differences. 
 The most obvious and most permanent need of this kind 
 Is that of sex, but in the highest orders this relationship 
 takes a thousand different shapes. The young needs the 
 parent, and so also does the parental instinct cry out for 
 young ones to satisfy it. The gregarious instinct runs far 
 down into the lower animal world, and in human life every 
 man must needs have some other human being by him, if 
 only to annoy him. Even rivalry and hatred rest on some 
 sort of consciousness of a common nature subjected to 
 difference, and of mutual help and love we need not 
 speak. 
 
376 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 One need not waste words In showing that this relation 
 to other Individuals must profoundly modify the workings 
 of " self-assertion," either by directly thwarting it, as when 
 love enjoins self-sacrifice, or perhaps by entering into and 
 modifying it, as when a man makes the pursuit of revenge 
 the object of a lifetime. The genesis of morality may be 
 said to consist in the development and interaction of these 
 two principles. 
 
 In the stage of pure instinct, the influence of the ele- 
 mentary relationships appears chiefly in the sexual and 
 parental impulse. We cannot regard these as unselfish, 
 any more than we can regard the impulse to eat and drink 
 as selfish. Both terms imply a conception of ends, which 
 is alien to pure instinct. The conception of a primitive 
 egoism on which sociability Is somehow overlaid Is without 
 foundation either In biology or in psychology. Indeed, it 
 has been said with more truth of Nature — 
 
 " So careful of the type she seems, 
 So careless of the single life." 
 
 For the impulses of sex and provision for young, if not 
 unselfish, at least do not tend to self-maintenance. In 
 some instances, as the act of procreation in the fly, and 
 courtship in the case of the male spider, they are danger- 
 ous, and even fatal, while if we allowed the solitary wasps 
 any sort of understanding of the purpose of their actions, 
 we should have to admire the self-devotion of their unre- 
 mitting toil to build and provision an abiding place for 
 the grub which they never see. We do not impute such 
 reflection, and we therefore reckon the actions mentioned 
 as neither selfish nor unselfish. What Is clear is that in 
 following out these Instincts the animal Is acting as a part 
 of a whole, as a member of a species. He is stimulated by 
 his affinity to another individual, and his actions are of 
 service to Individuals that come after him. It does not 
 seem that the " social principle," so to call It, makes any 
 marked advance In the first stage of intelligence. We have 
 seen that the attention shown to the young is of a rudi- 
 mentary character, and that social life is little more than a 
 manifestation of the gregarious Instinct. It is indeed diffi- 
 
XVI SYSTEMATIC THOUGHT 377 
 
 cult to see how the experiences operating within the 
 limitations of this first stage could teach anything with 
 regard to the effect of conduct on others. So far, it is 
 only when the consequences of action make themselves 
 apparent in the feelings of the agent that they influence 
 subsequent conduct, and under that limitation it is hard to 
 think that the effect of action upon others can be in any 
 way apprehended. It is in the stage of concrete experi- 
 ence, where we get on the one hand purposive action, and 
 on the other recognition of and definite feelings towards 
 individuals, that action first becomes interesting from the 
 point of view of the ethical inquirer. In this stage life is 
 still dominated by the struggle for existence, but the animal 
 builds up for himself a little ring fence within which the 
 impulses making for co-operation are allowed full play. 
 Family life has a definite development in this stage. 
 Mating is often relatively permanent — conspicuously 
 among many species of birds — and the care for the young 
 is carried to a high pitch. In many cases herds and flocks 
 are found which live in the main in a state of internal 
 peace, and in which mutual helpfulness and sometimes a 
 simple division of labour are found. In these little com- 
 munities we have already seen that many of the fundamental 
 social and self-regarding impulses appear. There is every 
 sign of sympathy and attachment, and equally of pride, 
 jealousy, anger, and hatred — qualities also implying a 
 relation to others as individuals, though a relation of 
 antagonism. Upon the whole, the higher animals appear 
 to act on the Mosaic precept, " Thou shalt love thy friend 
 and hate thine enemy." The greater part of the world is 
 either an enemy or a prey, and accordingly the animal 
 must live principally by taking care of himself and being 
 ready to fight. Hence self assertion is the dominant note 
 of his character if he is strong, self protection if he is weak, 
 and he must have the qualities known as " self-regarding," 
 which belong thereto. But there is a little bit of the 
 world which is a friend, and in relation to this little bit he 
 develops a different side of his character, and becomes a 
 social animal. Thus in this stage the " social principle," 
 that is, the fundamental identity of the species appearing 
 
378 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 in different forms according to age, sex, and individuality, 
 becomes the foundation, first, of certain distinctive relations 
 which we might almost call " personal," with the appro- 
 priate emotions of love, hate, sympathy, attachment, 
 jealousy. Secondly, it is the foundation of little social 
 structures, families, flocks, herds, resting on a certain com- 
 munity of interest, admitting of a simple division of labour, 
 and possessing some permanence. To maintain these little 
 societies there must be a considerable measure of mutual 
 understanding and assistance. That is to say, among the 
 concrete or practical ends which we recognise at this level 
 of development, the satisfaction of mate or young or even 
 comrade may figure along with the satisfaction of self. We 
 may say broadly that in this stage, on the basis of Sym- 
 pathy, actions are adapted to concrete social ends. It must 
 further be recollected that such action rests neither on blind 
 impulse nor on any general conception, but is directed to 
 the particular practical end preferred at the moment — that 
 is, it is based upon desire. Human morality rests on the 
 same fundamental conditions at a higher stage of develop- 
 ment. Our common human nature is the ultimate basis 
 of moral conceptions. Upon the emotional need we have 
 of each other rest the affections, and with them the rela- 
 tion of family and friends. On the same creed extended 
 and reinforced by common understandings and common 
 interests which enjoin mutual help and mutual self-restraint 
 rests society. In short, upon the basis of a common nature 
 is reared a common interest and understanding. But this 
 common interest is not at first explicitly recognised. It is 
 rather a principle embedded in the structure of society, 
 and fostering its life and growth. What comes before con- 
 sciousness in the earlier stages is rather the mass of rules and 
 customs prescribing those dealings of individuals with one 
 another on which the existing social structure rests. These 
 rules and customs evolve later into written laws on the one 
 hand, and moral judgments supplementing and correcting 
 established laws on the other. Human society is from the 
 first differentiated from any animal society that we know 
 of by the fact that the individual actions on which it rests 
 are not left either to fixed instincts and habits on the one 
 
XVI SYSTEMATIC THOUGHT 379 
 
 hand, or to the desires of the moment on the other, but 
 are embodied in general rules forming a permanent standard 
 which society itself will enforce. In this formulation of 
 the general rules of action prescribed by the conditions of 
 life, and particularly of social life, we find the foundation 
 of human moral systems. 
 
 It follows that eiFective moral theory is broadly relative 
 to the practical exigencies of the existing social structure. 
 Now the existing social structure rests on a very partial 
 application of that principle of a common human nature to 
 which it owes its existence. In primitive life, societies are 
 small, and often, particularly among the more vigorous 
 stocks, mutually hostile. The common interest which 
 unites the men of group a makes them collectively hostile 
 to group B. Nor is this all. The relations within any single 
 group are by no means dominated by the social principle 
 to the exclusion of any other. The actual structure of 
 any society is a kind of compromise between the claims of 
 self assertion and the recognition of what is due from man 
 to man. The pure social principle would demand the 
 suppression of every instinct of antagonism and personal 
 aggrandisement. Effectively recognised morality has 
 never demanded anything of the kind. It recognises 
 self-assertion, rivalry, competition, and antagonism, within 
 their limits, and seeks so to adjust them that they shall 
 not be destructive of the social order. The social princi- 
 ple is, as it were, Society's collective instinct of self-pre- 
 servation, and it reduces the other instincts to order as 
 best it may, but its original aim is not to conquer but to 
 compromise with them. It is at a later stage, when 
 the social principle has become more explicitly realised, 
 that there arises a moral theory going beyond actual 
 morality. Hence also comes about a divorce between the 
 moral ideal, or religion and philosophy on the one hand, 
 and the effective morality which is the generalised 
 expression of customary conduct and the recognised 
 requirements of social life, on the other. We are told, 
 for example, to love our enemies, but the primitive man, 
 and we are all primitive men when it comes to the point, 
 loves his friends and hates his enemies, and his conceptions 
 
38o MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 of right and wrong rest on the hate as much as on the 
 love. The average man learns in church to love his 
 neighbour as himself, but he keeps the lesson for Sundays 
 and holy-days, i.e., days on which he has nothing to do. 
 It does not enter into his practical consciousness of right 
 and wrong. When he sets about to best his neighbour, 
 he has no sense of wrongdoing as he has when he steals or 
 lies. We are not to think of the conception of doing to 
 others as we would be done by as a principle which appeals 
 to the average man in the light of a duty against which 
 he habitually transgresses with a certain sense of remorse. 
 On the contrary, it does not for the most part appeal to 
 him as standing in any relation to practice at all. It is 
 just a pretty formula which he likes to hear repeated, as 
 long as the preacher does not use it to draw uncomfortable 
 conclusions bearing on practical life. Under the veneer 
 of Christian ethics, the average man has a code of his 
 own. It is a mistake in the opposite direction to suppose 
 with the cynic that the natural man recognises no purely 
 moral obligation. On the contrary, he is constantly 
 surprising the attentive observer by showing a regard for 
 some kind of code in quite unexpected ways. But it is 
 a code of his own — a code, one may conjecture, differing 
 more or less from class to class and from nation to nation, 
 and based in each case on the realised relations of a man's 
 life, on the nature and exigencies of the particular part 
 which it falls to him to play, the special form which the 
 struggle for existence takes for him. Life remains for 
 the average man a game which he plays against others, 
 and he has the character and the sentiments appropriate 
 to a player. His morality consists essentially in recog- 
 nising the rules of the game. If you condemn the game 
 altogether, in the name of something higher than war and 
 competition, he simply does not understand you, or he 
 classes you with those ministers of religion who preach 
 upon the blessings of peace one day, and the next lead 
 with voices raised to highest sanctimonious pitch the 
 popular howl for war. The average man not only plays 
 his game against others, but in his heart approves of and 
 
XVI SYSTEMATIC THOUGHT 381 
 
 respects them when they play it well against him. Still, 
 he expects them to keep to certain rules. If they hit, it 
 must be above the belt, and if they cheat, it must be 
 all in accordance with the regular tricks of the trade. 
 The average man has, as we say, his code. 
 
 ..." What passes as the moral consciousness of mankind is 
 no more purely and unreservedly moral than mankind itself. It 
 is a highly complex product of very various sentiments, many of 
 them beautiful, most of them respectable, but some of them 
 irrational and ugly. To make sure of this, it is only necessary 
 to take the average moral sentiment of workaday life, consider not 
 the phrases which it employs, but the application which it makes 
 of them, and compare it with any well-known example of the 
 genuine ethical spirit, say the Sermon on the Mount, which 
 comes almost as near as is humanly possible to unalloyed ethical 
 truth. The diiFerence resolves itself into this, that whereas the 
 Sermon on the Mount is an expression of pure love, the average 
 moral sentiment is an expression of regard for others tempered by 
 rivalry and fear. It is a compromise between the primitive 
 struggle for existence and the sense of an identical nature and 
 purpose. Hence, to illustrate by a single point, its regard for 
 success as such, and its contempt and dislike of failure ; its feeble 
 criticism of successful violence and its self-righteous zeal in 
 devising fresh degradation for those who are already disgraced. 
 There can be little doubt that the average moral man thoroughly 
 enjoys the punishment of an offender and feels his own righteous- 
 ness enhanced thereby. Objection to cruelty seems to be a 
 comparatively modern feeling, still in its infancy and limited to 
 a small percentage of people. An unauthorised shot at a rabbit 
 is still a far more serious offence than beating a child with a 
 poker, and pecca fortiter remains a tolerably safe motto. In the 
 same spirit, when the average man talks of honour he is not really 
 thinking of a moral quality, but of something which makes a man 
 respected and feared by others, which puts him beyond the reach 
 of insult or injury. It is only in this sense that a duel can be 
 called an affair of honour, and it is in just the same sense that a 
 nation's honour is thought to be more seriously menaced by a 
 frank admission that it has done a wrong, than by the most un- 
 scrupulous use of force against the people that it has injured. In 
 short, force, self-assertion, and all that contributes to the market 
 value of man or woman, are natural objects of admiration for the 
 consciousness which is immersed in the struggle for existence, 
 and they remain constantly at strife with the ideas of love, self- 
 
382 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 surrender, and mutual service which arise with the dawning 
 consciousness of a common human nature." ^ 
 
 7. Ordinary unreflecting morality is in line both with 
 lower and higher developments in its ultimate basis. The 
 common character and interests of the species, its unity 
 for certain purposes, go to determine the instincts, and 
 later, the sympathies and antipathies of animals ; in human 
 thought they become, within certain limits to be insisted 
 on presently, explicitly realised. Our social morality rests 
 on our knowledge that others are made of like clay to 
 ourselves. But what the average man knows of others is 
 that while for some purposes or in some relations he may 
 rely on their help, for other purposes he must also be 
 prepared to maintain himself against them. Now within 
 a society, as order develops, the average man comes to 
 conform himself well enough to the customs, laws, and 
 understandings which establish a certain compromise 
 between his self-assertion and his regard for his neighbour. 
 He recognises, to use our former expression, the rules of 
 the game. But outside the organised society, all men are 
 primitively enemies, and here, at least, it is astonishing 
 how primitive we still are. The result of social morality 
 in its lower stages is to organise men into competing 
 groups. Nowhere, as we all know, is the paradox of the 
 moral consciousness more conspicuous than in the contrast 
 between the relations upon which it insists within a well 
 ordered society, and those which it tolerates or encourages 
 towards the foreigner. Dr. Wallace gives an idyllic 
 account of the Dyaks of Borneo, who appear to be the 
 most charming and orderly of people — only they have an 
 unfortunate habit of head-hunting. The heads, of course, 
 are only taken from the inhabitants of other villages. 
 Here, surely, is the human moral consciousness in a nut 
 shell. All the great work of social reorganisation that 
 constitutes the progress of 100 years has gone to make 
 the states of Europe more determined adversaries in a 
 more deadly struggle. 
 
 For the natural man, rights and obligations effectively 
 
 ' From the writer's "Ethical Basis of Collectivism," International 
 Journal of Ethics, Jan. 1898, pp. 151, 152. 
 
XVI SYSTEMATIC THOUGHT 383 
 
 extend only to the Group to which he belongs. In any 
 society but the most primitive tribe, which is too small 
 and too feebly organised to admit of much differentiation, 
 the differences and antagonisms that keep different tribes 
 apart are reproduced, if somewhat more faintly, in the re- 
 lations of groups, classes, or castes within the tribe. All 
 the world over, a man has one morality which he keeps 
 for his peers, and another for those " beneath " him. It 
 is instructive to note how the moral distinction survives 
 the disappearance of the political forms or legal barriers 
 in which it is originally expressed. It is in the most 
 democratic communities that we are apt to find the shades 
 of social inequality most nicely marked off. The average 
 man cannot genuinely feel that an inferior class deserves or 
 even really desires the kind of treatment which he expects 
 for himself, and recognises as due from him to others of 
 his own order. " Libbaty's a kinder thing that don't agree 
 with niggers " is a maxim which, mutatis mutandis, governs 
 social morality all the world over. 
 
 If we trace the moral paradox to its root, we shall find that 
 it grows out of an inadequate conception of that common 
 human nature upon which morality rests. The duties that 
 we recognise towards others, the rights of our own to which 
 we expect them to pay regard, are founded on the common 
 human nature which makes possible the broad reciprocity, 
 the give and take of social life. To this principle civilised 
 morality invariably does lip-service, but it is so imperfectly 
 realised, and its obligations are so faintly felt, that it is only 
 applied where other motives come to its support. These 
 motives fall roughly into two main classes. There are, 
 first, those of affection and sympathy on which rest family 
 life, and, in a less degree, the intercourse of friends, and 
 the relations of a man to those whom he recognises heartily 
 as his "neighbours." There is, secondly, the community 
 of interests, not necessarily mere self-interest, but the sense 
 of an end common to a certain group, be it a class, an 
 organisation, a party, or a nation. We have already seen 
 how this community of interest underlies the formation of 
 social groups, and develops along with them, being at once 
 the cause and effect of their life and growth. 
 
384 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 8. The social structure at any given place and time, and 
 the moral system appertaining to it, is a partial organisa- 
 tion of many conflicting forces. The self-assertion of 
 individuals, the collective selfishness of families and other 
 minor groups are not subdued, but come to a kind of com- 
 promise with the necessities of social union, and the fighting 
 spirit is permanently maintained by the hostile or at best 
 unsocial and unorganised relations of society as a whole to 
 other societies. But from an early period the sense of a 
 common human nature makes itself felt above the limita- 
 tions of the ordinary workaday morality. There is, for 
 example, a certain chivalrousness towards enemies apparent 
 even at the level of barbarism, and the impulses of sympathy 
 and tenderness occasionally well up over all barriers of 
 class or race or creed. A moral revolution is introduced 
 as soon as the conception of common humanity becomes 
 recognised as the fundamental moral truth which is to be 
 thanked for such advances in social organisation as have 
 been already made. With the explicit recognition of this 
 principle begins the organisation of life on quite a different 
 scale and with altogether higher ends. 
 
 The first and most striking effect of the humanitarian 
 principle is its levelling tendency. In the ancient world, 
 the Stoic doctrine of the fatherhood of God, and the con- 
 sequent brotherhood of man, was instrumental in breaking 
 down the barriers raised by diiferences of race, nationality, 
 and even caste against the universal application of moral 
 truth. The older morality of Greece and Rome was civic. 
 It was concerned with the reciprocal obligations and rights 
 of free men in a city state, and but faintly concerned itself 
 with duties to slaves or foreigners.^ The Stoic doctrine was 
 better suited to be the ethical creed of the great denation- 
 alised Roman Empire. In proclaiming the moral equality 
 of the slave with his master. Stoicism overleapt class boun- 
 
 ' Nevertheless the utter cynicism of Athens in the fifth century B.C. 
 shocked the Greek world, just as France at the beginning of the nine- 
 teenth century, England at the end of it, and, above all, Germany in 1914, 
 have shocked the modern world. The Melian dialogue followed by the 
 dramatic retribution of the Sicilian catastrophe is Thucydides' testimony 
 to this feeling of his contemporaries. But Plato's conclusions (Rep. 
 469-571) show how narrow was the conception of humanitarian duties in 
 the fourth century. 
 
XVI SYSTEMATIC THOUGHT 385 
 
 daries as well as race boundaries, and made quite clear for 
 the first time in "Western Civilisation that a man is to be 
 judged, not by his birth or fortune, but by what he is worth 
 as a man.^ The absorption of humanitarianism in super- 
 natural religion has at once popularised and corrupted it. 
 Between the great world-religions of Buddha, Christ, or 
 Mohammed, and the more ancient tribal or national religions, 
 there is a broad difference, roughly parallel to the difference 
 between humanitarian and nationalist ethics. The world- 
 religion at least seeks to include all men in its scope. If 
 all men could be persuaded to believe the same thing, this 
 would be well enough, but as in matters of theology this 
 ideal is never realised, the effect of religious teaching is 
 ordinarily to draw a very vital distinction between those 
 who are of the household of faith and those who dwell 
 without. Hence the revived humanitarianism of modern 
 times has often had to protest against the ethics of religion, 
 and for a time found itself allied with science in combat- 
 ing the Church. There were however sufficiently strong 
 humanitarian elements in the Christian creed to assert 
 themselves against the degradation of religion, and the 
 modern humanitarian movement from the Evangelical 
 revival of the Eighteenth century down to the Christian 
 Socialism of our own day, has been as much furthered by 
 the established religion on certain sides as it has been 
 hampered and obstructed by it on others. It is but just to 
 add that in the modern world the humanitarian spirit has 
 also had to fight the crudities of an incomplete and over 
 confident science. The humanitarianism which, whether as 
 a force interpenetrating older creeds or as itself a religion, is 
 familiar to the modern world, is principally associated with 
 the series of political and social changes to which it gives 
 unity of meaning and purpose. Many of these changes 
 have a negative or destructive aspect. Such, for instance, are 
 the abolition of slavery, the destruction of class privilege, 
 the establishment of equality of opportunity. But the 
 humanitarian principle is not negative but inclusive, and 
 
 1 A single passage in Aristotle {Eth. Nic. VIII. ii, 7) may be said 
 to admit this truth by implication, but rather by way of exception to a 
 rule than as a fundamental axiom of life. 
 
 C C 
 
386 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 aims at destruction only so far as is necessary to the removal 
 of barriers by which its operation is limited. It is as much 
 concerned for the extension of corporate responsibility as 
 for the free self-development of the individual ; but the 
 social order which it seeks is that of a higher organisation 
 in which differences are not obliterated, but preserved. 
 Similarly it holds the unity of the human race for a 
 principle which transcends all differences and rivalries of 
 nations, whence its persistent opposition to warfare ; but it 
 has no less often been the champion of nationality because 
 It recognises that the problem is to make divergent types 
 contribute to a vast harmony, not to reduce them to the 
 dead uniformity of a bureaucratic machine-world. Hence 
 politically its problem is on the one hand to create a state 
 which, without derogation to present freedom, shall be a 
 true community with no outcast or disinherited class ; on 
 the other, to make each state part of one greater com- 
 munity in which without loss of national vitality there 
 would be an overruling sense of the common human 
 heritage. I speak only of its efforts, and do not here 
 attempt to measure its success. 
 
 9. But there is another aspect of the humanitarian spirit 
 of which it will be well for our purposes to form some 
 conception, however imperfect. Its doctrine, as we have 
 put it, is that a man is to be judged by his worth as a man. 
 Properly speaking, it would carry this conception a step 
 further, and insist that moral and social values themselves 
 are to be measured and estimated in accordance with the 
 requirements and possibilities of human nature. The im- 
 portance of this position is that current doctrines of right 
 and wrong and the current estimate of comparative values 
 may diverge very greatly from what is best suited to the 
 normal development of the human species. For this diverg- 
 ence there are several reasons. In the first place, we have 
 seen that the moral standards of a people are evolved in 
 correspondence with the practical needs of that people. 
 They must accord with the social structure assumed under 
 pressure of that necessity. Clearly such necessities may 
 be of a temporary character, and they may be such as to 
 stunt or distort the social growth. Now the influence of 
 
XVI SYSTEMATIC THOUGHT 387 
 
 tradition tends to maintain moral rules after the need for 
 them has passed away. Morality is like a plant growing 
 in a confined space, which cannot at once resume its natural 
 form as soon as the confining barriers are removed. This 
 obstacle to free development is much aggravated by the 
 tendency of moral conceptions to crystallise into precepts 
 arrogating to themselves a supernatural sanction, and 
 accordingly an absolute fixity. This assumption, which 
 doubtless strengthens moral authority as long as the 
 supernatural basis is firmly believed in, and the ideal 
 preached is thoroughly in harmony with the desires and 
 better tendencies of the time, tends to undermine the hold 
 of morality altogether as soon as the possibility of a wider 
 and completer life is opened out. Religion is a progressive 
 force when it seizes on a new moral truth and presents 
 it convincingly to the popular imagination. It becomes 
 retrogressive when in presence of a still higher truth it 
 obstinately maintains the absolute validity and fixity of 
 the old. 
 
 Against the tendency to bring conceptions of right and 
 wrong to the bar of tradition or of supernatural truth, it has 
 to be said that both tradition and religion have rather to 
 be brought before the bar of human nature. It is out of 
 the needs of common human nature that morality is ori- 
 ginally built up. Could we arrive at a complete conception 
 of human nature and its possibilities, we should possess 
 final moral truth. The humanitarian spirit has at least 
 reached the point of conceiving human nature as an 
 organism with a natural growth of its own. The growth 
 of the individual is limited in morality as in actual fact 
 by the corresponding growth of others. There is as it 
 were a moral struggle for existence, no less than a physical, 
 and the character arrives at maturity at the expense of 
 some loss. Like the Individual, the species has also a 
 possible and natural growth, made up necessarily of the 
 growth of its members, but differing in this, that it can 
 go on from generation to generation. The full meaning 
 of the humanitarian principle Is to conceive of this growth 
 as a whole as the end and aim of all human eflFort, and to 
 judge existing conceptions of right and wrong thereby. 
 
 c c 2 
 
388 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 Human development may be instructively compared and 
 contrasted with simple organic growth. If we consider a 
 seed, we know that it contains within it certain possibilities 
 of development. In the proper soil and under assignable 
 conditions its growth will follow a normal course, and it 
 will come to the perfect flower. What is true of the seed 
 is true of the human being at birth. For each there is 
 normal development, a possibility of full and perfect 
 realisation, resting on certain conditions and laws of 
 growth. There is however this diflFerence, that the 
 flower may become perfect at the expense of its neigh- 
 bours, while for the man, this method of attaining perfec- 
 tion destroys it. The perfection of the human soul is a 
 function of the perfection of others. Thus from indivi- 
 dual development we are driven on to social development, 
 and from that, to the development of the whole race. For 
 the race to be perfect, the individuals must be perfect, and 
 an essential part of their perfection must lie in their mutual 
 relations. This again is a peculiarity of the human world. 
 The general idea of a racial development is of course appli- 
 cable to the plant as well as to the man. Just as the 
 botanist studies the growth of the individual rose, its 
 normal course, its perfection, the conditions of health and 
 disease, so he investigates the evolution of the species or 
 the variety, shows how a generic type exhibits the promise 
 and potency of a specific form, and discovers the condi- 
 tions under which that form evolves. So does the sociolo- 
 gist with the human species : he treats it as something 
 that has evolved, and is evolving, and he seeks to discover 
 what further developments it holds in germ. In this way 
 the study of growth, human evolution, is to the humani- 
 tarian spirit what botany is to the gardener, who would 
 not only bring the flowers that he has to the summit 
 of their perfection, but would seek to derive from them 
 new and more beautiful varieties. 
 
