74 Animal Intelligence 



and very clearly defined, a single experience may make the 

 association perfect, and we may have an abrupt descent 

 in the time-curve without needing to suppose inference. 

 But if in a complex act, a series of acts or an ill-defined act, 

 one found such a sudden consummation in the associative 

 process, one might very well claim that reason was at work. 

 Now, the scores of cases recorded show no such phenomena. 

 The cat does not look over the situation, much less think it 

 over, and then decide what to do. It bursts out at once 

 into the activities which instinct and experience have 

 settled on as suitable reactions to the situation 'confinement 

 when hungry with food outside.'' It does not ever in the 

 course of its successes realize that such an act brings food 

 and therefore decide to do it and thenceforth do it im- 

 mediately from decision instead of from impulse. The one 

 impulse, out of many accidental ones, which leads to pleas- 

 ure, becomes strengthened and stamped in thereby, and 

 more and more firmly associated with the sense-impression 

 of that box's interior. Accordingly it is sooner and sooner 

 fulfilled. Futile impulses are gradually stamped out. 

 The gradual slope of the time-curve, then, shows the ab- 

 sence of reasoning. They represent the wearing smooth of 

 a path in the brain, not the decisions of a rational conscious- 

 ness. 



In a later discussion of imitation further evidence that 

 animals do not reason will appear. For the present, suffice 

 it to say, that a dog, or cat, or chick, who does not in his 

 own impulsive activity learn to escape from a box by pulling 

 the proper loop, or stepping on a platform, or pecking at a 

 door, will not learn it from seeing his fellows do so. They 

 are incapable of even the inference (if the process may be 

 dignified by that name) that what gives another food will 

 give it to them also. So, also, it will be later seen that an 



