The Mental Life of the Monkeys 239 



that is not only fitted to do more delicate work in parts, 

 but is also alive, tender all over, functioning throughout, 

 set off in action by anything and everything. And if one 

 adds coordinations allowing a freedom and a differentiation 

 of action of the muscles used in speech comparable to that 

 already present in connection with the monkey's hand, he 

 may well ask, "What more of a nervous mechanism do 

 you need to parallel the behavior of the year-old child?' 1 

 However, this is not the place to speculate upon the impor- 

 tance to human development of our instinctive aimless 

 activity, physical and mental, or to describe further its 

 similarity and evident phylogenetic relationship to the in- 

 stinctive behavior of the monkeys. Elsewhere I shall under- 

 take that task. 



4. In their method of learning, the monkeys do not ad- 

 vance far beyond the generalized mammalian type, but in 

 their proficiency in that method they do. They seem at 

 least to form associations very much faster, and they form 

 very many more. They also seem superior in the delicacy 

 and in the complexity of the associations formed and the 

 connections seem to be more permanent. 



This progress may seem, and doubtless will to the thinker 

 who looks upon the human intellect as a collection of func- 

 tions of which ideation, judgment and reasoning are chief, 

 to be slight. To my mind it is not so in reality. For it 

 seems to me highly probable that the so-called ' higher ' in- 

 tellectual processes of human beings are but secondary re- 

 sults of the general function of having free ideas and that 

 this general function is the result of the formation after the 

 fashion of the animals of a very great number of associations. 

 I should therefore say, "Let us not wonder at the com- 

 parative absence of free ideas in the monkeys, much less at 

 the absence of inferences or concepts. Let us not wonder 