 This scanty sketch will serve its purpose if it suggests 
 that the ethics of the civilised world is a field of thought 
 in which two principles, or more strictly, two phases of 
 development, are confusedly intermingled. On the one 
 hand is the morality of the natural man, a morality that 
 
XVI SYSTEMATIC THOUGHT 389 
 
 has grown up in correlation with the facts of individual 
 and social life, and this morality tends to be the effective 
 rule of conduct. On the other hand is a higher morality, 
 based on a conception, more or less perfect, of what life 
 means. This morality appeals too strongly to the con- 
 science or reason of mankind to be overtly rejected when 
 fairly presented, but it is not as yet strong enough to over- 
 come established practice when the two conflict. Hence 
 those " conventional lies," by which a faulty civilisation 
 seeks to make the best of both worlds. Hence also the 
 pitiable state of the recognised religious bodies, most of 
 which admit large fragments, more or less distorted, of 
 true ethical teaching which as parts of the established 
 order they dare not apply. 
 
 It will readily be seen that " natural morality " corre- 
 sponds to the Third Stage of intellectual development. 
 It has already been characterised in describing that stage. 
 At that level experience is organised into conceptions, and 
 similarly conduct is formulated in general rules, but as 
 there is no penetrating analysis of the conceptions, so there 
 is no striving after the underlying purpose that might 
 justify but might also remodel the rules. This analysis, 
 which involves moral as well as intellectual insight, is the 
 foundation of a higher moral teaching, which has historic- 
 ally become current in a fragmentary manner and in very 
 diverse forms. The central idea which gives unity to 
 these differences is that humanity is the object of man, 
 i.e., that the business of the human race is to work out 
 all that it has in it to be. In this conception the social 
 structure and even the current morality are treated as 
 servants rather than masters of human life. And if we 
 follow out this doctrine into all that it implies, we are led 
 to think of an ethical system which will be guided by the 
 conception of the human race as a whole, bound together by 
 the ties of a common nature, and capable under ascertain- 
 able conditions of a future for which all earlier evolution 
 is preparatory. 
 
 10. Such a principle might serve as a basis for that 
 comprehensive harmony of conduct which we should 
 expect to find at the highest stage of development. In 
 
39° MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 this respect again it contrasts with the fragmentary and 
 more or less inconsistent rules which satisfy unscientific 
 thought. But it is worth adding that a transition from 
 the lower or fragmentary to the higher or systematic 
 ethics may be seen at the point at which without any 
 scientific analysis, some general conception arises, compre- 
 hending and subordinating to itself all minor rules of 
 conduct. Such a conception may be social or religious ; 
 the end that it proposes may be the welfare of society, or 
 it may be obedience to the will of God. In either case, 
 though with very different results, such a conception 
 endows life for the first time with real unity of purpose, 
 and under its guidance a man's every action comes to be 
 devoted to a single end. Such an end, however, rarely 
 includes within it the whole of human nature. Those 
 who consecrate their lives to a single cause tend, as we are 
 often tragically made aware, to limit themselves in pro- 
 portion to their success in concentration. There are very 
 few men who can be as ardent in their patriotism as 
 Mazzini, and yet at the same time conceive of their 
 country as the servant rather than the mistress of 
 humanity. The ordinary patriotism is, if made the 
 highest end of life, a narrow, exclusive, and in the long 
 run a self-destructive idea. Conversely the greatest 
 modern statesmen in our own country have been noted 
 for qualifying the insular by the " European " view. 
 Nor need we waste words in describing how religion often 
 tends to narrow as well as to elevate. A man's God is 
 a crystallisation of certain elements of his own nature. It 
 is therefore a limited being, narrower than the man him- 
 self. To find the true God is to understand the Spirit 
 which moves and works in all things and strives towards 
 realisation, and it is only this God whose service is the 
 perfect freedom which consists in following the plan which 
 is at once natural and divine. 
 
 The ideal of moral philosophy is also to bring the con- 
 duct of life under the unity of a single comprehensive 
 purpose. But this unity, it is suggested, is formed by a 
 deliberate synthesis of the divergent but not necessarily 
 conflicting possibilities of human development. Nothing, 
 
XVI SYSTEMATIC THOUGHT 391 
 
 if the method is true to itself, can be left out that Is per- 
 manently necessary or desirable in the formation of human 
 character. Hence the ethical religion claims the privilege 
 of concentrating, like other religions, all life and all its 
 powers on a single aim, but it concentrates without narrow- 
 ing. Its ideal is to bring to their highest pitch all the 
 faculties of man so far as they are capable of harmonious 
 development. Its enemy is everything that conflicts with 
 such harmony, and of this it finds much in the established 
 order, and even in the recognised moral and religious 
 teaching of the best ordered societies. It has therefore 
 constantly to go back from the recognised ideal to its own 
 deeper ideal. Its work is constantly to revise social rela- 
 tions and moral values in accordance with the realities of 
 human nature and social life. In this formula we arrive 
 by another road at the point reached when discussing the 
 goal of scientific thought. We saw then that the develop- 
 ment of science and philosophy pointed to the ideal of a 
 completed system in which the results of race experience 
 should be so far co-ordinated as to make possible a just 
 understanding of the true lines of race-development. We 
 saw that this ideal postulated a certain development of 
 the ethical consciousness, since it is for this consciousness 
 that the race becomes a unity, while even to apprehend, 
 and, much more, to translate it into a practical correlation 
 of conduct and ideal, an ethical principle was needed as the 
 underlying motive. We have now sketched the course of 
 ethical development so far as to show that it leads us to 
 the same result, that the highest ethical consciousness 
 postulates an understanding of the possibilities of race 
 development, and consists in the effort to remodel social, 
 moral, and religious life in accordance therewith. As in 
 theoretical, so in practical science, the higher development 
 consists in a double process. Like philosophy, it is a com- 
 pletion of the co-ordination of conduct which we find in all 
 moral ideas by the formation of a single comprehensive 
 system. Like philosophy, it proceeds by tracing existing 
 conceptions back to underlying prtftciples, finding in such 
 principles a keystone of the arch. 
 
 The parallel between ethical development and the general 
 
392 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 growth of system and co-ordination of which it is a part, 
 may indeed be carried through all the four intellectual 
 stages which we have distinguished. In the first stage we 
 have impulse not explicitly related to its end. Accordingly 
 we have no evidence of purposive action for the good of 
 another. In the second stage we have concrete, practical 
 ends. Corresponding with this, we have sympathy and 
 attachment binding one individual to others, and corre- 
 lating his action with their immediate needs. In the third 
 stage, action rests on general conceptions, and is adapted to 
 comprehensive ends. Ethically it is guided by moral 
 rules, and may be subordinated to an end as comprehensive 
 as the permanent welfare of a great community. In the 
 fourth stage general conceptions being traced back to their 
 principles are formed into a comprehensive system in which 
 any particular thought or action must find its definite 
 place in relation to all the rest. Ethically this general 
 conception is the realisation of the full promise of human 
 nature in the efFort towards which it is conceived that 
 human efFort might find a unity which should not be a 
 limitation. 
 
 Summary. 
 
 The last stage of development that we have traced 
 consists, like the earlier ones, in a double advance in ex- 
 plicitness and comprehension. Once again, there is no 
 breach of continuity, but a series of changes amounting as 
 they are summed up to a difference of quality. Going below 
 the reasoning of the previous stage and its conditions in 
 reality, thought now interconnects the universal Truths 
 which constitute these conditions and forms of them a 
 system, the aim of which is to render experience intelligible 
 as a whole. From first to last the mind works by corre- 
 lating experiences. In the highest development of the 
 present stage, the principles and methods of correlation 
 themselves become objects of consciousness, and form a 
 distinguishable element in the system which they build up. 
 We have compared the earlier stages to distinct phases in 
 the apprehension of a logical syllogism. The lowest stage 
 
XVI SYSTEMATIC THOUGHT 393 
 
 we compared to a syllogism in which the conclusion alone 
 was explicit, the premisses being represented by psychological 
 forces which, without being grasped as such, produced 
 their result. The second stage we took as equivalent to 
 the inference from minor to conclusion, where a major 
 premiss was still unrecognised. In the third stage, the 
 major was brought into the conscious process, and we had 
 major, minor, and conclusion explicitly recognised as a 
 coherent whole. It remains that in this last stage the 
 theory of syllogism, the character of the Universal and the 
 Particular, the assumptions involved in reasoning, in a 
 word, the whole thought-process operating as a psycho- 
 logical force in the lower stages, should be analysed out, 
 and become, like its data and its products, an object of 
 examination and criticism. The highest operation of 
 thought, as we know it, is to be conscious of its own prin- 
 ciples. And this applies, of course, to the moral and 
 practical as well as to the theoretical functions of thought. 
 We demand at this stage a similar analysis of the basis of 
 the moral judgment : of religious conceptions : of the 
 social structure. In the lower stages of human develop- 
 ment these conceptions grow like natural products. 
 Though their life is in the thought and action of intelli- 
 gent individuals, yet the action of man on man, of thought 
 on thought, of the social structure on the individual^ of 
 the individual on his environment, is so subtle and so 
 complex that though each step in the progress of any 
 great change may be the conscious act of a rational agent, 
 the change as a whole proceeds unconsciously and without 
 plan. Gradually to weld the vast mass of interrelated 
 cause and effect that constitutes history into an intelligible 
 whole will be the latest result — for it is a result not yet 
 achieved — of the highest science. In point of explicitness, 
 then, the work of the highest human philosophy is to 
 analyse and bring into its system the principles upon which 
 that system rests. 
 
 These principles form the keystone of the arch, which 
 for the first time embraces the whole of human purpose 
 within its span. In the previous stages we have seen how 
 the organisation of experience began modestly, with the 
 
394 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap, xvi 
 
 readjustment of instinctive processes, and developed to the 
 point where in human life it uses the recorded experience 
 of the past to form a basis of conduct, and a setting for 
 the life and purposes of the individual. But up to this 
 point, though experiences are grouped together, the results 
 are not systematically co-ordinated inter se, nor has life one 
 purpose, plan, or rule, but rather many that contend with 
 one another. It remains for the highest stage to reduce 
 the whole of human experience to a single system, and to 
 make the future of humanity the all-embracing purpose of 
 action. Remote as this ideal organisation of life may be, 
 it is suggested that the trend of theoretical science is 
 towards the discovery of the conditions of human de- 
 velopment, while the trend of the ethical spirit is towards 
 making that development the supreme object of action. 
 In the union of these movements, human thought would 
 seem to come as near as possible to the limiting conception 
 of the correlation of all experience with all action. At 
 any rate, knowledge of the underlying conditions of 
 development would become the basis of a system of 
 conduct designed to promote development. The life 
 of the species would become self-conscious, and its growth 
 self-determined. It remains only to note that the force of 
 instinct or heredity would not disappear, but it would no 
 longer be a force operating outside the system of know- 
 ledge. On the contrary, it would enter into the system 
 and be duly allowed for among the fundamental conditions 
 affecting the possibilities of growth. 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 SUMMARY OF THE STAGES OF CORRELATION 
 
 I. The broad fact dealt with in the preceding chapters 
 is the adaptation of human and animal action to the 
 requirements of life and growth. Such adaptation we have 
 found to involve a certain correlation, to put it in the 
 most general terms possible, between the experiences and 
 actions of the individual and of the race. In the character 
 of the correlation found at different stages there is an 
 immense difference, and as is the nature of the correlation, 
 such is the adequacy, subtleness, and comprehensiveness of 
 the adaptation, and such also the " requirements of 
 existence" which the organism seeks to meet. At one 
 end of the scale we have a method of correlation based on 
 the principle of heredity, and working out in the course of 
 many generations and through the extinction of a majority 
 of individuals, a structure fitted to respond with some- 
 thing approaching the regularity of a machine, to those 
 promptings of the environment or of the inward mechanism 
 which concern the safety of the individual and the per- 
 petuation of the species. Adaptation at this stage, though 
 often a model of precision in its working, is seen never- 
 theless in its narrowest and most primitive shape. For 
 each act is merely a response to a stimulus or set of stimuli 
 which under normal circumstances gives the required result, 
 but, where the environment deviates from the normal, 
 there is little or no power of making the necessary 
 readjustments. Lastly, the requirements of existence 
 which action is adapted to secure are the requirements of a 
 
 395 
 
396 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 bare existence, or, to put it more fully, of the maintenance 
 of the specific type. Action is not adapted to the im- 
 provement of the type, nor even to making the life of the 
 individual or of other individuals better or fuller or more 
 comfortable. 
 
 From this stage of correlation we passed to those in 
 which the behaviour of the organism is less and less rigidly 
 defined by heredity, while the part played by experience 
 becomes greater. Adaptation becomes at the same time 
 more many-sided and directed to remoter and more 
 comprehensive aims, including conceptions of welfare 
 which involve something more than the bare existence of 
 the species. As the development proceeds, the experience 
 of the race is once more brought into play in a new form, 
 as acting not merely through inheritance, but through 
 tradition and history, and finally as the basis of scientific 
 inductions. In a parallel fashion, the conception of the 
 ends of conduct widens until it grasps the welfare of the 
 race as a whole as its object. At this point Develop- 
 ment, at first blind and mechanical, advancing through 
 stress of conflict and competition, becomes directed and 
 purposeful — an organic growth, and yet the growth of 
 an organism that knows its own destiny, and by knowing 
 achieves it. 
 
 This process is, as we conceive, the fundamental fact of 
 Orthogenic Evolution. We have now to summarise the 
 main features of the successive stages as they have appeared 
 in the preceding chapters. 
 
 /. Correlation by Heredity. 
 
 There is, as we have seen, an indirect correlation of 
 experience, reaction, and welfare, before intelligence, that 
 is, the capacity of the individual to learn from experience, 
 comes into play. Response to stimulus is in this stage the 
 outcome of an inherited structure, and if a certain variation 
 of structure gives a more suitable response, that is, one 
 better adapted to preserve the organism or its offspring, 
 such a structure would tend to be " selected." That is to 
 say, individuals possessing it would have an advantage in 
 the struggle for existence. In this way inborn tendencies 
 to a given method of response may be correlated with the 
 
XVII STAGES OF CORRELATION 397 
 
 past experiences of the race. The points to be summarily 
 noted here as to this method of adaptation are : — 
 
 1. Such correlation is not achieved within the experience 
 
 of any individual, but only through a succession 
 of individuals, resting upon the destruction of most 
 of them. 
 
 2. The "welfare" subserved by the adaptation is simply 
 
 the survival of the race under the existing conditions 
 of its environment. 
 
 3. Adaptation is limited by stimulus ; that is to say, if 
 
 the normal stimulus fails or is greatly modified, the 
 power of carrying out the " ends " which the 
 adaptation subserves is small, and often altogether 
 absent. 
 
 4. The growth of adaptation {i.e., the evolution of a 
 
 Reflex or any structurally determined response) 
 is limited by the condition that each stage of 
 change must be directly more beneficial than 
 that which it supersedes {i.e., without regard to 
 the question whether a further development on 
 similar lines would be still more beneficial or 
 not). 
 
 It follows that (as compared with correlation effected 
 within the experience of the individual) the rate of change 
 is indefinitely slow, and there is no necessary tendency to 
 a higher type, but merely to one which will under existing 
 circumstances maintain itself more efficiently. 
 
 II. Correlation by Coexistent Conditions. 
 
 We could not carry our study of behaviour far in any 
 direction without coming on a factor clearly distinct from 
 the operation of a hereditary mechanism, and indeed in 
 appearance from any mechanism whatever. The dis- 
 tinction was that mechanical process is unaffected by its 
 consequences. The new factor, which we called generic- 
 ally conation, is conditioned by its relation to the results 
 arising from it. We found traces of this factor in very 
 low stages of the animal world, and it is probably co- 
 extensive with animal if not with all life. It expresses 
 itself in action in the uniqueness and originality with 
 
398 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 which diverse elements affecting the organism are so 
 correlated as to secure suitable results. Such correlation 
 among ourselves involves the condition of consciousness. 
 Consciousness is known to each of us only by introspec- 
 tion, only therefore within himself. But we do not 
 hesitate to impute it to other human beings and to 
 attribute to them modifications of consciousness similar 
 to those which we each know in ourselves on the ground 
 of similarity of behaviour. We found that among 
 animals processes exist which proceed from causes and 
 perform functions closely corresponding to those which 
 among ourselves involve consciousness in various forms, 
 and we decided to characterise such processes in terms of 
 consciousness, without implying thereby that if we had 
 a sense which could directly acquaint us with what 
 passes within the animal we should find it exactly like 
 the conscious state that we know in ourselves. We also 
 speak freely of conscious processes as causes of behaviour 
 without postulating a theory of the relation between the 
 conscious and the physical. Every conscious process 
 may, for anything that has here been said, have a physical 
 side or concomitant, and it may be only through its 
 physical side that it operates on physical processes. But 
 even so the physical state involving consciousness is 
 distinct from all others in its causes and effects, and it is 
 the nature of this distinction which we have been pointing 
 out. When we speak of any form of consciousness as a 
 link in causation, then we refer to the operation of that 
 process, be it physical or psychophysical, in which, among 
 ourselves, that form of consciousness is an integral 
 factor.^ 
 
 The function of conative consciousness in general is 
 to effect fresh correlations within the life of the individual, 
 correlations which could not be achieved by hereditary 
 
 1 That the psychical element is a true cause, i.e.^ that psychical energy 
 exists, is, however, my belief. I have worked out the reasons in my own 
 fashion in Development and Purpose, Part II. Ch. IV. The impossibility 
 of a mechanical view of mind and the weakness of the presumptions on 
 which it rests is ably shown by Dr. McDougall in his Mind and Body, 
 however much the Animistic theory in the form which he proposes may be 
 subject to criticism. 
 
XVII STAGES OF CORRELATION 399 
 
 mechanism. In its earliest forms this appears in the 
 relation established between the act and the present con- 
 ditions of the organism. The crudest instance is the 
 maintenance of action, with repeated reversals and varia- 
 tions under the influence of some persistent stimulus. 
 This behaviour tends at last to bring relief, and may be 
 regarded as determined, in an indefinite or negative 
 fashion, by its tendency, since it is the discomfort of the 
 present that excites action and maintains it at high 
 tension while the failure to give relief causes its reversal 
 and modification. In the sensori-motor action we found 
 a more definite direction given to effort. Various circum- 
 stances and movements are uniquely correlated in the act 
 of attention and (if we exclude ideas) we must regard 
 the sense of approximation to the result as the factor main- 
 taining the appropriate action and inhibiting deviations. 
 
 The result thus indirectly determining action (as the 
 point to which the conation tends) is the performance of 
 some function in the life of the organism. In our con- 
 sciousness it is that which at the moment satisfies. Where 
 one object is attained, others come into view, and in 
 certain cases a train of objects may be formed leading up 
 to some total result. Such a line of behaviour may be 
 laid down by the hereditary structure of the organism, 
 and the enduring interest which governs it is called an 
 Instinct. In Instinct then successive conations are corre- 
 lated so as to secure some ultimate result, i.e., to subserve 
 some organic function, but this correlation, so far as it is 
 purely instinctive, is not effected by consciousness. The 
 instinct at any given stage arouses interest in the object 
 appropriate at that stage and conative consciousness is 
 limited to the achievement of that object. In so far as 
 remoter aims come into view and intermediate stages 
 losing their independent interest are treated merely as 
 means, a higher factor of correlation comes into play and 
 we pass from the sphere of pure Instinct into the stage 
 in which Instinct is merged with Intelligence. 
 
 So far, then, consciousness as such effects a correlation 
 of present conditions. Acting under correlations deter- 
 mined by heredity, it serves to make these more plastic 
 
400 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 and efficient in adapting themselves to variety and over- 
 coming obstacles. We have now to examine the extension 
 of its scope to Past and Future. 
 
 ///. Correlation based on Individual Experience. 
 
 Of this process, which we have considered the special 
 work of Intelligence, we have distinguished four great 
 stages. 
 
 Stage I. Inarticulate Correlation. 
 
 While inherited behaviour, whether instinctive or 
 reflex, consists of the response to stimulus of a preformed 
 structure, we find in this stage a modification of such 
 response by experience of its effects. This process may 
 be regarded as the germ of all subsequent correlation. 
 In this first stage, the correlation is to be understood as 
 follows : — 
 
 The feeling consequent upon instinctive or random 
 reaction to a stimulus modifies the reaction to similar 
 stimuli in a manner determined by the nature of the 
 feeling. Simple instances are those of the spider refusing 
 after a few trials a fly which had been dipped in turpentine, 
 or of the fish which learns to come for food on the 
 approach of human beings. 
 
 To the observer it is clear that the basis of the 
 modification is a Certain relation of stimulus, reaction, and 
 feeling. But for the intelligence at this stage, these 
 elements and their relations are not explicit. They have 
 no distinct function each for itself, but act as a whole so as 
 to effect the particular modification described. We have 
 described this as a Correlation of Empirical Results, or 
 negatively, as Inarticulate Correlation. As a thought 
 process we have compared it to a syllogism In which the 
 mind is explicitly aware of the practical conclusion alone, 
 the premisses being presented by a certain combination of 
 psychological forces from which the conclusion follows. 
 
 The distinctive conscious function involved is an 
 impulse-feeling attached to a sensory excitement in con- 
 sequence of previous experience. 
 
 The scope of the experience co-ordinated is the relation 
 between reaction upon stimulus and the immediately attend- 
 ant feeling. The scope of the adjustment effected is pre- 
 
XVII STAGES OF CORRELATION 401 
 
 cisely the same — that is, adaptation of reaction so as to 
 -produce the most suitable feeling. 
 
 Correlation of this type prunes and perfects hereditary 
 tendencies and forms useful habits out of random acts. 
 The general biological effect is to render instinct more 
 plastic. 
 
 Ethically considered, action in this stage is Impulsive, 
 and so far as determined by experience, must be regarded 
 as limited to adjustments based on and relative to the 
 feeling of the individual alone. 
 Stage II. Concrete Experience and the Practical Judgment. 
 
 It is clear that in the first stage the scope of intelligence 
 is at a minimum, being confined to the felt character of 
 the excitement of the moment. This character must ^ 
 contain a motor impulse more or less definite, but is not 
 in any way differentiated into distinct elements. Hence 
 discrimination is also at its lowest point. The first 
 advance in both these respects brings us to the second stage. 
 Psychologically, the new departure which has taken place 
 in this stage is that the related term which in the previous 
 stage merely influences action, is now brought explicitly 
 into consciousness. In other words, the perceptual 
 relation, the concrete whole in which distinct terms are 
 united, now appears to be the basis of action, or even 
 to enter, along with other experiences, into higher com- 
 binations. Thus in the previous stage, where an excita- 
 tion A led to a consequence b, it acquired thereby a 
 motor character /3. But in proportion as ^ becomes 
 accurately defined and individualised in each new case, it 
 comes to be equivalent to what is in human consciousness 
 a motor idea of b in a definite relation to a. The content 
 thus arrived at is a whole constituted by related elements. 
 
 The judgment in which distinct elements are held in 
 relation must rest upon a perception, and thus the founda- 
 tion of the change we are describing must lie in the growing 
 distinctness and comprehensiveness of perception whereby 
 related objects can be apprehended distinctly and yet 
 together. Such apprehension again becomes possible as 
 
 ^ At least in the lower stages. The development of sensation into Per- 
 ception does not depend exclusively on motor impulses. 
 
 D D 
 
402 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 the perception proper becomes disengaged from the motor 
 impulse, so extending its scope and becoming a perceptual 
 judgment.^ Such a perceptual complex when freely 
 reproducible, becomes the basis of the recognition of 
 individual objects, persons, and places, and of the 
 succession of events. Action is now no longer tied to a 
 specific motor stimulus, but is based on a relation whereby 
 means and end are connected. 
 
