284 Animal Intelligence 



are stamped out; /the impulses to perform them in that 

 situation are weakened by reason of the positive discomfort 

 or the absence of pleasure resulting from them. So the 

 animal finally performs in that situation only the fitting act. 



Here we have the simplest and at the same time the most 

 widespread sort of intellect or learning in the world. There 

 is no reasoning, no process of inference or comparison ; 

 there is no thinking about things, no putting two and two 

 together ; there are no ideas - - the animal does not think 

 of the box or of the food or of the act he is to perform. He 

 simply comes after the learning to feel like doing a certain 

 thing under certain circumstances which before the learning 

 he did not feel like doing. Human beings are accustomed 

 to think of intellect as the power of having and controlling 

 ideas and of ability to learn as synonymous with ability to 

 have ideas. But learning by having ideas is really one of 

 the rare and isolated events in nature. There may be a 

 few scattered ideas possessed by the higher animals, but the 

 common form of intelligence with them, their habitual 

 method of learning, is not by the acquisition of ideas, but 

 by the selection of impulses. 



Indeed this same type of learning is found in man. When 

 we learn to drive a golf ball or play tennis or billiards, when 

 we learn to tell the price of tea by tasting it or to strike a 

 certain note exactly with the voice, we do not learn in the 

 main by virtue of any ideas that are explained to us, by 

 any inferences that we reason out. We learn by the grad- 

 ual selection of the appropriate act or judgment, by its 

 association with the circumstances or situation requiring 

 it, in just the way that the animals do. 



From the lowest animals of which we can affirm intel- 

 ligence up to man this type of intellect is found. With 

 it there are in the mammals obscure traces of the ideas 



