148 Animal Intelligence 



pulse and act as connected with that particular situation. No 

 cat ever goes around clawing, clawing, clawing all the time, 

 because clawing in these boxes has resulted in pleasure. 

 Secondly, the connection thus stamped in is not contem- 

 poraneous, but prior to the pleasure. So much for the fact ; 

 now for the explanation. I do not wish to rehearse or add 

 to the arguments with which so many pages have been al- 

 ready filled by scientists and philosophers both. What we 

 need most is not argument, but accurate accounts of the 

 mental fact and of the brain-process. But I do wish to say 

 to the parallelist, what has not to my knowledge been said, 

 that if he presupposes, to account for this fact, a ' physical 

 analogue of the hedonic consciousness,' it is his bounden 

 duty to first show how any motion in any neurone or group 

 of neurones in the nervous system can possess this power of 

 stamping in any current which causes it. For no one would, 

 from our present knowledge of the brain, judge a priori that 

 any motion in any part of it could be conceived which should 

 be thus regnant over all the others. And next he must show 

 the possibility of the current which represents the associa- 

 tion being the excitant of the regnant motion in a manner 

 direct enough for the purpose. 



I wish also to say that whoever thinks that, going along 

 with the current which parallels the association, there is an 

 accompanying minor current, which parallels the pleasure 

 and which stamps in the first current when present with it, 

 flies directly in the face of the facts. There is no pleasure 

 along with the association. The pleasure does not come until 

 after the association is done and gone. It is caused by no 

 such minor current, but by the excitation of peripheral 

 sense-organs when freedom from confinement is realized or 

 food is secured. Of course, the notion of such a secondary 

 subcurrent is mythology, anyway. 



