4 Animal Intelligence 



nature and causation, is often far easier to study than that 

 of adults. Again, much time was spent in argumentation 

 about the criteria of consciousness, that is, about what cer- 

 tain common facts of behavior meant in reference to inner 

 experience. The problems of inference about consciousness 

 from behavior distracted attention from the problems of 

 learning more about behavior itself. Finally, when psy- 

 chologists began to observe and experiment upon animal 

 behavior, they tended to overestimate the resulting insight 

 into the stream of the animal's thought and to neglect 

 the direct facts about what he did and how he did it. 



Such observations and experiments are, however, them- 

 selves a means of restoring a proper division of attention 

 between consciousness and behavior. A psychologist 

 may think of himself as chiefly a stream of consciousness. 

 He may even think of other men as chiefly conscious 

 selves whose histories they report by word and deed. But 

 it is only by an extreme bigotry that he can think of a dog 

 or cat as chiefly a stream or chain or series of consciousness 

 or consciousnesses. One of the lower animals is so ob- 

 viously a bundle of original and acquired connections be- 

 tween situation and response that the student is led to 

 attend to the whole series, - - situation, response and con- 

 nection or bond, - - rather than to just the conscious state 

 that may or may not be one of the features of the bond. 

 It is so useful, in understanding the animal, to see what it 

 does in different circumstances and what helps and what 

 hinders its learning, that one is led to an intrinsic interest 

 in varieties of behavior as well as in the kinds of conscious- 

 ness of which they give evidence. 



What each open-minded student of animal psychology 

 at first hand comes thus to feel vaguely, I propose in this 

 essay to try to make definite and clear. The studies 



