io Animal Intelligence 



the anxiety and its intensity would both be so crudely 

 measured by present means that even if the observers 

 were from the score of most competent psychologists, their 

 reports would probably be not much better than, say, the 

 descriptions now found in masterpieces of fiction and drama. 

 Science could not tell at all closely how much John's anxiety 

 at this particular time resembled either his anxiety on 

 some other occasion or anything else. This inferiority 

 is due in part to the fact that the manifestations of anxiety 

 in behavior, including verbal reports, are so complicated 

 by facts other than the anxiety itself, by, for example, 

 the animal's health, temperament, concomitant ideas 

 and emotions, knowledge of language, clearness in expres- 

 sion and the like. It is due in part to the very low status 

 of our classification of kinds of anxieties and of our units 

 and scales for measuring the amount of each kind. Hence 

 the variation amongst observers would be even greater 

 than in the case of the toothache, and the confidence of 

 all in their judgments would be less, and far, far less than 

 their confidence in their judgment of John's stature. The 

 best possible present knowledge of John's anxiety, though 

 scientific in comparison with ordinary opinion about it, 

 would seem grossly unscientific in comparison with knowl- 

 edge of his stature or weight. Knowledge of the anxiety 

 would improve with better knowledge of its manifestations, 

 including verbal reports by John, and with better means of 

 classification and measurement. 



John's knowledge of his own anxiety would be in part the 

 same as that of the other observers. He too would judge 

 his condition by its external manifestations, would name 

 its sort and rate its amount on the basis of his own behavior, 

 as he saw his own face, heard his own groans, and read the 

 notes he wrote describing his condition. But he would 



