154 Animal Intelligence 



in the conception of mental development have been sug- 

 gested somewhat fragmentarily and in various connections, 

 that has not been done because I think them unimportant. 

 On the contrary, I think them of the utmost importance. I 

 believe that our best service has been to show that animal 

 intellection is made up of a lot of specific connections, whose 

 elements are restricted to them, and which subserve practi- 

 cal ends directly, and to homologize it with the intellection 

 involved in such human associations as regulate the conduct 

 of a man playing tennis. The fundamental phenomenon 

 which I find presented in animal consciousness is one which 

 can harden into inherited connections and reflexes, on the 

 one hand, and thus connect naturally with a host of the 

 phenomena of animal life ; on the other hand, it emphasizes 

 the fact that our mental life has grown up as a mediation be- 

 tween stimulus and reaction. The old view of human con- 

 sciousness is that it is built up out of elementary sensations, 

 that very minute bits of consciousness come first and grad- 

 ually get built up into the complex web. It looks for the 

 beginnings of consciousness to little feelings. This our view 

 abolishes and declares that the progress is not from little and 

 simple to big and complicated, but from direct connections to 

 indirect connections in which a stock of isolated elements plays 

 a part, is from ' pure experience ' or undifferentiated feelings, 

 to discrimination, on the one hand, to generalizations, ab- 

 stractions, on the other. If, as seems probable, the primates 

 display a vast increase of associations, and a stock of free- 

 swimming ideas, our view gives to the line of descent a mean- 

 ing which it never could have so long as the question was 

 the vague one of more or less ' intelligence.' It will, I hope, 

 when supported by an investigation of the mental life of 

 the primates and of the period in child life when these di- 

 rectly practical associations become overgrown by a rapid 