 We have called this the stage of Concrete Experience 
 and of the Practical Judgment. The correlation which it 
 effects is a degree more complex than that of the preceding 
 stage. Its terms are themselves complexes of related 
 elements. In the percept-complex which forms the 
 starting point, experiences which are distinct are already 
 combined to form a whole. The adjustment of means to 
 ends is again, as we have understood it, a distinct act of 
 correlation, and the one relation is based on the other. 
 We may express this increased complexity by describing 
 this stage as the correlation of interrelated elements or 
 Articulate Complexes, the one complex being perceptual, 
 the other practical. Both are essentially concrete, that is 
 to say, we deal in this stage not with the relation as such, 
 but with two or more related objects of experience. From 
 this it follows that while the " particular " relations are 
 "conscious" or "explicit," the "universal " that connects 
 them operates unconsciously. In a given case a conse- 
 quence is anticipated on the basis of a parallel experience, 
 but there is no consciousness of the implied generalisation, 
 nor even an analysis revealing the point of identity as 
 against the individual differences between the two cases. 
 The inferential process involved is thus parallel to the 
 argument from particulars to particulars, or, if we regard 
 the application of experience alone, to an argument from 
 minor premiss to conclusion. In this argument the major 
 premiss is not an explicit object of consciousness, but is 
 
 ' In sensori-motor action we already have a certain correlation of 
 distinct elements. But this correlation is purely subservient to the motor 
 response. We have no evidence of the apprehension of the complex as a 
 distinct state until we find it "reproduced" in an idea. We may there- 
 fore speak of perception in relation to sensori-motor activity but not of 
 the perceptual judgment. 
 
XVII STAGES OF CORRELATION 403 
 
 represented by the psychological efFect of past experience, 
 which makes the mind draw its Inference. 
 
 The increased scope of correlation in this stage is most 
 clearly seen in the fact that in reaching it we pass from 
 the sphere of motor reaction and attendant feelings to 
 that of perception and the anticipation of events. The 
 organism can now be said to " know " outer objects (as 
 having distinct qualities, for example) to recognise persons 
 and other animals and to anticipate their behaviour. Its 
 Instincts as bearing relation to other individuals, etc., are 
 thus subject to modification in accordance with experience, 
 while It Is also possible for It to learn modes of action to 
 which there is no instinctive tendency at all, and that 
 not merely by the fortunate efFect of random successes. 
 On the other hand, the animal's action appears to be 
 limited to what may be called its concrete environment and 
 immediate practical ends. 
 
 On the ethical aspect, the important points to note are, 
 first, that action being prompted by an Idea of Its end, we 
 may say that In this stage Impulse is replaced by Desire, 
 and since desires may conflict, the germs of deliberation 
 and even of self-control appear. Secondly, with the 
 knowledge of Individuals and their behaviour comes the 
 possibility of emotional states in relation to them. For 
 our purposes the most significant of these states are 
 Sympathy and Affection, whereby the experiences of 
 another become an object of desire along with one's own. 
 The sympathetic desires and feelings are In the first place 
 the conscious rendering of the Instincts tending to the 
 maintenance of the species, but observation shows that 
 they may be transferred under the workings of experience 
 to other beings {e.g., men) to whom they do not attach 
 instinctively. 
 
 To sum up. 
 
 The work of Intelligence in this stage, may be described 
 as a Correlation of articulate complexes in the perceptual order. 
 
 The distinctive conscious functions involved are the 
 perceptual judgment in which distinct elements are held 
 in relation, and the practical Idea based upon it which 
 relates to the future. In the correlation which these 
 
 D D 2 
 
404 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 functions efFect the universal relation is the implicitly 
 operative force. Comparing it in this respect with 
 the previous stage, we see that the concrete relation 
 which was there merely an element in the " process " has 
 here passed over with the content. The underlying 
 identity remains outside. The process of correlation 
 is thus comparable to a Syllogism in which minor premiss 
 and conclusion are avowed, while the major premiss is 
 suppressed. 
 
 In scope, the experiences co-ordinated are those of the 
 concrete objects and events in their relation^ with which the 
 mind comes in contact through perception. The scope of 
 purpose is the adoption of means to practical ends. 
 
 In sphere this co-ordination is limited to ends determined 
 in general character by instinct. In general biological 
 effect, its tendency is to throw instinct back to the outlines 
 or plan of action, and to replace it in detail by individual 
 experience and mutual help and even tradition. 
 
 Under its Ethical Aspect its distinguishing feature is the 
 determination of behaviour by Desire having for its object 
 the experience of others as well as of the Agent. 
 
 Stage III. Conceptual Thinking and Will. 
 
 In the last stage, the connection between the perceived 
 relation and the action based on it remained unanalysed. 
 It rests on an element of identical quality and implies a 
 generalisation which are not in that stage made explicit. 
 The steps by which this bond of connection is analysed out 
 as a distinct content of thought lead us to the third stage. 
 
 The starting point, logically, of this process is the act 
 of analysis which renders distinct the common element in 
 different instances. This analysis, which represents a 
 higher development of articulateness in perception, is 
 conditioned by comparisons which throw the common 
 point into relief by exhibiting it in varying contexts. Such 
 comparisons are rendered possible by the increased scope 
 of experience, and are in turn facilitated by the analytical 
 tendency which they cultivate. Thus through increase 
 in the scope and clearness of intelligence a new kind of 
 correlation grows up, resting on the common characters 
 which run through experience, and their specific differences. 
 
XVII STAGES OF CORRELATION 405 
 
 We have called such correlation cross-relation, because it 
 runs across the order of direct perceptual or practical 
 activity in which the relations of the previous stages have 
 been found. Of the working out of this correlation, 
 language, both as cause and effect, is the central feature. 
 
 This cross connection then appears as the backbone of 
 the third stage. The terms which it connects are not 
 merely related percepts. They are qualities as such, 
 relations as such, elements of continuous identity as 
 such. We have called them collectively elements of 
 affinity between different portions of the world of 
 percepts. These affinities are now explicitly recognised 
 and correlated with one another, thus forming generalisa- 
 tions in which the connection between experience and 
 action always operative is for the first time clearly 
 expressed, and felt in consciousness as connection, as 
 inference. On the other hand, the methods by which 
 the generalisation is drawn from and applied to experience 
 still remain uncriticised. The work of correlation becomes 
 at length comparable to a complete syllogism in which 
 both premisses are made explicit. Yet there is at work a 
 thought-process which, with all the assumptions involved 
 in reasoning on the basis of experience, is not yet taken 
 into account. 
 
 In scope, the correlation that is now made possible is 
 immeasurably widened. In the conceptions of this stage, 
 thought first finds itself possessed of contents set free 
 from the line of practical interests, and also — through the 
 possibility of freely breaking up and inter-connecting 
 detached concepts — from the perceptual order. In this 
 way a " world of ideas " is formed, going beyond as well 
 as behind experience, and the conceptions which form this 
 world — whether logically universal, or like the Self and 
 the State, Individual — are equally schemes of reference to 
 great masses of experience, past or future. Thus the 
 permanent elements in experience are grasped, and in 
 experience we must now once more include the experi- 
 ence of the race as handed on by tradition. Similarly, 
 action is subordinated to purposes of comprehensive and 
 abiding interest and to rules of universal appHcability. 
 
4o6 Mir^D IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 Conduct is adjusted to meet the requirements of self or 
 others as Persons, of Society as an abiding structure, or 
 Morality as a system of universal rules. In fine, the 
 correlation is now between the permanent and universal 
 in experience on the one hand, and broad purposes of 
 life or general standards of conduct on the other. 
 
 Though the part played by experience and thought 
 operating on experience is so greatly increased, it must 
 not be supposed that the instinctive basis of action has 
 disappeared. On the contrary, experience and the use 
 made of it are determined in the first place by the 
 inherited structure. The same fundamental conditions 
 are at the root of the ideals of life, and largely even of 
 the theories of reality which emerge in this stage. Yet 
 at all points, in a manner which we do not in this work 
 seek to determine in detail, instinct is now infused with 
 experience, if in experience we include tradition. The 
 nature of man's ends can now no more be called purely in- 
 stinctive than the means whereby he learns to achieve them. 
 
 From the ethical point of view, we note, first, the 
 emergence of Will as something more than a balancing of 
 Desires — more, because it expresses the personality as a 
 whole which now for the first time has a comprehensive 
 end or scheme of life to guide it. As desire is transformed 
 into will, so sympathy is transformed into regard for the 
 personality of others, and the social impulses of the 
 previous stage pass into an ordered conception of social 
 life and its duties, with a felt obligation of its own that 
 is independent of passing impulse. Conduct is standardised, 
 and becomes explicit morality. 
 
 To sum up: the work of intelligence in this stage is 
 the correlation of the elements of affinity pervading and 
 connecting masses of diverse experience. 
 
 The distinctive conscious function involved is the con- 
 ception wherein such an element being distinguished from 
 any given experience becomes a medium of reference to 
 bodies of experience. Correlation through this function is 
 comparable with the completed syllogism with explicit 
 Major Premiss, and comparing it with the preceding 
 stage, we see that the pervading identity which was there 
 
xvii STAGES OF CORRELATION 407 
 
 the central feature of the inexplicit " process," has now 
 passed over into the recognised "content," leaving outside 
 those general methods and assumptions of thought by 
 which the universal and all other products of intelligence 
 are built up. 
 
 The scope of intelligence in this stage extends to the 
 permanent and substantial in the world of experience 
 and to the causal relations underlying its variations. 
 It includes the permanent interests of the individual 
 or of society among its ends, and regulates behaviour 
 in accordance with general rules. 
 
 Intelligence thus extends its sphere of influence to the 
 permanent conditions under which life is maintained, and of 
 the great ends that make it desirable. In this it partly 
 replaces and partly remodels hereditary tendencies. Yet 
 by these tendencies it is itself unconsciously guided, and 
 for this reason its grasp of the conditions remains partial 
 and uncertain. 
 
 Under its Ethical Aspect, this is the stage of Will 
 guided by general conceptions of the permanent welfare of 
 self, others, or the community, as well as by the code of 
 rules in accordance with which the life of any given society 
 is organised. 
 
 Stage IV. Rational System. 
 
 The interconnection of experience with experience, which 
 is the essence of what we mean by system, has been seen 
 at work in all the preceding stages, and in the third stage 
 the work of systematisation has gone so far as to group 
 experiences and purposes into more or less organised 
 bodies. Nevertheless it is a familiar characteristic of 
 " common sense " knowledge that it is unsystematic. 
 This is as much as to say that its systematisation is inex- 
 plicit and incomplete. We may consider that the fourth 
 stage begins when system, i.e., the formation of a coherent, 
 self supporting, exact and exhaustive body of knowledge 
 upon a subject — begins to be made an explicit object of 
 mental effort. The stage would be complete when such 
 a system should embrace the conditions and possibilities 
 of human evolution. 
 
 From an early stage of its development, the effort 
 
4o8 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 to systematise induces two consequences. The first is a 
 criticism of the principles upon which thought has hitherto 
 dealt with experience, the second a criticism of experience 
 itself, or perhaps rather of the result constructed by 
 thought operating in and upon experience. In this move- 
 ment, the work of analysis, of rendering thought articulate, 
 reaches its final stage, at which it attacks the principles, 
 methods, and processes of thought itself. We compared 
 the inferences of the last stage to a syllogism in which 
 both premisses and conclusion were completely explicit ; 
 but in this stage there is yet another point that is explicit, 
 i.e., the assumptions involved in syllogising, in building 
 up and applying universal conceptions. 
 
 Ideally, intelligence at this stage also reaches its highest 
 development in point of scope, for its ultimate goal is 
 nothing less than the complete synthesis of reality as a 
 whole. This goal we have treated as merely a " regulative 
 concept." Reality is infinite, but the conditions affect- 
 ing human life and its development are finite, and there 
 is no reason why they should not come within the scope 
 of science. The knowledge of the conditions of human 
 life and the possibilities of the human race would there- 
 fore constitute the scope of intelligence, if we conceive the 
 scientific stage to have arrived at maturity. The result 
 would be a system including not all reality, but all that 
 affects practical life. 
 
 The application of such a system would be a deliberate 
 organisation of life, in which the development of the race 
 is itself the supreme object. And of such an organisation 
 the highest ethical consciousness supplies the necessary 
 basis. If we imagine the tendencies which we see in germ 
 to have reached maturity, we should have brought the de- 
 velopment of mind to a point at which the slow and uncer- 
 tain growth emerging through conflict and competition with 
 forms that are often stronger though less worthy, would 
 be replaced by an orderly development moving steadily 
 towards an ascertained goal, and master of the conditions, 
 internal and external, of its advance. Thus the scope of 
 correlation at this stage is inclusive of all matters affecting 
 action. The whole experience of the race is used to guide 
 
XVII STAGES OF CORRELATION 409 
 
 the whole future of the race. From race-experience — in 
 that widest sense in which moral, spiritual, and imagi- 
 native experience are comprehended — is derived that 
 understanding of man's own nature, the meaning of his 
 life on earth, by which action is so shaped as to bring 
 about the consummation in which the human spirit 
 " comes to itself," and in so doing enters on its kingdom. 
 We express this by saying that the conditions and character 
 of human development are made the basis of conduct 
 directed to the perfection of that development. 
 
 At this point the hereditary factor undergoes its final 
 transformation. For under one aspect the special work 
 of this stage consists not in eliminating but in evaluating 
 that factor. The methods upon which correlation rests 
 remained unconscious and implicit in the third stage. 
 They are of course methods resting on a hereditary 
 structure modified by such gradual and unnoticed opera- 
 tions of experience as are no more conscious or deliberate 
 in their workings than the growth of physical structure 
 itself. While science and philosophy have, to criticise 
 methods of inference, they have also to take account 
 of the limitations of sense-experience — limitations of 
 course depending on the inherited structure of the sense 
 organs. But perhaps most important of all is the 
 evaluation of the hereditary factor in the moral con- 
 sciousness. We have seen that in the previous stage the 
 moral impulses gave rise to definitely formulated rules 
 and standards of action. They also fuse with the concep- 
 tions coming from other sources to make the religions of 
 the world. But though they give rise to explicit con- 
 ceptions, they themselves are far from being clearly 
 analysed. Nowhere is the contrast between clearness of 
 result and obscurity of process more marked or of more 
 serious importance than in the sphere of practical conduct. 
 What is contributed by instinct, what by tradition, how 
 much rests on conscious or unconscious adaptation to 
 economic or political circumstances, how far theories of 
 the supernatural have elevated, debased, or in any way 
 modified ethical conceptions, are questions of which ethical 
 theory has hardly yet touched the fringe. The problem 
 
4IO MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 on solving which the possibility of " self-conscious de- 
 velopment " depends is to find the value of all these un- 
 known quantities, and by evaluating them, to determine how 
 much of moral truth is contained in recognised morality. 
 This is, in other words, to determine what is meant by 
 the best and highest development of the human soul, and 
 what conduct is essential thereto. 
 
 Summing up : The work of intelligence in this stage 
 may be described as the Correlation of the governing con- 
 ditions of the life of mind, that is, of the methods and aims of 
 correlation itself— a correlation of correlations. 
 
 Its distinctive psychological unit is the apprehension of 
 the principles and processes underlying thought — the pro- 
 cess of thinking made conscious. This is the process 
 implicit in all the preceding stages, and in bringing it into 
 consciousness so that the whole of the " thought process " 
 now passes into the content, the reasoning of this stage is 
 as a syllogism in which the assumptions involved in 
 syllogising should be taken into account. 
 
 In scope, the work of Intelligence is to correlate the 
 permanent underlying conditions of racial development with 
 its ideal goal. 
 
 Its sphere is thus coextensive with life, and includes 
 the due appreciation of the conditions imposed on develop- 
 ment by heredity. 
 
 Under its Ethical Aspect, we may call this the stage of 
 the rational Will in which social standards are subordinated 
 to and unified in the real conditions of human welfare and 
 development. 
 
 At this fourth stage of development, the wheel has come 
 full circle. We start from a condition in which ancestral 
 " experience " acting indirectly through heredity and the 
 elimination of the less adapted fits responses to stimuli into 
 an order suited to maintain the racial type in the environ- 
 ment in which it finds itself. Passing out of this condition, 
 we enter on a process in which life is more and more 
 dominated by intelligence. 
 
 In the lowest stage of this process, a dimly felt mass of 
 experience gradually remodels reaction to stimulus. In the 
 second stage, the perceptual world becomes clear and con- 
 
XVII STAGES OF CORRELATION 411 
 
 Crete, and its relations are used intelligently in the service 
 of desire. In the third stage the mind dissects out the 
 threads of common quality that bind the moving show of 
 perception, and by their aid grasps the permanent inexperi- 
 ence, and subordinates action to large and general purposes. 
 Finally, in the fourth stage, it works down to the principle 
 whereby these great fragments of knowledge and of purpose 
 are pieced together into a rational system, comprehending 
 in a synthesis of thought and action the summed experi- 
 ence and purpose of the race. The first stage is a correla- 
 tion of massive results, the second of articulate complexes 
 in the perceptual order, the third of transperceptual 
 affinities, and the fourth of the processes of correlation. 
 In the first we have consciousness of the present, in the 
 second conscious reference to past and future, in the third 
 the self-consciousness of the individual, and in the fourth 
 that of the race. Impulse and feeling, perceptual judg- 
 ment and desire, conceptual inference and will, critical 
 reason and ethical spirituality mark the successive steps. 
 In each stage, as the sphere of experience grows, that of 
 heredity is transformed. In the first stage it is rendered 
 plastic and general instead of being relatively par- 
 ticular and rigid. In the second, it begins to fuse 
 with experience as the basis of action. In the third, 
 it tends to disappear as a separate force, being partly 
 formulated into rules of life, partly fused with tradition, 
 and partly overlaid thereby. Meanwhile, Experience 
 in the form of recorded history is extending over the 
 ancestral line through which heredity acts, and thus in the 
 fourth stage we come to the point in which the whole 
 field at first covered by unconscious physical forces is 
 now overrun by experience and thought. Race experience, 
 race maintenance, and race-future are still the determining 
 factors, but all now fall within the scope of the Reason, and 
 purposes equally with methods are transformed accordingly. 
 It is not the maintenance of the type, but its perfection, 
 which is sought : not mere adaptation to circumstances, 
 but the domination of the rational spirit in the world. 
 
 Note. — It should be superfluous to say that the above division of in- 
 tellectual growth into stages is of a hypothetical character, and is not 
 
412 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap, xvii 
 
 regarded by the writer as, at best, anything more than a first approxima- 
 tion to the truth. Such as it is, the scheme has a twofold origin : (i) in 
 an analysis of developed experience ; (2) in the observation of less 
 developed experience. The fourfold method of correlation differing stage 
 by stage (a) in respect of the factors explicitly taken into account, and 
 {6) therewith in extent of the sphere comprehended, appears to the writer 
 to be realised in human consciousness as we run the gamut from philo- 
 sophical reflection down to the quasi-mechanical response of habit. 
 Whether these stages into which developed human reason can be analysed 
 correspond to stages by which it g'reiv is of course another question — a 
 question only to be answered by a much wider knowledge of animal 
 psychology and of the distinct processes of human development than we 
 at present possess. If we accept evolution, analogy suggests that human 
 intelligence is a specific and higher development of a more general form 
 of intelligence. Hence, if we cut away the higher development, we 
 should come to something roughly common to man and the higher 
 animals. If we cut further, we should come to something common to 
 man and a wider class of animals, and so forth. But there is a caution 
 to be borne in mind. No two species will come to a quite identical de- 
 velopment. No part of the physical structure of man, I suppose, is 
 precisely equivalent to the homologous part in another mammal, still less 
 in another vertebrate of a different class. It is the same with the mental 
 structure. We must not expect to find any animals whose intelligence 
 falls readily into any classification based on the analysis of human ex- 
 perience. We can only expect to find homologous developments. That 
 being understood, it may be said that the method of the preceding 
 chapters, so far as they relate to animals, has been to analyse out the 
 phases of intellectual development as distinguishable in human experience, 
 and to discover what homologous structures are to be found in the animal 
 world. In accordance with these homologies animals are ranked in. the 
 classification. 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 ORGANISATION, CONFLICT, AND EVOLUTION 
 
 I . We assumed in Chapter I. that Orthogenic Evolution 
 must be identical with the evolution of Mind. This 
 evolution we have now traced, and found to consist in a 
 gradually developing organisation of life. This intelligent 
 organisation, however, is but the natural development and 
 expansion of a process which in its lower stages is purely- 
 biological. The growth of intelligence and of social life 
 rests on a high development of physical organisation. To 
 grasp the process of Orthogenic Evolution as a whole we 
 must therefore extend our view. Speaking generally, it is 
 an advance towards a higher organisation, a development 
 of the organic principle in life. But what is a " higher " 
 organisation ? Can any definition be found which will not 
 bring us back to the conception of Mind or to some human 
 judgment of value ? 
 
 Some light on this question may be gained by considering 
 what we mean by organic unity. By an organic whole, is 
 understood one which (a) has a certain general character or 
 individuality, while (^) it consists of distinguishable parts 
 each with a certain character of its own, but (c) such that 
 they cannot exist unmodified apart from the whole, while the 
 character of the whole is similarly dependent upon them. 
 By a mechanical whole, the negation of this interdepend- 
 ence is intended. It may indeed be doubted whether a 
 purely mechanical whole exists as a reality in rerum natura. 
 Thus, a heap of cannon balls, which has sometimes served 
 
 413 
 
414 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 as an instance, may be said to have a certain character of 
 its own which in some degree afFects the individual balls 
 — by pressure, for example, which imperceptibly alters 
 their figure, and presumably their molecular structure. 
 The definitions then must be taken as laying down two 
 limiting conceptions to which actual things approximate more 
 or less closely, and which are used in ordinary thought. 
 Thus, e.g., by the mechanical view of society is meant the 
 theory which treats human beings as being constant 
 quantities, whether in or out of their social relations. The 
 organic view of society recognises an interdependence 
 whereby the individual is modified by the very social 
 relations which he himself helps to build up. Without 
 going deeper into the nature of the organic principle, these 
 simple considerations may lead us to distinguish two main 
 lines of organic development. There is, first, degree of 
 organic unity. A whole is more organic in proportion as 
 the interdependence of parts is more complete, and one line 
 of advancing organisation will consist in perfecting this 
 unity. Then there is, secondly, scope of organisation. 
 Very simple elements may be very completely organised. 
 Much more numerous, diverse, or complex elements may 
 be less completely organised. In the first case, there is a 
 perfect organism of low or narrow scope. In the second, 
 an imperfect organism of a higher or wider scope. Scope 
 of organisation is proportioned to the diversity of elements 
 which go to build up its unity. A Rhizopod is not so 
 completely a unity as man is, but even if it were, it would 
 be a lower organism. It is a unity including much less 
 of diff^erentiation. From this distinction, it will readily 
 appear that there are two methods by which organic unity 
 may develop. One is by the gradual obliteration of the 
 distinctive characters of the parts, wherein all that is opposed 
 to unity and organisation is worn away. The other is by 
 the working out of a type of organisation in which 
 there is room for more of difference and of what was 
 before contradiction. It is clear that it is only the 
 latter form of development by which organisation can grow 
 in perfection and in scope simultaneously. Taking the 
 two tests of Unity and Scope together, we may regard 
 
XVIII ORGANISATION AND EVOLUTION 415 
 
 them as conjoint tests of " higher " organisation, and we 
 may define orthogenic evolution as the process by which 
 such organisation is attained. 
 
 2. Now the organisation of the life of a species as a 
 whole depends on three more elementary forms of cor- 
 relation. These are : — 
 
 (i). The correlation of the constituent parts of the 
 individual — perfection of structure and function. 
 
 (2). The correlation of the several acts and experiences 
 of the individual. 
 
 (3). The correlation of the acts and lives of different 
 individuals. 
 
 With the two latter we have dealt. It remains to show 
 in a summary way how their development is associated 
 with an advance in physical organisation from the lowest 
 organisms to man. The Protista are classed as the lowest 
 organisms on account of their " simplicity," i.e., the narrow 
 scope of their organisation, confined as it is to a single 
 cell. Among the lowest Metazoa, the unity of the distinct 
 cells that constitute the living being is so loose that it is 
 often difficult to say whether a certain aggregation of cells 
 should be regarded as one individual or many. 
 
 "When from sundry points on the body of a common 
 polype, there bud out young polypes which, after acquiring 
 mouths and tentacles and closing up the communications between 
 their stomachs and the stomach of the parent, finally separate 
 from the parent ; we may with propriety regard them as distinct 
 individuals. But when in the allied compound, Hydrozoa, we 
 find that these young polypes continue permanently connected with 
 the parent ; and when by this continuous budding-out there is 
 presently produced a tree-like aggregation, having a common 
 alimentary canal into which the digestive cavity of each polype 
 opens ; it is no longer so clear that these little sacs, furnished with 
 mouths and tentacles, are severally to be regarded as distinct 
 individuals. We cannot deny a certain individuality to the 
 polypedom." ^ 
 
 Long after organisation is sufficiently developed to leave 
 no doubt as to the unity of the organism, the separate 
 
 ' Herbert Spencer, Principles of Biology, Vol. I. p. 246. Cf. Verworn, 
 pp. 63, 64. 
 
4i6 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 parts still retain powers which show that their mutual de- 
 pendence is still far from complete. The most remarkable 
 of these powers is that of Regeneration, which, as is well- 
 known, diminishes roughly in proportion as organisation 
 advances. For example, among Worms, it is common to 
 find Regeneration not only of the tail, but even of the 
 head.-" No Vertebrate could imitate this feat of growing 
 its head anew, but the lower Vertebrates retain a con- 
 siderable though diminished power of regenerating lost 
 limbs and other organs. Thus, the larval Salamander 
 regenerates the lens of the eye from the posterior layer of 
 the iris.^ The Salamander can also regenerate ah am- 
 putated limb, if the bone is cut across, but not if it is 
 exarticulated. These powers however are by no means 
 common to all the lower Vertebrates — the frog's limb, for 
 example, would merely heal without growing again — and 
 are, I imagine, wholly lost in the higher class of birds 
 and mammals, where the power of regeneration is confined 
 to that fresh growth of the adjacent tissues which we are 
 familiar with in the healing over of a wound, or in the 
 mending of a bone. 
 
