The Evolution of Human Intellect 289 



that learned to get out of a box by pulling a loop of wire 

 did not feel the parts of the box separately, the bolt as a 

 definite circle of a certain size, did not feel his act as a sum 

 of certain particular movements. The monkey who learned 

 to know the letter K from the letter Y did not feel the sepa- 

 rate lines of the letter, have definite ideas of the parts. 

 He just felt one way when he saw one total impression and 

 another way when he saw another. 



Strictly human thinking, on the contrary, has as its essen- 

 tial characteristic the breaking up of gross total situations 

 into feelings of particular facts. When in the presence 

 of ten jumping tigers we not only feel like running, but also 

 feel the number of tigers, their color, their size, etc. When, 

 instead of merely associating some act with some situation 

 in the animal way, we think the situation out, we have a 

 set of particular feelings of its elements. In some cases, it 

 is true, we remain restricted to the animal sort of feelings. 

 The sense impressions of suffocation, of the feeling of a 

 new style of clothes, of the pressure of 10 feet of water above 

 us, of malaise, of nausea and such like remain for most of us 

 vague total feelings to which we react and which we feel 

 most acutely but which do not take the form of definite 

 ideas that we can isolate or combine or compare. Such 

 feelings we say are not parts of our real intellectual life. 

 They are parts of our intellectual life if we mean by it the 

 mental life concerned in learning, but they are not if we 

 mean by it the life of reasoning. 



Can we now see how the vague gross feelings of the animal 

 sort might turn into the well-defined particular ideas of the 

 human sort, by the aid of a multitude of delicate associations ? 



It seems to be a general law of mind that any mental 

 element which occurs with a number of different mental 

 elements, appears, that is, in a number of different com- 

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