The Mental Life of the Monkeys 213 



forming an association between the sight of the object and 

 the act towards it through an idea gained from watching 

 you. You may have caused his act simply by attracting his 

 attention to the object. Perhaps if you had pointed at it or 

 held it passively in your hand, you would have brought to 

 pass just the same action on his part. There are several 

 cases among my records where an act which an animal failed 

 totally to do of himself was done after I had so attracted his 

 attention to the object concerned. 



Throughout all the time that I had my monkeys under ob- 

 servation I never noticed in their general behavior any act 

 which seemed due to genuine imitation of me or the other 

 persons about. I also gave them special opportunities to 

 show such by means of a number of experiments of the fol- 

 lowing type : where an animal failed by himself to get into 

 some box or operate some mechanism, I would operate it in 

 his presence a number of times and then give him a chance to 

 profit by the tuition. His failure might be due to (i) the 

 absence of instinctive impulses to make the movement in 

 that situation, (2) to lack of precision in the movement, (3) 

 to lack of force, or (4) to failure to notice and attack some 

 special part of the mechanism. An instance of (i) was the 

 failure to push away from them a bar which held a door ; 

 an instance of (2) was the failure to pull a wire loop off a 

 nail ; an instance of (2) or (3) was the failure to pull up a 

 bolt ; an instance of (4) was the failure to pull up an inside 

 bar. Failures due to (3) occur rarely in the case of such 

 mechanisms as were used in my investigations. 



The general method of experiment was to make sure that 

 the animal would not of itself perform a certain act in a cer- 

 tain situation, then to make sure that his failure could not 

 be remedied by attracting his attention to the object, then 

 to perform the act for him a number of times, letting him get 