 As the loss of regenerative power points to a growing 
 centralisation of the vital functions, so also does the 
 gradual loss of independence on the part of the lower 
 nerve-centres point to the growing centralisation of the 
 nervous system. In passing from the higher to the lower 
 vertebrates, the relative independence of the spinal re- 
 flexes is well marked ; but it is as nothing to the powers of 
 separate nerve centres among the higher Invertebrates. 
 Thus, the loss of the hind quarters does not prevent a 
 bumble bee from continuing its meal, nor an ant from 
 persisting in a battle.^ W^asmann mentions cases of an ant 
 or wasp fighting with its own severed limbs.* On the 
 other hand, according to Forel,^ the severed head of an ant 
 still distinguishes a friend from an enemy. On the same 
 authority we learn that crickets deprived of the cerebral 
 ganglia can be stimulated by touch to oviposition. At 
 
 ' See e.g. Wilson, op. cit., p. 325. ^ Wilson, p. 329. 
 
 ^ Wasmann, Instinct und Intel Ugenz, p. 93. * Ibid. 
 
 ' Aperqu de Psychologie comparde, Annie psychologique, 1895, p. 25. 
 
XVI II ORGANISATION AND EVOLUTION 417 
 
 this stage it is clear that the utiity of the nervous 
 system is not the unity with which we are familiar 
 in man, or in animals which approach man in the general 
 plan of their structure. In truth, unity of nervous 
 organisation is less necessary and perhaps less possible 
 where behaviour consists mainly of a series of instinctive 
 reactions. Reflexes and instincts may be efficiently carried 
 out, each by its own appropriate mechanism, and their 
 mutual dependence may be slight. But in proportion as 
 the organism comes to rely upon its own experience for 
 guidance, it becomes more and more necessary that 
 diiFerent actions and different experiences should be 
 brought to bear upon one another ; and for this purpose 
 different parts of the nervous system must be more 
 intimately correlated. Thus completeness of physical 
 unification serves as a condition of that still higher 
 organisation of life which is the work of intelligence. 
 
 In the same way, social life has its ultimate basis in a 
 refinement of physical organisation whereby the play of 
 separate individual lives becomes interwoven. This is. first 
 seen at a low stage of the animal world in the distinction 
 of sex whereby each individual becomes an incomplete 
 organism, needing union with another to fulfil its vital 
 functions, and endowed accordingly with means of finding 
 and uniting with the other. It is seen, secondly, in the 
 physical relation of mother and young both before and 
 after birth — a relation which, as has been shown, steadily 
 grows in importance as we ascend the orthogenic scale. 
 In both cases physical bonds unite otherwise distinct 
 individuals ' to form temporarily or permanently a higher 
 organisation. As intelligence in general starts from the 
 organised unity of the individual, so the social intelligence 
 — the organising principle which makes a unity of separate 
 individual lives — starts with a physical organisation which 
 does the same work in little. 
 
 Thus from first to last the essence of orthogenic 
 evolution is a progress in Organisation. Such a progress 
 
 1 In the case of the embryo indeed we get a doubt as to the dis- 
 tinctness of individuality quite parallel to that which we have noted in 
 regard to the component parts of the lowest Metazoa. 
 
 £ E 
 
41 8 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 takes two forms. There is a development in organic 
 unity or " organicity," as parts and wholes come to be 
 more and more completely interdependent. And there is 
 increase of scope, as the life or purpose of the organisation 
 becomes more and more comprehensive. The lower 
 phases of this movement are worked out by biological 
 forces. The higher are the work of mind. 
 
 But is this antithesis final and complete ? We . oppose 
 the operation of Mind to that of biological forces * so far 
 as these are mechanical and, like natural selection, act 
 blindly without regard to results. But in everything 
 living we have seen traces of a principle which is not 
 mechanical, which in its most definite shape we identify 
 with conation. If conation is co-extensive with life, then 
 there is at least the germ of Mind in all life, and this is 
 what differentiates it from the inanimate. When we 
 oppose Mind to biological forces, then we mean those 
 forces taken in abstraction from the element of Mind, 
 without which it would seem nothing actually lives. 
 What part then is played in building up organic unity by 
 Mind in the lower forms of conation on the one side and 
 by mechanism on the other .'' This is a question which 
 Biology does not as yet enable us to answer with definite- 
 ness or certainty. In every individual we find a mechanism 
 co-ordinating parts in subservience to the life of the whole. 
 In every individual also we find conation supplementing 
 this mechanism and perfecting it. The relationship is not 
 that of two wholly independent factors. For {a) conation 
 itself depends upon pre-existent structure and stimulus, — 
 hunger, for instance, or the sex impulse arising from 
 a physical condition in response to a physical stimulus 
 and issuing in a pre-formed process which, in the lower 
 stages, the conation only modifies in minor detail. 
 (b) The conation that has done its work affects structure 
 and leaves a modified mechanism behind it, so that the 
 process which has been conscious and conative sinks to 
 the purely mechanical. This latter relation suggested one 
 of the earliest evolutionary theories of instinct, viz., that 
 it arose from the inheritance of habits themselves originally 
 due to intelligence. No one would now maintain this 
 
xviii ORGANISATION AND EVOLUTION 419 
 
 view. But we must observe : {a) the only ascertained 
 cause of determinate modification in the individual is 
 conation. {F) Conation modifies the individual structure. 
 (c) The cause of germinal variation remains wholly 
 unknown except in so far as it is due to the combination 
 of different gametes, and this leaves the variations of the 
 individual gamete unexplained, (a) The denial that 
 modification due to conation may aifect the germ plasm 
 has been erected into a dogma on account of the difliiculty 
 of understanding it, experimental evidence leaving the 
 question open. The early origin of the germ cells within 
 the body is not decisive because we do not know all the 
 ways in which distinct cells aifect one another. It is just 
 possible that modifications impressed from without {e.g. 
 mutilations) should not affect the germ cells while 
 conations arising from within do in some way work upon 
 them. It is clear that any considerable change of the 
 parent organism must affect the environment of the germ 
 cells, and therefore call forth from them new efforts to 
 maintain themselves within the body tissues, and it is 
 conceivable that such effort should involve a modification 
 of structure congruous with and comparable to the change 
 in the tissue which surrounds them. We must not 
 therefore exclude the possibility that conation is at work 
 through the generations building up the organic structure, 
 and if that is the case the whole of organised life would 
 be referable ultimately to the working of Mind, the 
 " mechanical " factors being merely conditions prescribing 
 the limits of its operations. Such an explanation, which 
 would unify the whole evolutionary process, must, how- 
 ever, be left for the present as a mere possibility.^ 
 
 ' Apart from this possibility it must be maintained that later research 
 on heredity has made any evolutionary theory of Instinct far more difficult 
 than before. According to the later lights we are to rule out the small 
 variations, the " fluctuations " about the parental mean that occur in every 
 individual. We are to rely on certain definite mutations of appreciable 
 magnitude occurring once for all and founding each time a new and 
 relatively fixed type. In relation to instinct this theory postulates a suc- 
 cession of divine chances. What first causes a spider to spin a web on 
 this view ? The addition to or the omission from the fertilised ovum of a 
 physical element. How any physical element destined to produce web 
 spinning comes into existence plumply before any web has been spun is a 
 question which admits of no answer unless we appeal to special creation. 
 
 E E 2 
 
420 MJND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 3. We saw in Chapter III. that all organic life rests on 
 adaptation. The means of maintaining life differ from 
 species to species, and improvement of organisation — the 
 method of Orthogenic Evolution, is one means among the 
 rest. It may be shov?n that this method is not only (as 
 we have assumed) a higher, but also a more efficient 
 method than any other. If we look on the life of a 
 species, its structure and normal functions, as something 
 adapted, I will not say to perfecting, but merely to 
 maintaining itself, it is clear that the efficiency of the 
 adaptation may be measured broadly by the proportion 
 of individuals that it is able to preserve through their 
 normal life span. If the normal life span is difficult to 
 measure, we may take instead the less severe test of 
 maturity, and measure the efficiency of organisation by the 
 number of individuals which it is capable of maturing to 
 the point at which they in turn can propagate the species 
 compared with the number of those that perish by the 
 way. 
 
 Of this proportion we can judge in a rough and ready 
 way by the birth-rate of any given species. For unless 
 the numbers of the species are to increase or decrease in 
 geometrical proportion, the adults must year by year be 
 replaced by, on the average, an equal number of the new 
 generation, neither more nor less. For this purpose, the 
 less efficient the species, the greater the number of young 
 that will be required. Accordingly, unless in any species 
 we have evidence for a steady growth or diminution of 
 numbers, we may fairly take the birth-rate as a rough test 
 of efficiency of organisation. The better the species 
 is adapted to maintain itself, the lower will be the birth- 
 rate, and conversely.^ 
 
 The theory supposes a physical change occurring for physical reasons, 
 and carrying with it a change of behaviour which happens to suit the 
 organism — a pure chance which must be repeated every time a new 
 instinct or new variety of instinct arises. The element of continuity which 
 was the essence of the older evolutionary theory has disappeared and we 
 are left with a succession of leaps, which if they only landed us in 
 varieties of form might be credible, but when they end in complexities of 
 behaviour accurately adjusted to need pass the limit of belief in casual 
 coincidence. 
 
 ' The birth rate for this purpose means the average number of young 
 
XVIII ORGANISATION AND EVOLUTION 421 
 
 Bearing this in mind, we find much significance in the 
 enormous differences in fertility that are to be found in 
 different divisions of the organic world. This fertility- 
 seems to be at its highest where individual organisation is 
 lowest, that is to say, among Protozoa. It is at its lowest 
 in the human race.^ It is calculated that a single Para- 
 mcecium would, if unchecked, produce two hundred and 
 sixty-eight billions of descendants in one month, while 
 another Infusorian is credited with a possible progeny of 
 a hundred and seventy billions in four days. ^ The birth 
 and death roll of many parasites is small in comparison 
 with these figures, but it has been computed that 
 60,000,000 eggs are contained in the body of a single 
 Nematode,^ while, to pass to insects, Huxley calculated 
 that the helpless Aphis, the prey of countless insects, is so 
 prolific that in ten generations the produce of one indivi- 
 dual would contain more substance than 500,000,000 men.* 
 Speaking generally, it appears that Invertebrates are more 
 prolific than Vertebrates, excepting fish,® while among 
 Vertebrates we find on the whole a regular descent from 
 Fish, through Amphibia and Reptiles to Birds and 
 Mammals. This is brought out in the following figures 
 which I take from Mr. Sutherland's valuable work.^ 
 
 Number of young produced per annum by each female. 
 
 Fish 646,000 
 
 Amphibia (average of 20 species) 441 
 
 Reptiles (average of 39 species) 17 
 
 Birds (average of 2000 species) 5 
 
 Mammals (average of 82 species) 3-2 
 
 Higher orders of Mammals i"3 
 
 Ape and Man ^ 
 
 In interpreting these figures, we must bear in mind that 
 we are not always comparing like with like. In the case 
 
 per adult, not per annum. A comparatively slow breeding animal may in 
 this sense have a high birth rate if it is long lived. (See Weismann, 
 Essays in Heredity, '' On the Duration of Life.") 
 
 1 The Elephant is perhaps less fertile than man, but the Elephant is 
 dying out, while the human race is increasing in numbers. 
 
 ^ Ray Lankester, Comparative Longevity, p. 74. 
 
 3 Cambridge Natural History, Vol. II. p. 162. 
 
 * Op. cit. Vol. VI. p. 589. 5 i^ay Lankester, loc. cit. 
 
 " Op. cit. p. 41. 
 
422 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 of fish, we are for the most part reckoning unfertilised 
 ova, vast quantities of which in fact miss fertilisation. 
 In the higher classes we are reckoning either fertilised 
 eggs or living young. But when all deductions are made, 
 enough seems to remain to justify the general truth of 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer's view that fertility and high 
 individual development in the main tend to vary 
 inversely. 
 
 ..." Individuation and Genesis are necessarily antagonistic. 
 Grouping under the word Individuation all processes by which 
 individual life is completed and maintained ; and enlarging the 
 meaning of the word Genesis so as to include all processes aiding 
 the formation and perfecting of new individuals ; we see that the 
 two are fundamentally opposed. Assuming other things to 
 remain the same — assuming that environing conditions as to 
 climate, food, enemies, &c., continue constant ; then, inevitably, 
 every higher degree of individual evolution is followed by a 
 lower degree of race-multiplication, and vice versa. Pro- 
 gress in bulk, complexity, or activity, involves retrogress in 
 fertility ; and progress in fertility involves retrogress in bulk, 
 complexity, or activity. 
 
 This statement needs a slight qualification. For reasons to be 
 hereafter assigned, the relation described is never completely main- 
 tained ; and in the small departure from it, we shall find a 
 remarkable self-acting tendency to further the supremacy of 
 the most-developed types. Here, however, this hint must 
 suffice."! _ . . 
 
 There are doubtless many great deviations from the 
 general tendency. One species may be more preyed upon 
 than another of no higher organisation. If so it must 
 either be more fertile in order to maintain its numbers, or 
 its numbers must fall till they reach a point compatible 
 with greater security. Again, there are countless devices 
 for protection which do not imply an advance, and may 
 even involve retrogression in general development. Such, 
 I imagine, are the hard outer shell of the tortoise, the 
 disagreeable taste of certain insects, and the " protective 
 mimicry " of others. The point is that with all the 
 fluctuations due to these causes we find upon the whole a 
 gradual diminution in fertility as we pass from the lowest 
 organisation to the highest. 
 
 1 Op. cit Vol. II. p 429 
 
xviii ORGANISATION AND EVOLUTION 423 
 
 4. So far of organisation generally. There is further 
 evidence, general and special, for the efficiency of the two 
 higher developments of organisation — Intelligence and the 
 Social Life. The efficiency of Intelligence is best measured 
 by contrasting it with that of Instinct — the next highest 
 stage of organisation reached in the organic world. After 
 what has been said, a single reflection will make clear the 
 superiority of Intelligence. Under natural selection In- 
 stinct is made and kept perfect only by the ruthless 
 elimination of the majority of individuals. Any diminu- 
 tion in the severity of the struggle will tend to diminish 
 the perfection of the instruments by which it is waged. 
 The species under such circumstances, far from dominating 
 nature, is still struggling for existence, and only its most 
 capable members survive. The condition of their survival 
 is not organised co-operation, but internecine struggle with 
 one another and with the rest of the world. If from the 
 maintenance of Instinct we go back to Its growth, we find 
 Its Inefficiency as compared with that of Intelligence In 
 the slowness and indirectness of adaptation to novel 
 circumstances, and in the consequent waste of Individual 
 life during the process. Whatever advance there Is pro- 
 ceeds at a rate which we may call geological. It requires 
 In all probability generations to perfect itself, and once 
 perfected it sticks. Compared with such sluggishness, 
 the social changes which appear to us slow enough are 
 as the express train to the stage wagon. Between the 
 England of Alfred's time and the England of to-day 
 how many changes of specific value would an accurate 
 sociological classification have to admit ? The reason of 
 the difFerence is very simple. Whatever Its end, intelligence 
 sees it In advance, and goes towards it as straight as 
 circumstances permit. Natural selection, or whatever 
 other biological force Is responsible for instinct, does not 
 see Its goal at all, but merely favours the breed which 
 most nearly approaches it, and by the preponderance 
 of success in that direction, the species is at length trans- 
 formed as a whole Into a new type. Thus the replacement 
 of instinct by intelligence as the guide of life means a 
 complete revolution in the rate of change. There may be 
 
424 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 progress — Orthogenic Evolution — under natural selection, 
 but if so, it must be fortuitous, indirect, and incomparably- 
 slow. It is only under the guidance of intelligence that 
 progress can become the normal condition. 
 
 Unfortunately it is only in its most developed form that 
 intelligence takes rank as a serious factor in the evolution 
 of higher species. In its beginnings, indeed throughout 
 the animal world, intelligence is but one among many 
 qualities through which a species maintains itself, achieving 
 the ends prescribed by its structure. At this stage, in- 
 telligence develops under the influence of natural selection, 
 and therefore at " geological " speed. Probably the same 
 thing holds of primitive man. It is only as the mind, in 
 the course of this advance, widens its scope and begins to 
 form general conceptions of social welfare, of religion, of 
 the principles of a science or a handicraft, that the move- 
 ment begins to go forward steadily. We do not indeed 
 find a steady general advance of civilisation, for the human 
 mind has not yet grasped the conditions of civilisation as 
 a whole, but here and there, as some new conception 
 arises, we find results worked out with unexampled 
 rapidity, and out of many such movements arises a social 
 evolution. If in the animal world we find intelligence 
 active mainly in adapting means to ends from day to day, 
 in the human world we find in it also the underlying 
 cause of great changes of type. Here again it replaces the 
 purely biological forces. 
 
 One aspect of organisation remains to be considered — 
 the correlation of the lives and actions of different in- 
 dividuals. Here again there is evidence that wastage 
 diminishes as correlation improves. In the animal world 
 this correlation depends mainly on two factors. One is 
 an organic change whereby the young remains to a later 
 and later stage within the body of the mother. The 
 other is a psychical change whereby the parent comes to 
 maintain and care for the young with more and more 
 persistence and efficiency. The first change brings about 
 an enormous decrease in the number of young requisite 
 for the maintenance of the species. Indeed, the vivi- 
 parous fish is a far more economical breeder than the 
 
XVIII ORGANISATION AND EVOLUTION 425 
 
 nest-builders.-' Summing up on the fertility of fish, Mr, 
 Sutherland says : — 
 
 " Of species that exhibit no sort of parental care, the average 
 of forty-nine give 1,040,000 eggs to a female each year ; while 
 among those which make nests or any apology for nests the 
 number is only about 10,000. Among those which have any 
 protective tricks, such as carrying the eggs in pouches or attached 
 to the body, or in the mouth, the average number is under 1,000 ; 
 while among those whose care takes the form of a uterine or 
 quasi-uterine gestation which brings the young into the world 
 alive, an average of fifty-six eggs is quite sufficient."^ 
 
 Now, the mere postponement of birth is of course a 
 purely physical development. Still, it is an important 
 step in the organisation of life and in curtailment of the 
 struggle for existence. The higher development of corre- 
 lation between separate lives begins with parental care in 
 the ordinary sense. Its efficacy is best seen in the higher 
 Classes. For example, Mr. Sutherland ^ divides Birds into 
 three grades, his account of which* may be summed up in 
 tabular form : — 
 
 Lowest grade. 
 The young are 
 
 capable. 
 There is no nest. 
 
 Average number 
 of eggs I2'5 per 
 annum. 
 
 Middle grade. 
 Young dependent but 
 
 can run at birth. 
 Loose nest. 
 
 Average y66. 
 
 Highest grade. 
 Young callow. 
 
 High skill in nest 
 building or in find- 
 ing substitutes. 
 
 Average 4'5. 
 
 Here it will be seen that with the development of 
 intelligence and of parental care, though the young are 
 more callow, fewer of them are needed to maintain the 
 numbers of the species. 
 
 With more complication of detail, Mr. Sutherland 
 shows that the same law holds among Mammals. Thus 
 from the lowest organisms up to the highest, culminating 
 
 ' We must except the most efficient nest-builders, such as the stickle- 
 back, who hatches from 20 to 90 eggs only at a time (Sutherland, p. 36.) 
 2 Op. cit. Vol. I. p. 40. 3 op. cit. p. 58. 
 
 * Op. cit. pp. 54-71. 
 
426 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 in Man, we find, with many fluctuations due to other 
 causes, a steady tendency to decrease of fertility, im- 
 plying a diminution of waste, and a better organisation 
 of life.i 
 
 5. Now, the further the birth-rate falls, the smaller is 
 the field in which natural selection can be exercised. And 
 yet the higher types are well maintained, and within the 
 highest type the forward movement is most rapid of all. 
 
 ' How far does this process continue in human species ? Is it the case 
 that as civilisation advances, the waste of life is less ? The question is of 
 the greatest interest, but cannot be answered by considering fertility 
 alone. 
 
 If we compare one nation or one grade of civilisation with another, the 
 birth-rates alone will not be sufficient, since in many cases population is 
 notoriously increasing, while in others, and particularly in the lower 
 races, it is diminishing, and even dying out. Moreover, as to the birth- 
 rate itself, no trustworthy figures exist for non-European peoples. 
 Another method of investigation would be to find in any given nation the 
 proportion of children who actually survive to a marriageable age. But 
 here again, anything like accurate information would be limited to 
 civilised nations. 
 
 Looking, however, to the actual facts, scanty as they are, we observe 
 first, that among European countries, the most backward are those in 
 which infantile mortality is highest. According to Mulhall {Dictionary 
 of Statistics, p. 178) the number of children out of i,ooo who complete 
 the fifth year of life is : — 
 
 In Russia 425 
 
 „ Spain 571 
 
 „ Austria 614 
 
 as against : — 
 
 In France 751 
 
 „ Denmark 755 
 
 „ Belgium 756 
 
 „ England 762 
 
 „ Scotland 780 
 
 „ Sweden 783 
 
 „ Ireland 837 
 
 „ Norway 838 
 
 It agrees with this that the birth-rate per marriage is also highest in 
 Russia, where it is 57 as against 4'2 in England and 3"o in France. 
 
 In France, with the birth-rate per family mentioned, population is 
 practically stationary, the increase having been '08 per 1,000 in the five 
 years 1891-5. (Newsholme's Vital Statistics, '^. 15.) 
 
 This affords us a rough measure of the wastage of life in a modern 
 civilised country, which corresponds fairly well with the figures for be- 
 tween four and five thousand Danish families given in Professor Karl 
 Pearson's Chances of Death. (Essay on Reproductive Selection, p. 98.) 
 In these figures, the average gross fertility of families in the pro- 
 fessional, commercial, and artisan class is given, compared with the net 
 
XVIII ORGANISATION AND EVOLUTION 427 
 
 The truth is that organisation as a method of maintaining 
 the species is set from the first in antithesis to Natural 
 Selection. Natural Selection rests on destruction. It 
 maintains the type only by sacrificing the majority of 
 
 fertility arrived at by taking the number of survivors, first after 1 5, then 
 after 25 years of married hfe. 
 
 Gross ajmd Net Fertility (Danish 
 
 Figures). 
 
 
 
 No. of 
 cases. 
 
 Duration of 
 
 marriages (15-24 
 
 years). 
 
 No. of 
 cases. 
 
 Duration 
 
 (25 years and 
 
 over). 
 
 Professional class 
 Commercial . . . 
 Artisan 
 
 Gross 
 Net 
 
 Gross 
 
 Net 
 
 Gross 
 
 Net 
 
 944 
 2,009 
 
 2,934 
 
 4-24 
 3-25 (77) 
 
 4-32 
 2-91 (-67) 
 
 479 
 3-12 (-65) 
 
 898 
 1,622 
 
 1,457 
 
 4-80 
 
 3-38 (70) 
 
 4-91 
 3-13 (-64) 
 
 5-26 
 
 3-17 (-60) 
 
 The broad result for our purposes is to show that the proportion of 
 children surviving to the age at vifhich they might in turn marry and have 
 children varies from 60 per cent, upwards. We shall therefore not be 
 far wrong if we take three children, or a fraction over, to a marriage, as 
 the number required to maintain the level of population in a modern 
 civilised country of the first rank. We seem, further, to be pretty safe in 
 assuming that a higher rate is required in a country of distinctly lower 
 civilisation, such as Russia. Passing to non-European countries, we find 
 a wild confusion of assertions as to the birth-rate. It has been suggested 
 on the basis of such statements as are to be found collected in Floss's 
 Das Weib, that the non-European birth-rate tends to be rather lower than 
 the European, averaging perhaps four to the family, or a fraction below. 
 But here three remarks suggest themselves. The first is, that the ten- 
 dency of casual observations of this kind is almost undoubtedly to under- 
 estimate. A missionary in a savage tribe finds three children with the 
 father and mother, and takes that as the number of the family, ignoring 
 the grown-up, the dead, and the unborn. Mr. Sutherland indeed says 
 roundly that " wherever travellers have taken pains to discover, not the 
 number of children actually alive, but the number that had been born 
 to a savage woman, the result comes out about seven to ten for each.'' 
 The second point is, that even if we took the low figures given as fair 
 samples, and assumed the birth-rate of non-European nations to be 
 below that of Europeans, still it does not follow that the wastage of 
 life is so low. To settle this point, we should have to know further, 
 whether in less civilised countries increase of population is found to 
 go along with the lower birth-rate. And that brings us to the third 
 point, i.e., the well-known fact that many savage tribes, where the birth- 
 rate is known to be low, are actually becoming extinct. 
 
