206 Animal Intelligence 



change in the animal's mind, a gradual weakening of the 

 impulse to go down which makes him feel less and less in- 

 clined to go down, though still doing so, until this weaken- 

 ing reaches a sort of saturation point and stops the action. 

 There were in their behavior some phenomena which might 

 witness to such a process, but their interpretation is so de- 

 pendent on the subjective attitude and prepossessions of the 

 observer that I prefer not to draw any conclusions from 

 them. On the other hand, records c, g, n, A and D seem 

 to show that gradual changes can be paralleled by changes 

 in the percentage of failures. 



In the statement of conclusions I shall represent what 

 would be the effect on our theory of the matter in both cases, 



(1) taking the records to be fairly perfect parallels of the 

 process, and (2) taking them to be the records of the summa- 

 tion points of a process not shown with surety in any meas- 

 urable objective facts. But I shall leave to future workers 

 the task of determining which case is the true one. 



If we judge by the objective records themselves, we may 

 still choose between two views, (i) We may say that the 

 monkeys did come to have ideas of the acts of going down to 

 the bottom of the cage and of staying still, and that their 

 learning represented the association of the sense-impres- 

 sions of the two signals, one with each of these ideas, or pos- 

 sibly their association with two other ideas (of being fed 

 and of not being fed), and through them with the acts. Or 



(2) we may say that the monkeys had no such ideas, but 

 merely by the common animal sort of association came to 

 react in the profitable way to each signal. 



If we take the first view, we must explain the failure of the 

 animals to change suddenly in some of the experiments, 

 must explain why, for instance, No. i in g should, after he had 

 responded correctly to the ' no ' signal for 27 trials out of 30, 



