The Mental Life of the Monkeys 209 



mental faculties in general, add the capacity for focalized 

 vision, they would do as well as the monkeys. 



EXPERIMENTS ON THE INFLUENCE OF TUITION 



The general aim of these experiments was to ascertain 

 whether the monkeys' actions were at all determined by the 

 presence of free ideas and if so, to what extent. The ques- 

 tion is, " Are the associations which experience leads them to 

 form, associations between (i) the idea of an object and (2) 

 the idea of an act or result and (3) the impulses and act itself, 

 or are they merely associations between the sense-impres- 

 sion of the object and the impulse and act?' Can a mon- 

 key learn and does he commonly learn to do things, not by 

 the mere selection of the act from amongst the acts done by 

 him, but by getting some idea and then himself providing 

 the act because it is associated in his mind with that idea. 

 If a monkey feels an impulse to get into a box, sees his arm 

 push a bar and sees a door fall open immediately thereafter 

 and goes into the box enough times, he has every chance to 

 form the association between the impulse to get into the 

 box and the idea 'arm push bar,' provided he can have such 

 an idea. If his general behavior is due to having ideas 

 connected with and so causing his acts, he has had chance 

 enough to form the association between the idea ' push at' 

 and the act of pushing. If then a monkey forms an asso- 

 ciation leading to an act by being put through the act, we 

 may expect that he has free ideas. And if he has free ideas 

 in general in connection with his actions, we may expect him 

 to so form associations. So also if a monkey shows a gen- 

 eral capability to learn from seeing another monkey or a 

 human being do a thing. A few isolated cases of imitation, 

 however, might witness not to any general mental quality, 

 p 