 So far then, the slender and unsatisfactory evidence available would 
 seem to show that the diminution of wastage, which is one of the most 
 
428 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 individuals. Organisation, especially in the form of 
 Intelligence, sets itself rather to maintain the individuals, 
 and in so doing improves the type. The rational organisa- 
 tion of life, from the dawn of parental care upwards, tends 
 to suspend the struggle upon which natural selection rests, 
 and there Is here, for the believer in progress through 
 natural selection, an insoluble contradiction. The solution 
 
 prominent facts of biological evolution, from the lowest organisms to man, 
 has been continued, though at a slower rate, within the limits of human 
 evolution. 
 
 An indirect confirmation of this view is the greater variety of civilised 
 as compared with uncivilised man. The many-sidedness of civilisation as 
 compared with barbarism, and of higher civilisation as compared with 
 lower, is one of the central features of historical development. Accord- 
 ing to Professor Karl Pearson, this increased variability extends even to 
 physical structure {Mathematical Contributions to the Theory of Evolu- 
 tion, Proc. Royal Society, Vol. LXI. No. 375), and he rightly points out 
 that this increase of variability implies a diminished pressure on the part 
 of natural selection. But there is a further point to be considered. We 
 are comparing the capacity of different societies to maintain their mem- 
 bers. But the difficulty of so doing increases, within limits and under 
 conditions that need not be specified here, in proportion to the density of 
 population. It is here that we find the greatest differences between 
 civilised and lower races. The greater part of the savage and barbarian 
 world is thinly peopled, and no great aggregations of population are to 
 be found below the level of the great European and Asiatic civilisations. 
 Elsewhere it appears that density of population is confined to small 
 specially favoured areas, such as the Gilbert Islands and certain spots in 
 the Black Belt of Africa. For great masses of population we must go to 
 the civilised lands of China, Japan, India, or Western Europe. In the 
 case of the first three the growth of population is dependent as much on 
 natural advantages as on the social order, though in the third case the 
 maintenance of the Pax Britannica has been responsible for an enormous 
 growth during the past century. There remains the case of Western 
 Europe, which we assume to be the home of the highest civilisation of 
 all. Here the average density is indeed below that of China, but it 
 implies a still higher grade in the mastery of the conditions of life. 
 Density and increase of population become at this stage independent of 
 natural advantages, or more accurately, men adapt to their use and profit 
 conditions which at a lower stage they would find unfavourable or im- 
 possible to cope with. Hence of course the far spreading range of the 
 white man and his dominance in climates not his own. Thus in uncivilised 
 countries population is generally sparse, in civilised countries of the 
 second rank it becomes dense under favourable conditions, while in the 
 higher civilisation it becomes relatively independent of the bounties of 
 nature. There can then be little doubt that the power to maintain the 
 life of its members by which we have measured the " efficiency " of 
 a species increases in a very marked degree as we pass from the lowest 
 to the highest phases of human development. 
 
 I have not thought it necessary to complicate this note by the insertion 
 of more recent figures which would only emphasise the general argument. 
 In England in particular the fall in the infantile death rate in response to 
 deliberate and organised effort has been marked since 1900. 
 
xviii ORGANISATION AND EVOLUTION 429 
 
 is to find progress not in the laws of inheritance — except 
 in so far as these may be used by intelligence for 
 its own purpose — but rather in the organisation of life 
 culminating in the deliberate self-development of a race 
 under the guidance of reason. Organised life rests not on 
 internecine rivalry, but on mutual interdependence. 
 
 This organisation is at first physical or biological. It is 
 extended by intelligence, the essential function of which 
 is to correlate experience and action. The development 
 of intelligence consists in widening the scope of this 
 function, as well as in perfecting its execution. There is 
 an organisation of individual experience, an organisation of 
 social life. Of this organisation in both these forms we 
 have roughly sketched the growth. Life is indeed in a 
 sense organised without intelligence, but only in a 
 rudimentary way. Without intelligence, the race is not 
 master of its fate. It is so built as to behave itself 
 appropriately within a certain groove. Outside of that 
 groove it is lost. Its instincts may prompt a measure of 
 co-operation, but this, again, will be within limits 
 mechanically defined. It is never at this stage master of 
 its surroundings, for the very perfection of its hereditary 
 adjustments rests on a constant elimination of the great 
 majority of its component members. Its rate of progress 
 at the best is such as can be attained by a gradual 
 elimination of the less efficient individuals. In all these 
 respects the growth of mind works a gradual revolution, 
 reorganising life on the basis of knowledge, realising the 
 unity of the race, and deliberately working out its 
 capacities for development. 
 
 6. But not only is the organisation of life made more 
 efficient by intelligence, but its very purpose is gradually 
 revolutionised. To complete our account, we must trace 
 the steps of this revolution. The first change introduced 
 by the intelligent use of experience lies in the substitution 
 of pleasures and pains for life and death as the "sanctions" 
 of conduct. It is a necessary consequence of this truth 
 that we should hold with Mr. Herbert Spencer that the 
 pleasurable and the life-giving, the painful and the death- 
 dealing tend to coincide. So much would be determined 
 
430 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 by natural selection. We must only bear in mind, first, 
 that it is the life of the race which natural selection has 
 metaphorically in view. There is to the biologist no 
 paradox in the pleasurableness of self-sacrificing effort on 
 behalf of children, descendants, or even the species as a 
 whole. Secondly, as life becomes more complex, we 
 must remember that what is pleasurable from one point 
 of view may be overwhelmingly painful from another. 
 This understood, we may say that in the first stage of 
 intelligence pleasure and pain are substituted as "masters" 
 of conduct for life and death. The first result is that 
 readjustments which natural selection might take an epoch 
 to effect, are carried through by the direct method within a 
 single lifetime, and perhaps ultimately through a single 
 experience. The readjustment, besides being swifter, is 
 obviously less wasteful of life ; and lastly, it favours an 
 improvement of type. This it does in two ways. From 
 the first, it makes possible a pliability of nerve-structure 
 which, while incompatible with detailed instinct, forms a 
 basis for more various and therefore broader development. 
 If width of scope is one test of development, we see here 
 the beginnings of an upward movement. Secondly, since 
 pleasure and pain instead of life and death are now the 
 determining factors, we see a possibility that modes of 
 action may be built up not concerned with the mere 
 maintenance of the species, but with anything that may 
 yield pleasure to its members. The primitive pleasures 
 and pains will doubtless be connected with race maintenance 
 (as the pleasures of eating, drinking, and sex), and as we 
 have seen both feelings must throughout development be 
 limited in the main by natural selection. This however 
 is a limiting condition only. Pleasures must not be 
 preponderantly unhealthy. It does not follow that 
 pleasures may not arise that have no bearing one way or 
 other on the life of the species. And if experience lights 
 on unexpected sources of pleasure, it will certainly attend 
 to them, and work them for what they are worth. 
 Further, since we find pleasure in the full development of 
 faculty, it is a possible and indeed a probable case that 
 among the pleasures on which experience lights should be 
 
XVIII ORGANISATION AND EVOLUTION 431 
 
 some connected not with the maintenance of the race at its 
 then level, but with the further expansion of its powers. 
 Such an expansion may be of little use to it as a means of 
 survival for the present, but it means progress hereafter. 
 Something like this would seem to be the history of those 
 mathematical and aesthetic " faculties " which have been a 
 stumbling block to natural selection. 
 
 7. Even among the higher animals the exercise of 
 faculty seems to be intrinsically pleasant, to be desired 
 upon its own account and independently of its value in 
 maintaining life. When we pass to the human level of 
 development, it is not merely pleasure, but a deeper 
 and more comprehensive end which plays a similar part. 
 As is Pleasure to Desire, so is Happiness to Will. Will 
 is not Desire, nor merely a resultant of desires, but an 
 expression of the whole personality. Desire is the impulse 
 towards a particular end in which a partial and temporary 
 satisfaction is found ; Will, the impulse to a broader end, 
 in which the whole being of the agent is concerned. Plea- 
 sure is the satisfaction of Desire : Happiness the satisfac- 
 tion of Will, the attainment by a man of what he feels to 
 be his true being's end and aim. Now, the conception of 
 Happiness will vary, not only according to individual 
 temperament and circumstances, but also according to the 
 current ideas of life and society. For in all but the most 
 degraded, and perhaps even in them, the conception of per- 
 sonal worth and of the part that a man is expected to play 
 in life enters as an ingredient, perhaps as the determining 
 ingredient, into the conception of his own happiness. And 
 besides his function in this life, there is the conception of 
 another life, or of his duty to God, which profoundly 
 influences the notion of happiness formed by great num- 
 bers of men. Finally, the happiness of others, which in 
 a greater or less degree a man identifies with his own, 
 is determined in the concrete form which it takes by a 
 similar multiplicity of influences. I am not here con- 
 cerned to go into these influences in detail, or to analyse 
 the actual conception of Happiness that prevails at different 
 times or under different conditions. I call attention to 
 two points only. One is, that as it actually develops, 
 
432 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 Happiness as an end Is something very different from life 
 as an end. There have been important sects which have 
 even held the suppression of life, or of important elements 
 in life, essential to man's temporal or eternal happiness. 
 And apart from abnormalities of this kind, one may say 
 generally that to live well Is not the same thing as to live. 
 Happiness does not mean necessarily Increased quantity of 
 life, but a special quality. 
 
 The second point Is what we may call the relativity of 
 Happiness. The conceptions of value are, as we have 
 hinted, largely a matter of social tradition ; largely, again, 
 dependent on religious belief. Thus, apart from philoso- 
 phic analysis and reflection, they are to be numbered among 
 those determining conceptions of life which grow up In 
 a spontaneous semi-unconscious way with the life of 
 society. And. taking the world over from China to Peru, 
 they may differ within very wide limits. No doubt here, 
 as lower in the scale, natural selection operating in the 
 background keeps a certain check on the growth of Ideas. 
 If the conception of well-being comes to conflict too vio- 
 lently with the real conditions of life, the society which it 
 dominates will obviously tend to succumb. The Ideal of 
 celibacy, for example, can only weed out the community 
 or the class which faithfully puts It in practice. But gene- 
 rally speaking natural selection drives humanity with a 
 sufficiently loose rein. Man is by so much the most 
 dominant of animals, that he can afford himself a good 
 deal of latitude, and yet preserve himself from destruction. 
 8. This latitude Is indeed a necessary condition of the 
 highest development. Natural selection can preserve and 
 augment nothing that is not Immediately useful. If the 
 pigment-fleck which Is the first rudimentary germ of the 
 eye Is preserved and developed. It must be because It Is 
 useful as a pigment-fleck. The plea that it will later 
 develop Into a magnificent sense-organ of the highest 
 possible utility could not avail It In the court of natural 
 selection unless it could prove services actually rendered 
 by Itself. So Is it with all the faculties ; and most of 
 all with the higher faculties of man. The philosopher, 
 as Plato's contemporaries complained, occupies himself 
 
xviii ORGANISATION AND EVOLUTION 433 
 
 with things superfluous. He is wont to walk into the 
 well while gazing at the stars ; and he may be thankful 
 with Plato himself if he is able to get under the shelter 
 of a wall, and philosophise there unmolested by the storms 
 that beat outside. Originality is the greatest disadvantage 
 to its possessor in the Intellectual market. The same 
 point is more obviously true on the moral side. Every 
 one of the Christian virtues is obviously a disadvantage 
 to its possessor in the struggle for existence, more par- 
 ticularly in a Christian community. The greatest offence 
 a man can commit against society is to be in any respect 
 better than society. For such the criminal law has always 
 reserved its worst tortures. But these germs of higher 
 qualities, so dangerous to their possessors, are destined in 
 their fuller development to carry human life to a higher 
 level. What was a short time ago a struggling ideal, is 
 now placidly accepted as normal. The world wonders 
 how it could ever have got on without it. The martyr 
 of the past generation is duly canonised, while the gridiron 
 is being cheerfully heated for the prophet of a still higher 
 creed. 
 
 Natural selection no doubt plays a beneficent part in 
 human life in curing the worst aberrations of the moral 
 or social standard. And this is not all. The higher 
 principle, If it Is given time to develop far enough and 
 deepen its hold, is also stronger than any lower principle, 
 and fairly beats It In the struggle for existence. Mr. 
 Sutherland has shown at great length how first the parental 
 and then the social principle are positively fortified and 
 confirmed by the struggle for existence. The most careful 
 parents will bring the largest proportion of their family to 
 maturity, while the children of the careless and the callous 
 are allowed to die. Similarly at a higher remove the best 
 ordered State is at an advantage over its competitors. 
 But here at once we trench upon the limits of this method 
 of progress. The good order necessary to a successful war 
 may, as we well know, be secured at the cost of individual 
 liberty, and of much besides. Hence an Iron despotism 
 may overthrow a state containing within It the elements 
 of a higher order, which. If it came to maturity, would be 
 
 F F 
 
434 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 not only better but also stronger than its conqueror. And 
 this is but one instance of a rule pervading all relations of 
 life. If the man of genius is endowed with unusually 
 strong will, or is placed in exceptionally favourable cir- 
 cumstances, he not merely escapes disaster, but imposes 
 his genius on the world, and is recognised as one of its 
 great men. The inventor is not always ruined, and if 
 not ruined, he makes a fortune. The loving tempera- 
 ment is not always crushed, and if not crushed, it is the 
 foundation of the most enduring happiness. But it re- 
 mains that in the ordinary course of the world, the virtues 
 and excellences belonging to the highest type are a disad- 
 vantage to the individual in the naked struggle for exist- 
 ence. They need the shelter of a social order in which 
 the reign of force is suspended or mitigated, and in that 
 shelter they reach a maturity in which they are found to 
 be after all the strongest as well as the most beautiful 
 growth. 
 
 9. The suspension of the struggle for existence makes 
 possible a many-sided development. In some directions 
 this development is all good, in others it is a mixed good, 
 in yet others it may lead to evils which the unmitigated 
 struggle would never allow to come into existence. But 
 upon the whole, this many-sidedness means that human 
 life becomes fuller, and that the infinitely varied capacities 
 of human beings find more and more room for satisfaction. 
 And this again is as much as to say that life reaches a higher 
 stage of organisation. For the highest organism is that 
 which, while m.aintaining its unity, allows the fullest de- 
 velopment of individuality in its parts. The controlling 
 factor needed to replace the rude efficacy of the struggle, 
 is the intelligent apprehension of the organisation possible 
 for human life, and the subjection of current standards of 
 value to that principle. At this point the conditions of 
 existence cease to act as a check on intelligence from out- 
 side. They are absorbed into its system as part of the 
 knowledge which it uses for its own ends. The philo- 
 sophic science of the highest stage brings us back to the 
 conditions of existence as the source of laws for conduct 
 from which we started in the sphere of instinct, but the 
 
XVIII ORGANISATION AND EVOLUTION 435 
 
 conditions and the existence are transformed. The 
 conditions are used by the mind as its instruments, 
 and the existence which it contemplates is not that 
 which it knows, but the higher life which it sees to 
 be possible. In a certain sort we have treated mental 
 development throughout as a process in which an implicit 
 purpose gradually comes into view. But we must bear in 
 mind that in proportion as it comes into view, it is changed 
 in character. The implicit purpose of the lower type is 
 to maintain itself, to satisfy the wants and impulses be- 
 longing to that type. But the very fact that impulse 
 comes to understand itself as desire implies that the type 
 is changed to something better, and the same holds at each 
 higher stage. If a man understood the real mental and 
 moral forces that underlie his cherished ambitions, his 
 ambitions would thereby be changed. We must therefore 
 understand the organisation of life as changing not only 
 in method but in plan, as it passes from the control of 
 heredity and the struggle for existence to that of Reason 
 and purpose. At its lowest it is an organisation of be- 
 haviour directed to the maintenance of the type. It passes 
 to organisation directed to the attainment of purposes 
 varying in scope and character, and ultimately becomes 
 an organisation for the comprehensive purpose of bringing 
 life itself to the perfection of its development. 
 
 F F 2 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 
 SELF-CONSCIOUS DEVELOPMENT 
 
 Our object in the present work has been to ascertain 
 the character and function of Mind as the organising 
 principle in Evolution. In the absence of intelligence and 
 in its lowest stages, Life is, as we expressed it, relatively "un- 
 organised." The successive actions of an individual are 
 not properly correlated. As between diiFerent individuals 
 there is conflict rather than co-operation. In the process 
 by which species are formed there is an even more com- 
 plete lack of plan. The fact that biological evolution 
 rests on a struggle for existence is itself enough to show 
 a want of that organic unity in which the good of one 
 part is necessarily the good of the rest. Were a species 
 to become a unity, and its development organic, the 
 fundamental condition would be that each individual should 
 find the furthering, the development, of his own nature 
 in that which furthers and develops others. Evolution 
 by natural selection is thus the direct negation of an 
 organic growth. It is in no way parallel to the regular 
 unfolding of a germ. It is an irregular backwards and 
 forwards movement in which now an Individual of one 
 type prevails, now an example of another, and little by 
 little, the battle swings over to the one side. This is not 
 development. It Is more like a slow process of sifting, in 
 which, by a long series of stages, and with many pauses, 
 grains of one kind tend to come together In one heap. In 
 such a process, clearly the accidental as well as the more 
 
 436 
 
CHAP. XIX SELF-CONSCIOUS DEVELOPMENT 437 
 
 permanent character of the environment must play a 
 notable part. 
 
 Accordingly evolution biologically considered exhibits 
 no comprehensive plan or pervading tendency. It pro- 
 duces, not necessarily a higher type, but one that deals 
 more effectually with its particular environment. It may 
 be said perhaps to tend towards variation, but the variation 
 is not necessarily towards anything higher or better. 
 
 I. The development of Mind in animals and Man 
 means in our view the gradual introduction of a higher 
 principle of organisation into this relatively chaotic state. 
 The first function of mind is to organise individual ex- 
 perience, and from this it proceeds through the organisation 
 of social life till finally it reaches the conception of the 
 development of the entire race as its starting point and its 
 goal. This conception brings into organic relationship 
 elements formerly at strife. It is true that on the ethical 
 side in asserting a common human nature as supreme 
 over all differences it is in a manner recognising a unity 
 that was there before, but in recognising this unity it 
 transforms it. The fundamental kinship of men is a fact 
 before it is admitted, but it is only when it is admitted 
 that it becomes a bond of union. Thus the unorganised 
 struggle of biological evolution gives place to an organic 
 principle. At the same time its purposeless movement 
 gives way to an articulate plan. As soon as the past 
 and present evolution of man are understood as the 
 opening stages of a much nobler growth, as soon as that 
 further growth becomes sufficiently understood to operate 
 upon standards of morality and conceptions of social effort, 
 evolution becomes conscious and full of purpose. Now, if 
 not before, it has a goal, or, if we prefer it, a standard of 
 perfect development to which it moves forward with 
 that orderly unrolling of powers which we find in 
 organic growth. When, further, the previous course of 
 mental evolution is conceived as a process by which the 
 intellectual and moral unity necessary for this growth 
 were prepared, we carve out of the whole of evolution one 
 great process of " orthogenic evolution " of which the 
 tendency and direction are one from first to last — the 
 
438 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 evolution of Mind as the dominating principle in this 
 world. If still further extending our view we take 
 into account on the one hand the organic growth on which 
 intelligence rests, on the other hand the generic function of 
 Mind in the world, we may describe the whole process as 
 the development of organisation and trace its beginning 
 to the first germ of life. Whether this unity of tendency 
 can be properly regarded as the expression of a purpose is 
 not so clear. What is clear is that in the earlier stages no 
 such purpose is realised by any of the individuals con- 
 cerned in the evolutionary process.'^ There are elements, 
 fragments of the purpose, realised in the lower stages, and 
 these gradually come together into that wider purpose 
 which makes of subsequent evolution an organic de- 
 velopment. 
 
 2. But are we right in calling it an organic develop- 
 ment ? Should we not rather, if we wish to understand 
 what human progress as designed by man would be, 
 compare it to a purpose executed by human fore-thought ? 
 There is certainly one point which should be noticed. An 
 organic growth in the ordinary sense follows a strictly 
 determinate course. Not only its beginning and end, but 
 each intervening stage follows in rigid sequence, each 
 depending on and arising out of that which went before. 
 Certainly there may be deviations of a kind, but these 
 proceed by equally uniform laws from abnormalities of the 
 environment. Now, if the development of humanity 
 were fixed in this way, there would be no need of in- 
 telligence. The function of intelligence is to adjust 
 variable relations, but if the development of the human 
 species were, like the physical development of each in- 
 
 ' Since certain biological processes have somehow engendered that 
 bodily organisation which is capable of mental life, those particular 
 processes must be deemed a part of orthogenic evolution. But this is not 
 to say that there is any plan in the conditions determining survival as such. 
 On the contrary the sort of organism that is a fit vehicle for mind is only 
 one among many that are fitted to survive, all of which are in fact fostered 
 by the biological conditions with the impartiality of complete indifference. 
 If we assume the efficacy of conation in determining structure we may (as 
 shown above, p. 419) impute the entire work of organisation to the action 
 of Mind, but even so it would not in the lower stage be a mind conscious 
 of its supreme purpose, but dimly conscious, fragmentary in effort, and 
 not in the full sense purposive at all. 
 
XIX SELF-CONSCIOUS DEVELOPMENT 439 
 
 dividual, based on a determinate interaction of structure 
 and environment, it may be questioned whether human 
 intelligence could do anything to affect it. But human 
 development is not fixed in this sense. Its proper aim, 
 and, we may say, its general course, are fixed by the 
 germinal possibilities of human nature, but wherever 
 intelligence can act, the limitations of ordinary organic 
 growth may be overstepped. An organic growth must, as 
 we have tried to show, always hold on its course, an 
 unfolding now of this structure, next of that, being the due 
 order never departed from. Intelligence, on the other hand, 
 may execute any sort of curve to get to its ultimate end. 
 It cannot, indeed, break any law of nature, but within the 
 limits of the laws of nature, it can alter the course by 
 which it reaches its goal at its pleasure. Since in the 
 intelligence which we presuppose in our "self-conscious 
 evolution," we have all the mastery of the forces of 
 nature, organic and inorganic, that the sciences give, with 
 the knowledge of man and his social life added thereto, 
 we should surely have not less but more of this intelligent 
 disposition of events than in the contrivance of any 
 ordinary human scheme. 
 
 But if we conceive future evolution as essentially a 
 human purpose, we must be on our guard against an 
 opposite fallacy. From such a conception we should be 
 apt to infer in it something mechanical and also something 
 arbitrary. Man imposes his purposes as it were on things 
 without regard to their wants and requirements. Bars and 
 rivets and wheels of steel or brass do not spontaneously 
 come together to make a steam-engine, nor in a steam- 
 engine have they ever that organic relation which subsists 
 between cells of the animal body. They are simply 
 brought into shape by an agent acting upon them, an 
 agent which they do not set in motion. Human evolution, 
 on the contrary, is the work of man — the product of the 
 being who evolves. Man does not stand outside his own 
 growth and plan it. He becomes aware of its possibilities 
 as he grows, and, if we are right, there comes a stage when 
 conception of the perfected growth seizes upon him, and 
 makes him intelligently work towards it. There is here 
 
440 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 on the one hand no distinction between the worker and his 
 material. It is the material which does the work. On 
 the other hand, the " material " is not " indifFerent " to its 
 destiny. It is out of human nature as it is that the 
 conception of the ultimate purpose and destinies of man is 
 evolved, and human nature being what it is, this purpose 
 must appeal to it in the end with compelling force. 
 
 If then self-conscious evolution is like the working out 
 of a human purpose in allowing unlimited license of 
 method, it resembles an organic growth in that its moving 
 principle is within. It resembles an organic growth in 
 that the broad possibilities of development are already 
 determined in the germ, but differs from it in that the 
 actual growth is determined by the conception of the end 
 itself and may be modified as that conception requires. 
 It is therefore an organic growth and something more ; it 
 is a purpose and something more. This we have tried to 
 express by calling it a self-conscious evolution. It should 
 be added that there is one point in which both human 
 purposes and organic growths agree. Both are definitely 
 making by different methods for an ascertained goal. In 
 this they differ from the process of biological evolution, 
 which arrives at a goal without making for it. One may 
 perhaps convey some conception of the difference by an 
 image. Three persons start for a certain place. One 
 does not know the way, but is directed to follow a certain 
 road. Keeping to this road, he arrives safely and speedily 
 unless there should be any unforeseen obstacle, such as a 
 broken bridge, in which case, as he knows no other paths, 
 he is blocked. This is the case of " organic growth." 
 Another, Intelligence, knows where the point is and finds 
 his way there, going by a detour if the direct road is 
 impassable. The third wanders at random, but as every- 
 where there are hedges and walls preventing him from 
 getting far out of the way, and as hedges grow up behind 
 him to prevent his return, he gradually arrives by 
 eliminating all possibilities of going anywhere else. This 
 is the evolutionary process. We might vary the image by 
 substituting three companies for three individuals. Of 
 the first company, three or four out of ten would arrive, and 
 
XIX SELF-CONSCIOUS DEVELOPMENT 441 
 
 that speedily, but the remainder would be unable to swim 
 the stream where the bridge was broken. Of the second 
 class, all would arrive, and, on the average, still more 
 speedily, since, taking obstacles into account, they know the 
 best way. Of the third, the different members would start 
 together and gradually disperse, and, having a tendency to 
 keep apart, one out of the number would in time happen on 
 one of the paths leading to the right spot. 
 
