Experimental Study of Associative Processes 105 



main, unless animals attend only to their own impulses and 

 the excitements thereof. But if the latter be true, it simply 

 affirms our view from a more fundamental standpoint. 



In another set of experiments animals were put in boxes 

 with whose mechanisms they had had no experience, and 

 from which they might or might not be able to escape by 

 their own impulsive acts. The object was to see whether 

 the time taken to form the association could be altered by 

 my instruction. The results turned out to give a better 

 proof of the inability to form an association by being put 

 through the act than any failure to change the time-curve. 

 For it happened in all but one of the cases that the move- 

 ment which the animal made to open the door was different 

 from the movement which I had put him through. Thus, 

 several cats were put through (in Box C [button]) the follow- 

 ing movement : I took the right paw and, putting it against 

 the lower right-hand side of the button, pushed it round 

 to a horizontal position. The cats' ways were as follows : 

 No. i turned it by clawing vigorously at its top; No. 6, 

 by pushing it round with his nose; No. 7, in the course of 

 an indiscriminate scramble at first, in later trials either by 

 pushing with his nose or clawing at the top, settling down 

 finally to the last method. Nos. 2 and 5 did it as No. i did. 

 Cat 2 was tried in B (0 at back) . I took his paw and pressed 

 the loop with it, but he formed the habit of clawing and 

 biting the string at the top of the box near the front. No. i 

 was tried in A. I pressed the loop with his paw, but he 

 formed the habit of biting at it. 



In every case I kept on putting the animal through the act 

 every time, if at the end of two minutes (one in several 

 cases) it had not done it, even after it had shown, by using 

 a different way, that my instruction had no influence. I 

 never succeeded in getting the animal to change its way for 