 3. Self-conscious evolution, then, differs from previous 
 evolution in having a purpose towards which it steadily 
 makes its way. This difference not only affects the 
 method by which it advances, but also the rate at which 
 it moves. I referred at the outset to the growing rapidity 
 of social changes as orthogenic evolution advances. The 
 whole life span of the human species, even if we take the 
 highest estimates of its antiquity, is a very small fraction 
 of the millions of years occupied by organic evolution. 
 But it is not too much to say that the extension during 
 that time in the scope of Mind and its power to control 
 natural forces and direct its own life is as great, and in 
 some respects greater than all that was effected in the 
 vastly longer period preceding the appearance of man. 
 But this is not all. If we accept a high antiquity — of 
 anything over 100,000 years — for the human race, the 
 result follows, that the greater part, eight- or nine-tenths 
 at least, of that period belongs to the lowest stage of 
 culture — the stage in which men had not learnt to grind 
 and polish their stone tools and weapons. The first 
 rudiments of civilisation in the great river valleys arose 
 from 6,000 to 8,000 years ago, but this again was a 
 civilisation judged by modern standards of an extremely 
 stationary type. It is only with the rise of Greek civilisa- 
 tion that anything like a forward movement began, and 
 civilisation since that day has had not only to maintain 
 and improve itself, but to absorb and control the vast 
 masses of barbarism which have constantly threatened to 
 submerge it. To this day the outlying mass of savagery 
 and semi-civilisation still threatens us, not with the open 
 conquest which has haunted perverted imaginations, but 
 with the far subtler danger of internal corruption. Civilised 
 
442 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 man as we have seen too often in recent years, has a painful 
 tendency to adapt his manners and his standard to those 
 of the lower races whom he conquers. The master takes 
 his character from the slave. 
 
 Nevertheless, the facts briefly adverted to, which might 
 be drawn out effectively in great detail, illustrate 
 sufficiently the self-accelerating tendency of mental 
 growth. Of the total growth of mind in scope and power 
 during the existence of the human race, at least one half 
 must be assigned to the comparatively short period from 
 the beginnings of Greek history to the present day. But 
 it must be remembered that the greater part of this period 
 still lies outside the scope of " self-conscious evolution." It 
 is only in modern times, as I hope to show in detail on 
 another occasion, that the threads begin to be drawn 
 together to weave the larger purpose. Up to this point 
 civilisation still moves in large measure through conflict, 
 though the social systems, the principles, the purposes that 
 conflict are wider, and give more scope for internal 
 development. As civilised societies become more highly 
 organised and their ideas more comprehensive, the onward 
 movement in each becomes more sure and its orbit more 
 vast. And yet, to this day, how great a proportion of 
 the energies of the best and ablest men is spent in 
 combating one another. If we can imagine all this 
 energy harmonised by the conception of a great pervading 
 purpose, we can form some conception of the increased 
 efficiency with which " self-conscious evolution " would 
 bring its forces to bear. 
 
 4. The conclusion to which we have been led is that 
 among the manifold conflicting movements of evolution, 
 there is one tendency of which the significance is not 
 obscure. In orthogenic evolution we find a constant 
 development of Mind in scope, and accordingly in power. 
 Slow at first, the development gathers speed with growth, 
 and finally settles into the steady movement of a germ 
 unfolding under the direction of an intelligent knowledge 
 of its powers and of its life conditions. The goal of the 
 movement, as far as we can foresee at present, is the mastery 
 by the human mind of the conditions, internal as well a§ 
 
XIX SELF-CONSCIOUS DEVELOPMENT 443 
 
 external, of its life and growth. The primitive intelligence is 
 useful to the organism as a more elastic method of adjusting 
 itself to its environment. As the mental powers develop, 
 the tables are turned, and the mind adjusts its environment 
 to its own needs. " Mihi res non me rebus subjungere 
 Conor " is the motto that it takes for its own. With the 
 mastery of external nature, applied science has made us all 
 familiar. But the last enemy that man shall overcome is 
 himself. The internal conditions of life, the physiological 
 basis of mental activity, the sociological laws that operate 
 for the most part unconsciously, are parts of the " environ- 
 ment " which the self-conscious intelligence has to master, 
 and it is on this mastery that the regnum hominis will rest. 
 
 The development in its highest stage is beyond doubt 
 purposive. The purpose is conceived in the human mind 
 itself. Are we now to throw the purpose back, and to 
 conceive the whole course of orthogenic evolution as 
 determined thereby .'' We can conceive such a purpose in 
 one of two forms. We may place it within the evolu- 
 tionary process, attributing it to the beings taking part 
 therein, or we may place it outside the process in a 
 hypothetical Being who contrives the whole movement, and 
 shapes it towards the end defined. In the former alternative, 
 we are forced to characterise the purpose as an unconscious 
 purpose, and this threatens to be a contradiction in terms. 
 At most, we can say that there are in the earlier stages 
 elements of, purpose and understanding which are 
 gradually blended and fused into coherence. The latter 
 alternative would bring us to the conception of an 
 unconditioned creation of the world-order, which can 
 never be accepted by the intelligence without stifling the 
 moral sense. Is there any third possibility .'' 
 
 5. I have argued elsewhere ^ that a close examination 
 of the postulates of knowledge leads - us to conceive 
 Reality as a single comprehensive system in which all 
 things and all processes have their place in accordance 
 
 1 In the Theory of Knowledge (1896). I leave the following section as 
 it was originally written, but may be allowed to refer to a fuller and in 
 some respects a modified exposition of the argument in Development and 
 Purpose (191 3). 
 
444 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap. 
 
 with a single pervading scheme. This scheme cannot be 
 something foreign to the elements which compose it, for 
 there is nothing outside it to impose it upon them. It is 
 the expression of their nature as a whole, and upon it they 
 in turn depend for their existence. If we would 
 figure such a relationship in terms of a familiar experience, 
 we may think of a living organism in which the life 
 process rests on the working of every part, and in turn 
 makes that working possible. The life cannot be more 
 than the parts make possible, yet the parts are not 
 conditions that limit it as from without, but are its con- 
 stituent elements, and apart from the whole have no 
 existence. 
 
 So, far, however, there is nothing to show that either 
 development or purpose are necessary parts of such a 
 scheme. We might still say that what the whole order and 
 framework of the universe is now, is determined by what 
 it was yesterday, and so on to infinity. But over and 
 above the postulate of thought, there is an ideal of thought 
 which we cannot regard as valueless for truth, though it 
 may be both unrealised and unprovable. The methods of 
 thought are valid, and give us reality. If, tracing them 
 onwards in their natural direction, we find them pointing 
 to a certain end as the goal of completed thought, we 
 cannot easily avoid the belief that such a goal is in fact 
 attainable. Now the goal of thought is a system 
 intelligible in itself and without passing outside it. 
 Whether such a system must be finite or not is a 
 different question, [f we could attain to it, the concep- 
 tions of finite and infinite would probably be changed from 
 what they are for us now. But whether the system were 
 to shed light on a finite or infinite reality, the principle 
 which is to make all things intelligible must lie wholly 
 within it if it is to be complete. 
 
 Now, it is easy to show that in such a system the 
 ultimate grounds of interconnection can neither be purely 
 mechanical nor purely teleological. Reality is or includes 
 a time process. Now, if we take any time process, and 
 consider its beginning, we are dealing with a partial fact, 
 and for every partial fact, thought demands an explanation 
 
XIX SELF-CONSCIOUS DEVELOPMENT 445 
 
 which will connect it with Reality as a whole. For the 
 cause of the origin of a process, then, we may look in two 
 directions, to its results or to its antecedents. If we look 
 to the latter, we are clearly going outside the process. 
 But if the process is one in which the whole nature of our 
 ultimate system is to be expressed, we cannot go outside 
 it without denying the claim of our system to be complete. 
 We are therefore thrown forward towards the results of 
 this system. But neither can the purpose achieved by the 
 process stand alone, for the necessity of the process must 
 also be made plain. If an unconditional purpose were the 
 secret of the universe, there could be no explanation of 
 the means, the process, and the eifort through which the 
 purpose is realised. 
 
 6. From the conception of purpose, then, we are again 
 thrown back on origins, just as these throw us forward to 
 their purpose. We have, in short, to conceive a single 
 principle not realised in full at any one phase, but pervad- 
 ing the whole world-process. In this principle, the possible 
 and the actual in a sense come together, for what it is to 
 be is an integral condition that goes to make the world 
 what it is. We cannot take any phase of Reality as an 
 absolute starting-point and regard it as determining every- 
 thing that follows upon it mechanically, or everything that 
 precedes it teleologically. If we conceive any process as 
 making up the life of an intelligible world- whole, we must 
 conceive its origin and issue as dependent on and implying 
 one another. That is, we must conceive it as determined 
 organically. And the word is the more appropriate 
 because, just as we saw at first that the relations of a 
 comprehensive plan to its elements could be figured in the 
 penetration of all the organic elements by the life of the 
 whole, so now when we treat the plan as the plan of a 
 process, we find its nearest analogy in the struggle of life 
 within its physical conditions to realise its full nature. 
 The life that, determined on one side by its constituent 
 elements, is equally determined from the first by its own 
 possibility and promise, displays a history in which end 
 and origin, broad principles and detailed conditions, form 
 a systematic whole. 
 
446 MIND IN EVOLUTION chap, xix 
 
 If this ideal of thought may be taken as adumbrating 
 the ultimate nature of Reality, nature is neither wholly 
 blind, nor wholly the creature of intelligent purpose. 
 Origin and purpose are mutually dependent parts of one 
 scheme. What was in the beginning was in order that 
 what shall be might be realised. But what shall be, and 
 the way in which it shall come about, are equally the 
 creations of that which was at first. If we seek to realise 
 in some concrete fashion what this means, we shall think 
 once more of the germ of a soul in a living organism. 
 The soul would not exist in germ, but that there is laid 
 up in store for it a futurity which repays the travail of 
 development. Neither could it exist but for the physical 
 conditions in which it is immersed. Its development is a 
 war with these conditions which maintain and yet limit it 
 and its triumph is the submission of the conditions to its 
 perfected nature. In this image we have a brief account 
 of the whole process of the evolution of Mind as traced 
 in these chapters, and therewith the process of evolution 
 upon this earth appears as the working out in concrete 
 shape and on this relatively narrow stage of the vaster 
 process which we dimly conceive as constituting the 
 essential life of the world. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 THE ELBERFELD HORSES 
 
 All preconceived opinions as to the limitation of animal in- 
 telligence have been called in question of late years by the 
 experiments of Herr von Osten and Herr Krall with their learned 
 horses. It is impossible for anyone who has not himself seen the 
 horses to make any contribution to the subject that is worthy 
 of attention. I had hoped to have an opportunity of forming 
 an independent opinion upon their performances before revising 
 this work, but events intervened, and I have been compelled to 
 rely on the evidence of others. It may be well, however, to 
 set forth briefly the admitted facts, to indicate the conclusions, 
 or rather the alternative conclusions, to which these point, and 
 to show what bearing they will have on the view of animal 
 psychology arrived at in the preceding chapters. The broad 
 facts are well known, but it will be convenient to summarise 
 them very briefly. 
 
 Herr von Osten had a horse called Clever Hans, which was 
 able apparently to solve arithmetical questions by rapping out the 
 appropriate numbers with his hoof, and to communicate with 
 his master by an alphabetical code, in which a number of raps 
 corresponded to letters. The performances of Hans attracted 
 attention in Germany, and were investigated by a commission of 
 psychologists, who came to the conclusion that he was guided by 
 involuntary signals telling him when to begin rapping and when 
 to stop, and that no further intelligence was involved in the 
 operations of the horse. After Herr von Osten's death, however, 
 the matter was taken up by a believer, Herr Krall, who has 
 trained a number of other horses on similar lines. The alleged 
 arithmetical performances of these horses include the four primary 
 rules, a knowledge of fractions, use of brackets, the extraction of 
 roots to the 4th and 5th root, complex sums involving multi- 
 plication of roots, and the solution of simple equations. They 
 
 447 
 
448 ^ APPENDIX 
 
 have further a spelling code, whereby they can communicate 
 with their master ; they can read words, describe a picture, ask 
 for bread or a carrot — which is one of their favourite rewards — ■ 
 have at times made spontaneous utterances in their code, and carry 
 on conversations. An illustration of the latter may be given from 
 Herr Krall's book : i 
 
 " I wrote on the board : ' What is sugar ? ' Muhamed, the 
 horse, answers ' Sweet.' 'But that is no proposition. What 
 must you say as well ? ' ' Z. ist.' ' What can you say further of 
 sugar ? ' ' Sugar is white.' ' What besides ? Consider again.' 
 ' Z. schmkt gud.' 
 
 " The next day I say to Muhamed : ' You said yesterday sugar 
 is sweet and white and tastes good. Now consider again whether 
 you can say something more about sugar,' and I put a bit of sugar 
 before him. Muhamed answers : ' Z. ht 4 ek,' i.e., sugar has 
 4 corners. While noting down this, he says, quite of himself, 
 ' lohn.' Johann asks : ' What am I to do ? ' The answer is : 
 ' Mgbn ' {i.e., mohre geben — -carrots)." 
 
 Feats of this kind are attested by a large number of witnesses, 
 many of whom are men of scientific eminence, and while some 
 have remained unconvinced, others are sure of the genuineness of 
 the performance, and nearly all believe the problem is worthy 
 of serious investigation. The marvel is not diminished by the 
 account Herr Krall gives of the method of education : 
 
 The horses Muhamed and Zarif were originally taught to 
 count by raising the foot once or twice, as the case might be, 
 while the number i or 2 was placed before them conspicuously 
 and the name of the figure uttered clearly. On the first day 
 the numbers I and 2 alone were employed. On the next 
 day 3 was added and o, which was to be expressed by the 
 horse by a turn of the head from left to right. Each horse 
 had an hour and a half to two hours' training per diem. After 
 a few days we are told the horses had learnt they must paw 
 with the foot in answer to the command " Count," and on the 
 fifth day the figures i, 2, and 3 were put up in a row, the horses 
 were allowed to touch them, and take a bit of bread placed 
 on each number. After about a week Herr Krall began to 
 write the numbers on a blackboard and to use a counting machine 
 to assist in addition. On the 13th day Muhamed began to 
 give the numbers from i to 4 correctly, and practice in addition, 
 with the aid of the counting board, was begun. A piece of 
 the actual record of the lesson may be subjoined, it being under- 
 stood that the horse has before him, along with the written figure 
 on the blackboard, the counting board, on which the appropriate 
 row of dots is placed under each number. 
 
 ' Denkende Tiere, p. 157. 
 
" Count 3." 
 
 5> 
 
 " Count 2." 
 
 J) 
 
 "Count 4." 
 
 J> 
 
 « Count 5." 
 
 5> 
 
 " Count 3." 
 
 » 
 
 APPENDIX 449 
 
 " Count 4." Muhamed answers rightly 4. 
 The 5 is then displayed on the counting board, written on the 
 blackboard, and named several times. 
 " Count 5." Answer 5 
 
 3 
 
 2 
 
 4 
 5 
 
 3 
 
 Then, as above, the 6 is produced. 
 
 " Count 6." Muhamed answers 6. 
 
 Now begins the first instruction in a sum, accompanied with 
 pointing to the dots on the counting board : 
 
 I + 3 
 . + . . . 
 
 " When I add 1+3, how many do I get i' " Answer 4 
 
 >j j» ^ T 4j j> » » >j 5 
 
 " Now I add 1 + 5, „ does that make ? " „ 6 
 
 „ „ 14- 6, tell me how many does 
 
 that make ? " „ 7 
 
 After Muhamed has pawed 7 times, the 7 is named. 
 
 " 6 less I is how many ? Here I have 6 (pointing to the counting 
 board, saying I, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). If I take away i (this is done, the 
 outer point being pushed under the i and then covered) how many 
 remains over? " Answer 5. 
 
 And so it goes on, by the end of the lesson Muhamed being able 
 to add 24-1+8 and to multiply 2 by 3 and 3 by 3. The 
 marvellous rapidity of this progress is only to be surpassed by 
 the speed with which Muhamed acquired the conception of 
 a square root. This lesson may also, with advantage, be 
 transcribed. 
 
 He is apparently already familiar with the notion of a power. 
 2^ is written up and he is asked how much does that make ? 
 
 Answer 4 
 " Once again ? " jj 4 
 
 « 2^ That makes ? " „ 8 
 
 ^4 = 2 is then written up, and Herr Krall says : " See, that is 
 called a root. ^ is the sign of a root. ^ or y is called 
 the second root or square root. What comes from it, 2, gives, 
 when raised to the second power, the number which is placed 
 under the root sign, so 2 gives 4, as you have already said, and the 
 second root out of 4 gives 2." 
 
 After this luminous explanation ^^16 is written up. But 
 Muhamed has not yet grasped the matter completely. 
 
 G G 
 
45° APPENDIX 
 
 " How much does the second root from 1 6 give ? " Muhamed 
 answers 82 and then 6. We are not surprised to learn that the 
 above explanation is repeated in an altered form, and then ^16 = 4. 
 is written up. It is pointed out to the horse that the second root 
 of 16 is 4. "Then 4^ is how much?" Muhamed: 16. 
 4^ = — is then written up. " You see you have there the number 
 which is placed under the sign of the root, now deal with it." 
 Apparently there is no result, but ,^25 = — is written up in the 
 same way. " I point to the open space behind the sign of equality : 
 Here must be the number which, multiplied by itself, gives 25. 
 So ?" Muhamed answers 5. 
 
 " You have done that well. Once again." Muhamed : 5. 
 After this, with one or two errors, Muhamed gives </49 as 7, but 
 fails to extract the root of 36, so that the conclusion is that he has 
 not yet conceived the matter rightly. On the evening of the 
 same day, however, the answer 4 followed at once when he was 
 asked for the root of 16, and the understanding of Muhamed 
 adapted itself to this kind of sum in a short time, so that he 
 could soon do the sum ^8i + /v/49=i6, or ^81—^25 = 4. 
 
 Thus, if we are to believe that Muhamed's answers are given 
 by genuine process of thought, we must suppose that in a single 
 lesson, by dint of sheer explanation, he advances from the power 
 to count 4 to that of adding 3 numbers and understanding multi- 
 plication ; while again, in a single lesson, he was able to grasp the 
 meaning of a root and the general notion of an inverted operation. 
 Apart altogether from the miraculous results achieved by the horse, 
 the method of instruction would suggest a totally different conclu- 
 sion. It convinces us that, in these lessons at any rate, whatever 
 might be the case afterwards, the horse must in reality have been 
 responding to voluntary or involuntary signs indicating which foot 
 'he is to use,^ when he is to begin to paw, and when he is to stop. 
 
 Such are the broad facts, which might be indefinitely multiplied, 
 and how are they to be explained ? The obvious hypothesis is 
 that the horse responds to a sign, voluntary or involuntary, on the 
 part of his master or of the groom, or, if someone else is conduct- 
 ing the experiment, of the experimeriter himself. As to this it 
 must be remarked first of all that the theory of conscious fraud is 
 not suggested as against Herr Krall, even by his bitterest opponents. 
 All observers appear to have come away convinced of Herr Krall's 
 honesty, and the most that can be said by his critics is that he is a 
 fanatic, who may have the failings of fanaticism but who undoubt- 
 
 1 The horses give units first, reckoning them with their right foot. 
 They then give the tens with their left foot, then the hundreds with the 
 right, and so on. Confusions as to the foot account for some of the errors 
 in their computations, e.^., we easily get 45 instead of 54 by this method. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 451 
 
 1 
 
 edly believes in his own case. There are of course others about 
 the horses, grooms and attendants, to whom less attention has been 
 paid, but it is to be remarked that experiments have been made in 
 the absence of Herr Krall, and also in the absen.ce of any groom, 
 so that apparently the horse is in contact with no one but the ex- 
 perimenter himself. Under such circumstances complicated sums 
 have been solved ; for example. Monsieur G. Bohn reports that in 
 the absence of Krall and the groom he has seen the following 
 performance : 
 
 4/2825761 - V53H4I = 14 
 
 Close attention has been given to the behaviour of Krall and the 
 groom and nothing in the nature of a sign has been detected. To 
 this, however, there is one exception. In order to eliminate the 
 possibility of visual signs, Krall acquired a blind horse called 
 Berto. Herr Wigge, witnessing a performance with Berto, 
 observed that the groom twitched the bridle at the point when the 
 horse had stamped the right number. He had the two reins in 
 his hand and jerked the right or left for the units or the tens. 
 Herr Krall's reply to this accusation is that what Herr Wigge was 
 witnessing was not a demonstration of a performance but of the 
 method of teaching a beginner. But this reply is not wholly 
 satisfactory. Dr. von Mdday ^ points out that no mention is made 
 of the use of the bridle in any of Krall's accounts of training ; that 
 the incident related by Wigge occurred after Berto had had six 
 weeks' training, whereas Krall maintains that Berto could count 
 up to nine in a fortnight. However, Haenel, one of Krall's most 
 vigorous supporters, six .weeks later than Wigge, mentions the 
 substitution of a pull for the actual guidance of the feet, and says 
 that he was witness of the important moment at which the hand 
 could be left ofF. At the lowest, this indicates serious lacunae in 
 Krall's account of the training of the horses. It confirms the 
 suspicion, based above on internal evidence, that the horses do not, 
 at least at the outset, really count when Krall supposed them to 
 be doing so, but were responding to a signal, which he did in fact 
 use. But if this throws an element of doubt on the method ot 
 training, it does not enable us to account for the actual results. 
 
 To the theory that the horses give their replies in answer 
 to involuntary signs, there are four replies. The first is that, 
 with the one exception noted, the signs are incapable of 
 detection. This has already been considered. The second depends 
 on what we may call the loophole experiments. The third on 
 experiments in the absence of Krall and the groom ; and the 
 fourth on experiments in which the answer is wholly unknown 
 even to the experimenter himself (Unwissentliche Versuche). 
 
 T 
 
 ' Tiersede, Heft I. p. 59. ^ Gibt es denkende Ttere, pp. 241-2. 
 
 G G 2 
 
452 . APPENDIX 
 
 Loophole experiments have been described by Clapar^de, who 
 is, on the whole, our best and most impartial witness. Krall, 
 in Clapardde's presence, wrote a problem on the board and retired 
 along with Clapar^de from the stable. The horse was left alone 
 and his proceedings watched through a loophole from outside. 
 The first sum so given was '7614656, and the answer, given in 
 some seconds, was 28, which is right. The next was ^4879681, 
 for which Muhamed, after 30 seconds, gave 117 and then 144. 
 The right solution, which is 47, Muhamed did not find. For the 
 next fourth root, where the right answer was 56, he gave the 
 following attempts : — 43, 73, 267, 34, 74, and 84, and then, 
 being set another sum, he rapped out 56, which would have been 
 right in the previous case. The results of this experiment are 
 curious and I think instructive. The only sum which the horse 
 does right is the first. It looks as though this answer might 
 have been somehow conveyed to the horse, or that possibly he had 
 the figure or the appropriate rappings for the figure 28 in his 
 memory previously. We shall find some corroboration for this 
 suggestion in other answers given by the horse. After the first 
 one he fails, but in the same curious way he seehis to have the 
 right answer to sum No. 3 in his mind, for it comes out, though 
 on the wrong occasion. It is clear that Clapardde's record, taken 
 alone, is unsatisfactory for the defenders of Muhamed, and with 
 regard to the loophole experiments in general Dr. Mdday points 
 out ^ that, so far as our descriptions go, the use of audible signs 
 is not altogether excluded. In several cases the door is partly 
 open, for instance, and Krall habitually talks to the horse from 
 outside. In 21 out of the 22 recorded cases Krall himself wrote up 
 the problern. Four of these cases were so-called Kuvert Versuche, 
 that is to say, the sum set was put inside an envelope, which Krall 
 opened immediately before writing it up on the board, and in 
 these four the proportion of false answers to the right was large. 
 One was not solved at all, but here again, as in Clapar^de's case, 
 the answer was given when the next sum was set. But in these 
 experiments again an awkward incident occurred. The horse 
 gave 33 as a cube root where the answer should have been 23. 
 Krall called out " False," and told the groom to give the horse a 
 stroke of the whip, whereupon, after another error, the horse 
 gave 23. This occurred, says Dr. Buttell Reepen, notwithstanding 
 that he had not told Krall the right solution. Krall's explanation 
 is that, in many cases, he knew a false answer from the manner of 
 pawing, but it must be admitted that the incident throws con- 
 siderable doubt upon the value of experiments in which Krall is 
 supposed to be ignorant of the answer to be given. 
 
 ' Op. cit. p. 297. 
 
APPENDIX 453 
 
 It may be remarked here that experiments in the extraction of 
 roots, of which Herr Krall is particularly fond, are in reality very 
 unsuitable as tests of arithmetical power. Roots can be very rapidly 
 guessed by anyone who has once got the trick, and fifth roots, 
 which sound the hardest, are in reality the easiest of all because 
 the terminal digit is always the same, and unless we run into three 
 figures, only one of them remains to be guessed. On the whole, 
 the loophole experiments add very little to our knowledge. We 
 pass to cases in which Krall is altogether absent. Doctors Sarasin 
 and Brunies give an account ^ of experiments made when Krall was 
 away, the groom coming in only when the horse declined to 
 answer, except in the case of blind Berto, who is apparently 
 unmanageable without him. Experiments with Zarif failed com- 
 pletely. The pony Hanschen read 23 correctly after certain 
 failures, failed to add 2 and 3, asked to count 63 gave successively 
 53, 33, 63 ; for 4 X 5 gave 45 and then 54. Having thus 
 disgraced himself he was energetically smacked and set the sum 
 of 25 X 5, which, after two failures, he gave correctly: 125. 
 There followed a series of trials with Muhamed, which 
 included some failures in very simple operations, e.g., 4 + 6 and 
 6x6. But Muhamed extracted ;^225 correctly after one failure, 
 ^5625 correctly after two failures, and ^2313441 correctly after 
 four failures. He then tapped the name of Albert the groom, 
 thus : A 1 p b a i d. Asked which letter is wrong he says the 
 sixth, which should be r. R is, in fact, given by thirteen taps and 
 i by thirty -one, so that Muhamed's error is excusable. Shown a 
 book and asked what it is, he taps b u, and then after accidental 
 interruption, g. 
 
 There followed some experiments with Berto, but as the groom 
 was present in these they need not be regarded. 
 
 Monsieur Bohn's successes with Muhamed in the absence of 
 Krall have already been referred to. It may be added that when 
 he proposed to the horse an addition, he got a result which'- he 
 thought was mistaken until he saw that he was himself responsible 
 for the error, having made the vertical sign of the plus so faint 
 that Muhamed had taken it for a minus and carried out a sub- 
 traction, which was worked correctly. 
 
 Monsieur Clapar^de's results under similar conditions were 
 hardly so favourable. On his first visit Krall wrote up the follow- 
 ing sum on the blackboard and then left the room : — 
 
 (V1296 - V^i) X (x/H4- V49)- 
 
 Muhamed, says Monsieur Clapar^de, threw a glance at the board 
 and instantly replied 115, which is wrong. Krall then called to 
 
 1 Tierseele, Heft I. p. 184. 
 
454 APPENDIX 
 
 him from outside to begin again, and he gave 25, and then 125, 
 which is still wrong. After this Muhamed persisted in knocking 
 numbers of his own and made an undecipherable word. He then 
 returned to the sums and gave a correct answer to the one written 
 above, namely, 135, without any preliminary mistake, and later on 
 he solved a fourth root when Krall had left the stable after writing 
 up the problem. Monsieur Clapar^de then being left alone with 
 Muhamed, gave him some simple additions, but the answers were 
 wrong and not clear. 
 
 In a second visit Monsieur Claparede obtained some rather 
 better results when he knew the answers to his own questions. 
 Hanschen failed in several cases, but succeeded in getting 
 24 + 12 = 36 at the third shot. Muhamed failed the first day, 
 and Zarif altogether, but on the second day Muhamed gave some 
 right answers in the absence of the assistants. These results, if 
 not as clear as might be wished, show that it is at least possible to 
 obtain a correct answer from the horses when neither Krall nor 
 any of the attendants is there, at least, so far as the experimenter 
 is aware, but I do not notice that any attention has been given to 
 the question of the possibility of a dishonest person operating in 
 some manner from outside the stable. 
 
 But the matter is of less critical importance than might appear, 
 because if the solution of the whole matter is communication with 
 the horse by a sign, which cannot be detected and which may be 
 involuntary, it is quite as possible that the experimenter himself 
 may give this sign without knowing it, and that is the suggestion 
 which has to be met by the upholders of the intellectualist inter- 
 pretation of these performances. The decisive test would then 
 lie in the power of the horse to answer a question when the right 
 solution was unknown to the experimenter himself The import- 
 ance of this test was seen by Monsieur Claparede, who, in the 
 experiments which he made when alone with the horses, attempted 
 by the use of cards to set them problems unknown to himself. 
 His results are as follows : — 
 
 Hanschen's answers were wrong, but in one case gave the 
 number 42 for 45. 
 
 Muhamed failed on that day with numbers known to Claparede, 
 and therefore was not tested with the unknown. On the next 
 day, after Muhamed had given some right replies as mentioned 
 above, in cases where Monsieur Claparede knew the answer, the 
 test of the unknown was applied. In all cases Muhamed's answer 
 was wrong. There followed an addition, in which Monsieur 
 Claparede knew the figures, 22 -f- 15, given correctly as 37, but 
 after this no results were given by the horse. Monsieur Claparede 
 considers the result of this investigation to be negative. It fails to 
 disprove the horses' powers, but it does not show a clear issue. The 
 
APPENDIX 455 
 
 horse makes numerous mistakes when Clapar^de knows the 
 answer, and we cannot therefore say decisively that his failure when 
 Monsieur Clapar6de does not know the answer is due to the 
 absence of an unconscious sign. Other cases are, first, that of 
 Monsieur Bohn, mentioned above, in which the horse subtracted 
 instead of adding. This feat convinced Monsieur Bohn. He 
 had the wrong solution in his mind, and therefore certainly could 
 not have signalled the right one. On the other hand, it must be 
 said it is permissible to doubt Monsieur Bohn's interpretation. 
 After all, he wrote a plus, not a minus, and the suggestion that 
 the horse read the plus as a minus is merely his own hypothesis. 
 Muhamed might simply have made another of his frequent 
 mistakes. 
 
 We come finally to Dr. Haenel's record. Herr Krall was 
 absent. Dr. Haenel sent the groom out of the stall, quite con- 
 vinced himself that nobody remained behind the door of the stall, 
 which had to be kept open for the sake of the light. He then 
 took a packet of cards, with the numbers i to 9 on them, wrote a 
 plus on the board, and put two cards one on each side of it without 
 seeing what they were. Muhamed, after several responses that 
 were not clear, gave decisively 15. Dr. Haenel then looked at 
 the numbers and found they were 7 and 8. Muhamed dealt in 
 the same way with 3 and 2, and with 8 + 2 + 3. There 
 followed a case in which Dr. Haenel had a half glance at the 
 numbers as he put them up, and summed them to 13. Muhamed, 
 however, gave 16, which proved to be right. Three other 
 additions were correctly given, two of them after a preliminary 
 failure, and he then substituted the multiplying sign for the plus 
 and put up two figures. Muhamed gave 27, and the figures were 
 9x3. For the two next figures Muhamed again gave 27 and 
 repeated it, but the numbers were 7x6. In the next experi- 
 ment Muhamed gave 9x2 correctly as 18, but on being asked 
 for a repetition gave I2, 2, 29, and then 18 again. For 8x6 
 Muhamed gave 65 and then 48. There followed seven similar 
 problems, which were not solved, and the details of which, 
 unfortunately, are not given us, and the seance was wound up with 
 the extraction of .^7890481 given correctly as 53. Being asked 
 for a repetition of this, Muhamed wavered considerably, giving in 
 succession 4, 55, 33, 23, and 54. This number had been given 
 by Herr Krall to Dr. Haenel on the previous night. The solution 
 was unknown to Dr. Haenel. 
 
 This record is without doubt the most remarkable in the whole 
 series, and if we could suppose Dr. Haenel to have taken all suit- 
 able precautions, would compel us to dismiss the theory of 
 involuntary signs once for all. But it must be remarked : — 
 
 (i) That the door was open. 
 
456 APPENDIX 
 
 (2) That Dr. Haenel writes as an enthusiast. 
 
 (3) That it may not be so easy as he takes it to be to secure 
 complete ignorance of the figures placed on the board. In one 
 instance, as a fact, he mentions the half glance, and it must 
 be borne in mind that the horse, on the face of the record, itself 
 frequently makes a number of uncertain efforts before he gets to 
 the right one, a process which still suggests that he is in some way 
 waiting for a sign. It is at least reasonable to suspend judgment 
 until further experiments of the type of this record by Dr. Haetiel 
 have been made under careful observation, by two or more experi- 
 mentalists in co-operation. 
 
 Let us now for a moment discuss the apparent results, seeking 
 to dismiss all preconceived opinions as to the capacity or incapacity 
 of horses. Let us suppose that we have merely the results before 
 us, without knowing whether they were produced by a civilised 
 man, a savage, a little boy, or an animal, and that we were therefore 
 free to enquire what sort of intelligence, if any, they presuppose. 
 We should, to begin with, find in them some strong reasons against 
 the supposition that they rest upon a genuine imderstanding of 
 arithmetical operations. This reason is to be found in the nature 
 of the mistakes made by the horses, and of the method by which 
 they approach solution. Quite easy problems are missed by these 
 advanced students ; for instance, Zarif gives 4^ = 15, and corrects it 
 to 24.^ Now, any horse as familiar with squares as Zarif was 
 supposed to be by this time ought to know that a square number 
 cannot be odd. The talented Muhamed, at quite a late date, fails, 
 in the presence of Dr. Sarasin, to add 4 + 6, and also to multiply 
 6x6. This in the same seance wherein he succeeds in find- 
 ing ^2313441. Berto can divide 21 by 3, and gives 7, but 
 immediately afterwards he supposes that 5 -|- 6 =41, and corrects 
 it to 14. 
 
 These are not casual mistakes. They are written all over the 
 record, and though they are imputed to obstinacy or wilfulness on 
 the part of the horse, it must be pointed out that they are often 
 punished with a hearty smack. It is indeed doubtful whether years 
 of practice make the horses really more competent in dealing with 
 very simple than with very difficult questions. On this point there 
 is some conflict of evidence. Dr. Plate put together a number of 
 results of successes and failures, classified in accordance with the 
 difficulty of the problem. The gist of these is given in the 
 appended table. Column I. includes additions and subtractions 
 involving not more than two figures, enumeration, reading the date 
 of the month, and so on. Column II., additions and subtractions 
 of more than two figures, division and multiplication, or in Berto's 
 case the counting of figures written on the back. Also spelling, 
 ' Clapardde, Archives de Psychologic, XII p. 273. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 +57 
 
 explaining pictures, and squaring one or two figures. Column III. 
 includes roots and cubing or raising to the fourth power. The 
 results are as follows : — 
 
 
 Correct without preliminary failure. 
 
 Complete failure. 
 
 
 I 
 
 II 
 
 III 
 
 I 
 
 II 
 
 III 
 
 Muhamed 
 
 44-8 
 
 41-2 
 
 lO'O 
 
 13-8 
 
 32-4 
 
 20 
 
 Zarif 
 
 77-3 
 
 53-8 
 
 — 
 
 13-6 
 
 26'9 
 
 — 
 
 Hanschen 
 
 44'4 
 
 31-0 
 
 — 
 
 187 
 
 26'2 
 
 — 
 
 Berto 
 
 477 
 
 3I-I 
 
 — 
 
 IO-8 
 
 197 
 
 — 
 
 Total 
 
 51-5 
 
 36-8 
 
 — 
 
 127 
 
 25-0 
 
 — 
 
 This table was made when Muhamed and Zarif had had over 
 four years' instruction, Hanschen one year, and Berto six months. 
 Dr. MAday notes that Muhamed still errs in nearly one out 
 of two of the simplest problems, and although he is the most 
 accomplished performer of the party, Hanschen and Berto equal 
 him in the simplest cases. Still these figures certainly show a 
 reduction of successes in proportion to difficulty, but particularly 
 in the case of Muhamed this reduction is by no means what one 
 would expect from a genuine intelligence which was undergoing a 
 genuine education. We should expect more like 90 or 95% of 
 successes in very simple sums at such a stage. Modjelewski's 
 figures, however, are much more damaging to the inteilectualist 
 view. He was present along with Monsieur Clapar^de and 
 enumerated all the cases witnessed by him, distinguishing the 
 more complex, in which he included all calculations and the 
 reading of verbal numbers, from the remainder. His results 
 showed that in the first seance the horses gave right answers 
 in 11% of all cases but in 13% of the more complex. This 
 is the very opposite of what we might expect from an intelligent 
 schoolboy. 
 
 The answers, as we have seen, are often senseless, wholly wide 
 of the mark, even numbers given as the root or square of odds, 
 and so on. But beyond this, right answers seem to be arrived 
 at by a process of groping; for example, for \/i 17649 Muhamed 
 gives successively 4, 13, 346, 347, and 343. Apparently he gets 
 by successive stages to three figures, and at the third shot he has 
 got two digits right. At the fourth shot he has got 7 as a terminal 
 digit, which is a possible square root for a number ending in 9. 
 That being wrong, 3 is the only alternative, and is correctly 
 given. It certainly looks here as if some mind was groping for 
 the right answer, but hardly that any mind was calculating. 
 So again V2313441 = 37> 16, 19, 49, and 39 (r). The first shot 
 
458 APPENDIX 
 
 is nearly right and 7 is a possible fourth root for a number ending 
 in I, but it must have been a mere shot, whoever is responsible for 
 it, for it is followred by 16, which is hopeless, and then by 19, 
 where the terminal is, for the first time, right. Shots are then 
 made at the first figure, which is got at the third try. Compare 
 the very next sum : 
 
 7 + 8 + 3 + II + 5 = 25, 33, 34. 
 
 Here we have an operation which seems rather more consequent. 
 The approximations are successive. The first figure is probably 
 influenced by the terminal 5. The second shot brings us very 
 nearly right. 
 
 One of the most suggestive cases is recorded by Monsieur 
 Clapar^de {Archives, XII., p. 289), V99225 = 315. For this 
 Muhamed gives the following answers: 134, 155, 113, 135, 153, 
 235, 134, 175, 325, 215. Monsieur Clapar^de rightly notes that 
 the digits group themselves about 315. Two digits are right 
 in every shot, and in several cases all three digits. Anyone 
 applying our test, knowing only that someone had given these 
 solutions without knowing who it was, would say that that 
 someone had got a notion of the digits constituting the number, 
 but no notion whatever of the operation by which the number is 
 obtained. 
 
 With these results we may associate the tendency to answer 
 wrong questions, which we have already noted. If, without 
 knowing it was a horse, we learnt that the answer 56 was given 
 to one sum when it belonged to a previous one for which the 
 answers propounded had been hopelessly wrong, we should infer 
 that the person who did that sum had somehow got the number 
 56 implanted in his mind and that it came out on the wrong 
 occasion. The previous sum might have set in motion the 
 train of association destined to call it forth, but it had worked too 
 slowly and come up at a moment when quite another figure was 
 required. On the whole, on these considerations we seem war- 
 ranted in drawing at least one negative conclusion. The horses 
 do not work sums of any complexity as arithmeticians. They 
 arrive at their results by some other method. Whatever that 
 may be, this method involves a great deal of guessing and groping, 
 and the same appears to be true of the words attributed to the 
 horses. Dr. zur Strassen gives as his opinion^ that the horses 
 produce senseless words at first, and that then when their 
 tappings give some sense, which their modes of spelling render 
 easy, they seem suddenly to know what they mean to say ; indeed, 
 the formation of words is no test, for the operation of signs is 
 
 ' Tierseele, Heft III. p. 265. 
 
APPENDIX 459 
 
 in this case quite impossible to exclude. Monsieur Claparede, cool 
 observer as he in general is, was greatly impressed at the outset ot 
 his experiments with Zarif by the fact that the horse spontaneously 
 rapped out in his code Schlprrd. Allowing for the resemblance 
 in German of Sch to C and for the absence of vowels in the 
 horse's notation, this is equivalent to the name Claparede. 
 Commenting on it, Krall at first said that Zarif had never heard 
 the name, but afterwards corrected himself and said that Clapar^de's 
 coming had been mentioned before the horse that morning. The 
 legitimate inference is not that the horse wanted to show that he 
 knew Clapar^de's name, but that when his spontaneous rappings 
 began Herr Krall tended involuntarily to check them successively 
 at the point at which they made an intelligible letter, and as the 
 shaping of these letters into a name proceeded, the process would 
 become more certain. 
 
 In fact, whatever may be said against the horses as arithmeticians 
 may be said with greater force against them as grammarians. It 
 is on their handling of arithmetical problems that they must stand 
 or fall, and on this point we may conclude negatively that, at 
 any rate, they do not do arithmetic after the manner of the 
 arithmeticians. But if the horses have not all the powers claimed 
 for them, are we to conclude that they have none at all beyond a 
 preternatural gift of responding to signs which no human observer 
 can detect ? In advancing this theory we are in some danger of 
 falling as deep into the bog of the miraculous on the one side as 
 the opposite party do upon the other. It is quite useless to bring 
 in telepathy to our aid, for telepathy would not explain the cases 
 in which the experimenter himself does not know the problem. 
 We have seen that genuine cases of success under these conditions 
 are very few, and our principal witness. Dr. Haenel, is not wholly 
 satisfactory, for he is apparently an enthusiast, and in his enthusiasm 
 omits some details which we should very much wish to have. 
 Let us, however, for the moment take his evidence, assuming its 
 soundness, and consider what powers it implies. It will be seen 
 that the experiments with Muhamed fall into three divisions. 
 The first consist in simple additions and very simple multiplica- 
 tions, which were for the most part solved accurately. The 
 second consist of a series of problems described as similar, in which 
 the horse failed and which, most unfortunately, he does not 
 specify. The third consists of the extraction of the fourth root. 
 Now this last problem was handed to Dr. Haenel by Krall 
 himself, and it is not an unfair inference that it is one in which 
 the horse might be expected to succeed. If that is so, it was 
 because the horse had memorised it, and we have seen evidence of 
 memorising, partial or complete, in some of the errors already 
 referred to. At any rate, without either calculation or memorising, 
 
46o APPENDIX 
 
 « 
 
 on the actual face of the evidence, we cannot explain Muhamed's 
 success in this case. Let us assume for the moment that it was 
 memorising — what does that mean ? It means that Muhamed 
 could associate a double series of taps, 3 with the right, 5 with 
 the left foot, with a complex symbol ; and if memorising is a 
 serious part of the explanation of the horse's achievements, it 
 means that he was capable of forming many such associations. 
 This is a very wonderful capacity to attribute to a horse, but less 
 remote from what we already know of animal intelligence than 
 bond fide arithmetical calculation. In mitigation of the difficulty 
 the frequency of mistakes must be borne in mind, and the tendency 
 of all the horses to prefer certain numbers to others. I think that 
 this must be admitted as a bare possibility. 
 
 We then come to the simple sums which Muhamed did. Most 
 of these are additions. It is barely possible that Muhamed can so 
 far be said to read the ligures, i, 2, 3, etc., as to respond to them 
 with the appropriate number of taps. This again is what no one 
 would readily believe of a horse, but it is less difficult to believe than 
 to credit him with some of the powers claimed by Herr Krall. 
 Now if Muhamed can in this sense read 6, 7, and 3, it is possible 
 that when 6 + 7 + 3 is put on the board, he should tap out 16 in 
 all, not adding them in the strict sense of the term, but tapping 
 them in succession. The test here is a simple one. If there were 
 true addition Muhamed would render the 16 by 6 taps with the 
 right and i with the left foot ; if the figures were read ofF, he 
 would give all 16 taps with one foot. Most unfortunately, 
 Dr. Haenel does not tell us which he did, but all the additions 
 which he mentions amount to small sums, which might have been 
 tapped with one foot without great fatigue. 
 
 Lastly, there remain four simple multiplications, two of which 
 were given wrong in the first instance and which again might 
 conceivably be memorised. In a word, if we keep to the cases in 
 which, if the report is accurate, any possibility of a signal is 
 excluded, we find that they postulate a definite memorising, both 
 of simple and complex signs, that is to say, the association with 
 such signs of the number of taps. But it must be admitted that 
 this alone is a forced explanation, and that it would be natural on 
 the ground of these experiments alone to attribute to the horse at 
 least the capacity for simple addition and possibly of very simple 
 multiplication. The alternative is to reject Dr. Haenel's evidence. 
 in toto. 
 
 There, for the moment, the matter must rest until further 
 evidence is available. The question will hardly be solved until 
 some more general evidence of intelligence is available than these 
 highly specialist methods provided ; for example, when we find that 
 the horse wholly fails to understand a statement that Monsieur 
 
APPENDIX 461 
 
 Clapar^de has a carrot for him and that he is to come and get it, 
 we find it exceedingly difficult to believe that he can himself make 
 up sentences about carrots and communicate them in a code to his 
 master.i gy^ ^g j^^y. (Jo^gH (q consider the bearings of the whole 
 question upon the general theory of animal intelligence, which may 
 be very briefly stated. Should the w^hole or even a small portion 
 of Herr Krall's claim be substantiated, it would rather show the 
 immense efFect of training on drawing out the potentialities of the 
 mind than alter our view as to the normal level of animal in- 
 telligence. Ordinary horses do not perform any such feats as those 
 of Muhamed and Zarif. They are incapable of communicating 
 with their masters in any such fashion. If they were, their whole 
 position in the world's economy would be different and men would 
 not be upon their backs. If anything like Herr Krall's view is 
 true, we must infer that powers like those of fixing a concept like 
 a number independent of anything seen, heard, or felt, and operat- 
 ing with it in some determinate fashion, are capable of being elicited 
 by training in a mind, which normally makes no use of any such 
 faculty. That is to say, the transition from the level of in- 
 telligence characteristic of the normal animal of the higher type to 
 that characteristic of the human being is capable of being made, 
 not by the evolution of a new type of brain but within the limits 
 of modifiability of a single brain through the stimulating powers of 
 the teacher. This would corroborate our view of the essential 
 difference between the animal and human intelligence as a differ- 
 ence due to the development of the means of inter-communication, 
 though it would attribute to this factor far more preponderating 
 influence than we have ventured to assign to it, far more even than, 
 with all Herr Krall's evidence before us, we can think is really 
 probable. 
 
 Note 
 
 The case of Rolf, the Mannheim terrier, may be more cursorily treated. 
 The truth is that, as Dr. Miday says, the story of Rolf reads almost hke 
 a skit upon performances of the Elberfeld horses. Rolf learnt his arith- 
 metic while listening to the children's lessons and helps them with their 
 sums when in any difficulty. He gives orthodox answers to Jesuits and 
 keeps a private theology of a more up to date kind for his friends. Almost 
 everything he has done he has done in the presence and with the know- 
 ledge of his mistress, and the evidence for unseen experiments is slight and 
 unsatisfactory. It consists, as far as I know, first of Mackenzie's statement 
 that he showed the dog certain cards which he described. " I am sure," 
 says Mackenzie, " that absolutely no one saw the design except the dog." 
 No details are given, and it is obviously exceedingly difificult to be sure of 
 such a point when there are many people in the room. Secondly, we have 
 the observations of Doctors Gruber and Wilser. Dr. Gruber gave certain 
 cards to Rolf, which he thought he concealed from everybody else. In 
 
 ' Archives de Psychologie, XII. p. 278. 
 
462 
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 these experiments Rolf's mistress was present. On the same day 
 apparently Dr. Gruber and Dr. Wilser interviewed Rolf in the absence of 
 his mistress and also tried unseen experiments. The dog, however, paid 
 no attention but gaped impolitely, and after many remonstrances brought 
 out the following sentence, " wholly unexpected and astonishing to all 
 present": — "Very many pictures seen and said what they are with 
 Ziegler (who had been with him two days before). It is enough. Will not 
 
 say any more what it is All men give me the hump." We may 
 
 sympathise perhaps, but we shall not agree with Dr. Wilser that in this 
 remark obviously nobody could have helped him. He then went on to 
 describe a picture correctly as a fat pig, but this picture — here said to 
 have been shown in the absence of his mistress — corresponds precisely with 
 one of the unseen experiments described by Dr. Gruber. Finally, after 
 returning to his mistress, Rolf gave some beautiful proofs of his capacity. 
 It follows that, in fact, experiments in the absence of his mistress, the 
 answer to which was unknown to the experimenters, failed. Instead of 
 performing them the dog produced this ridiculous sentence which substi- 
 tuted astonishment and laughter for enquiry. Monsieur Clapardde 
 (" Clapardde et Des Bancels," Archives de Psychologie, XIII. p. 377), 
 who attempted unseen experiments, found, as a careful observer would, 
 considerable difficulty in satisfying himself as to the conditions, but 
 finally succeeded in so satisfying himself in two cases, in one of 
 which the dog gave a correct description of a picture, in the other 
 a vague one. As to this success, Monsieur Claparede gays judiciously : 
 "We affirm that Mdme. Moekel did not look at the pictures, and 
 we believe that it would have been very difficult to see them even 
 involuntarily." But affirmation is not a proof, and this proof would be 
 necessary to secure the experiment all its value. Monsieur Clapardde 
 wished to continue the experiments the next day. Rolf, in the meantime, 
 had been taken ill. He concludes that his observations did not suffice to 
 establish the facts proposed to be verified. " Without doubt the experi- 
 ments that we report seem to attest in the dog the possibility of a spon- 
 taneous speech, and would demonstrate its real existence if they had been 
 executed in conditions which could defy criticism. But we cannot offer 
 them as entirely satisfactory in this respect. We are obliged to insist, on 
 the other hand, that Rolf, sympathetic as he is, does not, under ordinary 
 circumstances, as far as we have the means of judging, pass the level of a 
 dog reputed to be intelligent, and that under the tests to which he is con- 
 strained he often shows signs of marked ennui." This is but a cold criti- 
 cism to follow the enthusiastic article of Professor Mackenzie {Archives 
 de Psychologie, XIII. p. 379). The authors add that they had wished 
 to show Rolf a card saying, " There is some sugar for you behind the 
 drawing-room door." This test, which it may be agreed would have been a 
 most decisive one, was prevented by Rolf's indisposition. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Accident, comparative unimportance 
 
 of, in experiments, 236 
 Acquirement of meaning, H2 
 Acquisition, perceptual and motor, 189 
 Affection, development of, 403 
 Alexander, Prof. S., 8 
 Altruism, 342 
 Amphibia, 127, 138 
 Analysis, absence of, in animals, 235 
 Animal behaviour and human morality, 
 
 34S. 35 1 
 Animal societies and division of labour, 
 
 344 
 Ants {see Hymenoptera) 
 Application of experience, 263 
 AppUcation, spontaneous, 263 
 Aristotle, 7, 335, 339, 368, 374, 385 
 Art, evolution of, 345 
 Articulata, 139 
 
 Articulateness in experience, 147 
 AssimilationandReadjustment, Ch. VII 
 „ retrogressive, 126 
 
 „ work of, 132 
 
 Association of Ideas, 144, 148, 153 
 Association, sense impulse theory of, 
 
 176 
 Attention not natural but acquired, 238 
 Autenrieth, 71 
 Automatic movements, 40 
 
 Bastian, Dr. H. C, 327 
 
 Bates, H. W., 277 
 
 Bateson, IV., 87, 117, 126, 134, 136, 
 
 161 
 Bees (see Hymenoftera) 
 Berry, C. S., 242, 243, 306 
 Bethe, Albrecht, 136, 328 
 Binet and Henri. 1 54, 155 
 Bingley, Rev. W., 240 
 
 Birds, reflex action among, 53 
 
 ,, operation of experience among, 
 
 115, 116, 127 
 „ modification of instinct among, 
 
 308 
 , , sentinels used by, 309 
 ,, grades of, 425 
 
 Birth-rate, 420-428 
 
 Bonnet, C., 82 
 
 Bradley, F. H., 335 
 
 BrehnCs Thierleben, 80, 82, 126, 127, 
 13s. 137. 138, 139. 140, 240, 274, 
 288, 293, 308, 310, 311, 312, 313, 
 
 314. 317 
 Buckton, G. B., 84 
 Burden Sanderson, Sir J., 34 
 
 Calkins, Miss M. W., 157 
 Cambridge Natural History, 6g, 86, 
 
 96, 136, 137, 140, 421 
 Cats, Mr. Thorndike's, 176-184 
 
 ,, character of, 189 
 
 „ pulling string, 190, 191, 192 
 
 ,, using lever, 195 
 
 ,, using pull-bolt, 197, 198 
 
 ,, using push-back bolt, 201 
 
 , , lifting catch, 203 
 „ loop, 207 
 
 ,, pulling spike, 209 
 
 ,, lifting cover, 212 
 
 ,, upsetting jug, &c., 210, 21 1, 212 
 
 ,, opening drawers, 215, 216 
 
 ,, sliding lid, 217 
 
 ,, "control" experiments with, 
 221, 222 
 
 ,, using tied cord, 228 
 Cells, 27, 39, 40 
 Cephalopods, action of experience 
 
 among, 140 
 Children, reflex action in development 
 
 in, 51 
 
 463 
 
464 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Children, early speech in, 322-329, 
 
 358. 359 
 
 {see Infants) 
 Christian Socialism, 385 
 Classification, preparatory work of 
 
 Science, 368 
 Coelenterata, evidence as to learning 
 
 by experience among, 128, 129 
 Cole, L. W., 243, 263, 300, 306 
 Common sense, 365, 366 
 Comte, Auguste, 373 
 Conation, 20, 57 et seq. 
 Concept, the, Ch. XIV 
 „ the Collective, 338 
 „ the Individual, 338 
 Concepts, general, 329 et seq. 
 Conceptual thought, products of, Ch. 
 
 XV 
 Conceptual thinking and Will, 349 
 Conduct, standardising of, 353 
 Confirmation and Inhibition, 1 14 
 Cornish, C.J., 309, 311 
 Correlation of intelligent organisms, 6 
 „ of Experiences and Actions, 
 
 132, 171 
 ,, work ot Intelligence, 6, II 
 ,, of sciences is work of 
 philosophy, 371 
 Correlation, summary of stages of, Ch. 
 
 XVII 
 Craig, Mr. Wallace, 68, 69, 81 
 Crickets, powers of separate nerve- 
 centres among, 416 
 Cross-relation, 333 
 Crustacea, 80, 85, 139 
 Cuvier, Baron George, 287 
 
 D 
 
 Dahl, F., 68, 83, 86, 117, 301 
 Darwin, Charles, 46, 51, 134, 140, 
 
 311, 315, 324, 32s 
 Dawson, Mr., 140, 141 
 Definition, part played by in science, 
 
 367 
 Desire, development of, 350 
 
 ,, nature of, 165, 361, 431 
 Development, general character of, 
 Ch. I 
 ,, human, 388 
 
 ,, self-conscious, Ch. XIX 
 
 )> )) 373 
 
 Diezel, Herr, 317 
 Direction experiments, 256 et seq. 
 Discrimination experiments, 220 et seq. 
 Dogs: Mr. Lloyd Morgan's Tony, 175 
 Mr. Thorndike's, 176 
 „ using lever, 194, 195 
 ,, imitation experiments with, 221 
 
 Dogs : Jack, character of, 190 
 „ „ pulling string, 192 
 „ ,, pulling string on banisters, 
 
 193 
 „ „ usmg lever, 195 
 „ „ „ pull-bolt, 196-199 
 
 ,, ,, „ push-back bolt, 200- 
 
 202 
 ,, ,, lifting catch, 203, 204 
 ,, ,, „ loop, 207 
 
 , , , , pulling spike, 208 
 
 upsetting jug, &c., 212 
 ,, „ lifting cover, 212, 213 
 ,, ,, opening drawers, 213-216 
 
 „ sliding lid, 217 
 ,, ,, pushing door, 217, 218 
 ,, ,, knocking off weight, 218, 
 
 219 
 ,, ,, failing with basket, 219 
 ,, ,, failing with hook, 219, 220 
 „ ,, "control" with experi- 
 ments, 221 
 ,, ,, pulling strings, 223-226 
 ,, ,, ,, tied cord, 226, 227 
 " Double movement " tricks, 237 
 Driesch, Prof., 29, 36, 37 
 
 Ebbinghaus, Prof, 154, 155, 158 
 
 Echinodermata, 3 
 
 Elberfeld Horses, the, 306, Appendix 
 
 Elephants, retrogressive assimilation 
 among, 126 
 ,, using pull-bolt, 198, 199 
 
 ,, ,, push-back bolt, 203 
 
 ,, lifting catch, 206 
 
 , , pulling tied cord, 229 
 
 ,, reaching with stick, 277 
 
 ,, using automatic machine, 
 
 296 
 ,, low fertility of, 421 
 
 Encouragement, use of in experiments, 
 188 
 
 European countries and infant mor- 
 tality, 426-432 
 
 Evers, Herr, 137 
 
 Evolution, general character of, 1-5 
 , , Haeckel's scheme of organic, 
 
 3 
 ,, aristogenic, S 
 
 orthogenic, 5-10, 347, 413, 
 . 437. 441,. 442 
 ,, biological, inorganic char- 
 acter of, 436 
 ,, self-conscious, Ch. XIX 
 Experience and Inference, 108, 116 
 ,, as regulating Instinct, 90 
 „ modifying a reaction, 108, 
 III 
 
INDEX 
 
 465 
 
 Experience, concrete, and the Practical 
 Judgment, Ch. VIII, 255 
 ,, concrete, 147 
 ,, „ revival of, 149 
 
 ,, ,, and Memory, 153 
 
 ,, , ,, among higher ani- 
 
 mals, 303 
 ,, articulate, 154-158 
 ,, application of, 263 et seq., 
 
 304. 319 
 ,, human, and systems of 
 conduct, 343 
 Experimental results, Ch. X 
 
 ,, „ tables of, 246-254 
 
 Explanation, final work of science, 368 
 
 Human race, low fertility of, 426-428 
 ,, fertility decreases with higher 
 development, 426 et seq. 
 Humanitarian principle, the, 383-387 
 Hume, David, 145 
 Hunter, Dr., 243 
 Hutchinson, General, 264, 297 
 Hymenoptera, learning by experience 
 among, 139 
 ,, communication among, 
 
 328 
 ,, powersofseparatenerve- 
 
 centres among, 416 
 
 Fabre, Jules, 76, 77 
 
 Fertility, tables of human, 426, 427 
 
 Fish, lower form of intelligence among, 
 
 137, 138 
 ,, treatment of young by, 137, 312, 
 
 313 
 Flechsig, Prof., 53 
 Fleure and Walton, Messrs., 128 
 Forel, Zf., 416 
 
 Foster, Sir Michael, 24, 25, 43, 44, 
 46, 49, 5° 
 
 G 
 
 Gbltz, Prof. Friedrich, 53 
 
 Gregg, F. M., and McPheeiers, C.A., 
 
 243 
 
 Groos, Karl, 262, 324, 326 
 
 Guinea-pigs, infant, reaction to touch- 
 stimulus in, 47 
 
 H 
 
 Habit and Discrimination, 220 
 
 Habituation, 162, 167 
 
 Haeckel, Ernst, 3 
 
 Haggerty, Dr. M. E., 69, 242, 306 
 
 Hamilton, G. K, 216, 243 
 
 Happiness, nature of, 431, 432 
 
 ,, development of, 432 
 
 ,, relativity of, 432 
 
 Hegel, G. W. F., 3, 335 
 Herrick, F. H., 92 
 Hicks and Carr, Messrs., 156 
 Hodge and Aiken, Messrs., 141 
 Holmes, S./., 76 
 Huber, Pierre, 83 
 Hudson, Mr., 68 
 
 Human development and organic 
 growth, 387, 388 
 ,, evolution, 389 
 
 Idea and Desire, 165 
 Ideas, Association of, 144, 145 
 , , evidence of guidance by, 232 
 ,, articulate, Ch. XII 
 ,, practical, of animals, 305 
 , , can animals have ? 320 
 Imitation, failure in, 183 
 
 ,, influence of, in experiments, 
 
 225 et seq. 
 ,, reflective or analogical, 
 
 305 
 Impulsive adjustments, 301, 302 
 Infants and reaction to touch-stimulus,. 
 
 S3 
 Inference, nature of, 265 
 Inferences, based on general similarity, 
 
 166 
 Inferential type of action, 1 1 1 
 Insects, instinct among, 90-97 
 
 ,, lower, learning by experience 
 among, 139 
 Instinct as unifying principle, 8, 9 
 ,, and Intelligence, 8, 9, 10, 70, 
 
 71, 80, 93 et seq. 
 ,, not always complete at birth, 
 
 67 
 ,, and Heredity, 72 
 „ " mechanical," 75 
 „ shaped by Experience, lOO, 
 
 355 
 „ position of, 354 
 ,, slow advance of, 429 
 Intelligence, working within sphere of 
 Instinct, 87 et seq. 
 diffusion of lower form, 
 
 133 
 human, development of, 
 
 357 
 and the Social Instincts, 
 
 Ch. XIII 
 stages of, 132, 133, 168, 
 
 173, 302-306, Ch. 
 
 XVII, 357-363, 400 
 
 et seq. 
 
 H H 
 
466 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Intelligence, work of, 400 
 
 „ efficiency of, 423 
 
 ,, affecting organisation of 
 
 life, 423, 424 
 Invertebrata, power of learning by 
 experience among, 139 
 ,, more prolific than Ver- 
 
 tebrata, 421 
 
 J 
 
 Jennings, Prof. H.S., 59, 63, 64, 113, 
 
 243. 263 
 Jennison, Mr. George, 1S6, 278, 328 
 Journal of Animal Behaviour, 51, 69, 
 73, 76, 81, 92, 93, 122, 123, 128, 
 139, 141, 142, 156, 216, 243 
 Journal of Marine Biology, 87, 117 
 Judgment and Assimilation, 143 
 
 ,, the Practical, general char- 
 acter of, 143 
 I, ,, ,, and Concrete Ex- 
 
 perience, Ch. 
 VIII., 147, 
 158, 168, 401 
 „ „ ,. as a stage in 
 
 the correla- 
 tion of expe- 
 riences, 1 70, 
 401-404 
 „ ,, Comparative, 331 
 „ ,, Universil333, e<j-«?.,36o 
 
 K 
 
 Kearton, K., 194 
 Kinnaman, Dr., 242, 295 
 Kirby and Sfence, 82, 83 
 Knowledge of Individuals, 261 
 
 ,, ,, Concrete Objects, Ch. XI 
 
 Language, elements implied in its use, 
 
 321, 322 
 ,, analogies to, in the animal 
 
 world, 323 
 ,, animal, 324 
 ,, of young children, 322, 
 
 325-329 
 
 Lankester, Sir E. Ray, 421 
 
 Layard, E. Z., 88 
 
 Leeches, variation of response in, 88 
 
 Lloyd Morgan, Principal, 27, 53, 66, 
 68, 69, 78, 95, 96, no, 115, 116, 
 119, 124, 125, 127, 136, I7S, 176, 
 240, 264, 265, 266, 267, 296, 298, 
 299. 300, 301. 308, 309. 31 '. 326 
 
 Logic, the Judgment of, 146 
 
 „ and criterion of certainty, 371 
 Lonsdale, Mr., 140 
 Lovat, Lord, 311 
 
 Lubbock, Sir J. (Lord Avebury), 76, 
 328 
 
 M 
 
 Mammals, adaptation in, 22 
 
 ,, instinct sometimes incom- 
 
 plete at birth, 67 
 ,, fertility decreases with 
 higher development, 425- 
 Marion, H., ■zdfs 
 Marryat, Captain, 66 
 McDougall, Dr. W., 398 
 Mechanism in organic processes, Ch. 
 
 II., 25, 30 
 Memory, Concrete Experience and, 153 
 „ and Anticipation, 159 
 ,, in animals, 239, 240 
 Melalnikow, Prof., 141 
 Metaphysics in connection with Logic 
 
 and Psychology, 370 
 Mill, J. S., 335 
 "Mind" (periodical), 51 
 Mind, function of in Evolution, 5, 418, 
 436 
 ,, highest known reality, 5 
 Mivart, Dr., 147 
 Mobius, K., 117, 140 
 MoUusca, effects of experience on, 
 
 134, 140, 240 
 Monkeys : — 
 
 Chimpanzee (Consul) and key, 294, 
 320 
 ,, Professor, character of 
 
 271 
 using push- 
 back bolt, 
 201 
 using boxes, 
 
 216 
 using tied 
 cord, 278, 
 
 279 , 
 reaching with 
 
 stick, 272 
 using rope, 
 
 273 
 working 
 stick with- 
 in tube, 
 283, 284 
 Drills, using push-back bolt, 201 
 Monkey rescuing keeper, 31S 
 Orang, Cuvier's, 287 
 Rhesus, yi'OTJBj', character of, 271 
 ,, ,, opening drawers, 
 
 216 
 
INDEX 
 
 467 
 
 Monkeys (cont. ) — 
 
 Rhesus, Jivimy, double movements, 
 238 
 >i )i reaching with stick, 
 
 275 
 i> ,, using rope, 276 
 
 >> !, ,, tied rope, 279 
 
 !i ,1 ,, bolt fastened 
 
 by hook, 
 280 
 >) ,, working stick with- 
 
 in tube, 284 
 ,, ,, using stool, 284-287 
 
 ,, ,, removing obstacle 
 
 from chain, 288 
 „ ,, unwinding chain, 
 
 289-292 
 ), „ attempting theft, 
 
 293 
 Morality, animal, 314 
 
 ,, standardising of, 346, 352, 
 
 353. 354 
 ,, average, 380 et seq. 
 „ of Greece and Rome, 384 
 „ higher, 389 
 ,, "natural," 389 
 Moral Impulses, development of, into 
 
 moral will, 351 
 Moral Standards and practical needs, 
 
 386 
 Mulkall, M. C, 426 
 Mailer, Fritz, 96 
 Muller and Schumann, 158 
 Mailer, K., atid O., 267 
 
 N 
 
 Natural Selection as factor in Evolu- 
 tion, 2 
 ,, ,, influence on reflex 
 
 action, 52 
 ,, ,, and birth rate, 426 
 
 ,1 ,, in human life, 430, 
 
 431. 433 
 Nest-building among birds, 68, 92, 308, 
 
 425 
 „ ,, fish and reptiles, 
 
 313, 42s 
 ,, „ hymenoptera, 90 
 
 et seq, 
 Newsholme, A., 426 
 Normal process of learning in animals, 
 239 
 
 O 
 
 Objects, knowledge of, 158, 166 
 
 ,, as centres of relations, 167, 
 258 
 
 Objects, concrete, knowledge of, Ch. XI 
 Organic development, lines of, 414 
 Organised and unorganised behaviour, 
 
 6, 7. 
 Organised life, resting on mutual inter- 
 dependence, 428 
 Organism, the, adaptability of, Ch. Ill 
 ,, ,, equilibrium of, 26, 30, 
 
 35 
 ,, ,, regeneration in, 26-29 
 
 ,, „ identity of, 24, 30, 33, 
 
 . 35 
 ., ,, highest, nature of, 414- 
 
 418 
 Otter, character of, 200 
 „ using pull-bolt, 200 
 ,, ,, catch, 204-206 
 
 Paramcecium, 58, 59 
 
 Parental care among animals, 313, 314 
 
 Parrot, using words with intention, 324 
 
 Pearson, Prof. Karl, isflt, 428 
 
 Pechuel-Losche, E., 274 
 
 Peckham, Mr. and Mrs. , 77, 90-95 
 
 Perception of objects in their relation, 
 
 303 
 , , , , Results, learning by, 303 
 Perceptual learning, 230-232, 236 
 
 ,, relation, 168 
 
 PMz, B., 266 
 
 Personality, conception of, 339, 369 
 Philosophic movement of thought, fac- 
 tors of, 37 1 
 Philosophy and Science, 371 
 ideal of, 371-373 
 , , views of function of, 372 
 Plato, j68, 384, 433 
 Ploss, Dr. H., 427 
 Polyp and snail, 140 
 Polypes, individuality of, 415 
 Preyer, W., 38, 47, 48, 51, 53, 68, 85, 
 
 1 10, 128, 325, 328, 329 
 Primary retentiveness, iii 
 Protista, survival of, 4 
 
 ,, reflex action among, 41 
 Protoplasm, excitability of, 55 
 Protozoa, adaptability among, 22, 109 
 ,, regeneration among, 27, 28 
 ,, reflex action among, 41 
 ,, modification by experience, 
 
 ii3> 141 
 ,, high fertility of, 421 
 Psychology, connection with Logic and 
 
 Metaphysics, 370 
 Purpose, 20, 160-164 
 
 ,, and knowledge of relation, 
 
468 
 
 INDEX 
 
 R 
 
 Rats, Mr. Small's, 184, 200, 221, 229, 
 
 23s. 241 
 Reality, nature of, 443, 444 
 Reason, its function in life, 7, 8 
 
 , , do animals ? 347 
 
 , , does man ? 348 
 
 ,, as a harmonising impulse, 365 
 Reasoning, emergence of conceptual, 
 
 349 
 Riaumur, R. A. F. de, 82 
 Recognition, 131 
 Redintegration, Law of, 148 
 Rees, Mr. A, M., 122 
 Reflex Action, as mechanical, 42-47 
 ,, ,, modification of, 47, 48 , 
 
 ,, ,, as determined by struc- 
 
 ture, 45 
 ,, ,, as distinct from purpos- 
 
 ive action, 45 
 ,, ,, in development, 51 
 
 ,, ,, compound, 74-78 
 
 ,, ,, "mechanical" sequence 
 
 of, 76 
 ,, ,, imperfect at birth, im- 
 
 proved by practice, 51- 
 
 53 
 Regeneration among worms, 416 
 
 ,, ,, salamanders, 416 
 
 Religion, evolution of, 346 
 
 ,, of Buddha, Christ, and Ma- 
 homet, 385 
 Reptiles, retrogressive assimilation 
 among, 126 
 ,, capacity for training, 138 
 ,, treatment of young by, 313 
 Resolve, development of, 351 
 Revival, Law of, 148-151 
 Rhizopods, simple organisms, 4 
 ,, reflex action among, 42 
 
 ,, organisation of, 414 
 
 Romanes, Dr. G. J., 68, 69, 77, 82, 
 83, 84, 86, 136, 139, 240, 
 271, 274, 277, 287, 288, 
 289, 301. 308, 309. 3". 
 313. 326 
 Miss, 238, 271, 274, 277, 
 288, 289 
 Roubaud, E.,Ti 
 Roux, IV., 28 
 
 Salamanders, regeneration among, 416 
 Schaeffer, Mr. A. A., 122, 123, 142 
 Schmidt, Dr. Oscar, 80 
 Schneider, G. H., 69, 77, 80, 86, 87, 
 
 95. 112, 135, 139, 140, 267, 308, 
 
 309, 310, 312, 313, 343 
 
 Science, evolution of, 346 
 
 ,, contrasted with common sense, 
 367, 368 
 
 „ character of, 366 
 Scope of inquiry, 6-8 
 Self, conception of the, 338 
 Self-assertion, 375 
 Self-conscious development, Ch. XIX, 
 
 373 
 Self-consciousness, 340, 374 
 Self-interest, 340 
 Self-knowledge, 339 
 Self-maintenance, 375 
 Selves, conception of other, 341 
 Sensori-motor action, 60 et seq., 89, 
 
 102 
 
 "Sentinels" used by birds and mam- 
 mals, 309, 344, 352 
 Shaler,Jif. S., 257, 264 
 Shepard and Breed, Messrs., 51, 156 
 Shepherd, W. T., 284, 305 
 Sherrington, Dr., 41 
 Small, W. S., 182, 184, 200, 221, 235, 
 
 241, 278 
 Smith, G. IV., I ^^ 
 Snail, failing to learn, 140 
 Snakes : — 
 
 Cobra and toad, 89 
 
 Watersnakes Hnd retrogressive assim- 
 ilation, 126 
 Social life, efficiency of, 423 
 
 ,, principle, the, 376 et seq. 
 Society, mechanical and organic view 
 
 of, 414 
 Spencer, Herbert, 3, 74, 415, 422, 
 
 429 
 Spiders, web-making among, 68 
 ,, adaptation among, 83 
 ,, effects of experience as, 86, 
 117 
 Squirrel, burying nut, 77 
 St. John, C, 309, 310 
 Stags and fence, 311 
 Stimulus and response, 40-44, 88, Ii8- 
 
 121 
 Stoic doctrine, 384 
 Stone, Mr., 264 
 Stout, Prof. G. F., 107, H2, 121, 132, 
 
 152, 23s 
 Suggestion, use of in experiments, 
 
 188 
 Sutherland, Alex., 5, 312, 313, 421, 
 
 425. 427, 433 
 Swift, Mr. E. J., 156 
 Sympathy among higher animals, 310, 
 
 315 
 „ development of, 378, 406 
 Synthesis of reality as a whole, 371 
 System, as general character of 
 
 Science, 366 
 System, rational, 407 
 
INDEX 
 
 469 
 
 Taine, Henri, 325 
 
 Taylor, Prof. A. E., 180 
 
 Teleology, 445, 446 
 
 Thorndike, E. L., no, 128, 176-185, 
 
 236 
 Thought, syslematic, Cti. XVI 
 Thucydides, 384 
 Tradition, 345 
 
 ,, taking place of Instinct, 356 
 Trial and Error, method of, Ch. IX 
 Tunicata, vertebrates derived from, 3 
 Turtles and retrogressive assimilation, 
 
 126 
 Turtle, Texan, learning by experience, 
 
 139 
 
 Unity, organic, 415-417 
 Universal, aspects of the, 333 et seq. 
 
 V 
 
 Vertebrates, higher, less prolific than 
 Invertebrates, 421 
 ,, lower, action of experi- 
 
 ence among, 
 134 et seq. 
 ,, ,, cases of affection 
 
 rare, 312 
 
 Verworn, Dr. Max, 28, 31, 33, 39, 
 
 42, 109 
 Vorticellae, effect of experience among, 
 
 141 
 
 W. 
 
 Wallace, Dr. A. R., 68-73, 3o8, 309, 
 
 382 
 Wallas, Prof. Graham, 105 
 Ward, frof. James, 107 
 Wasmann, Dr. Erich, 97, 416 
 Wasps (see Hymerwplera) 
 Wat kins, G. P., 141 
 Walson, Dr., 306 
 
 Weir, Dr. James, jun., 127, 301, 315 
 Weismann, Prof. A., 27, 421 
 Wesley Mills, Prof, 53, 125, 300, 327 
 Whitman, Prof, 88 
 Will, emergence of, 349, 406 
 
 ,, conception of, 361 
 
 ,, expression of whole personality, 
 
 431 
 Wilson, Dr. Andrew, 298 
 Wilson, Prof. E. B., 27, 29, 416 
 Wodsedalek, Mr. J. E., 128 
 World-religions, 385 
 Worms, regeneration among, 416 
 
 ,, evidence as to learning from 
 experience, 141 
 Wundt, Prof. W., 71, 182, 299 
 
 Yerkes, Prof. R. M., 123, 141, 306 
 
 THE END 
 
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