Experimental Study of Associative Processes 23 



they have marvelous capacity of forming associations, and 

 is likely to refer to the fact that human beings only rarely 

 reason anything out, that their trains of ideas are ruled 

 mostly by association, as if, in this latter, animals were on a 

 par with them. The history of books on animals' minds 

 thus furnishes an illustration of the well-nigh universal tend- 

 ency in human nature to find the marvelous wherever it 

 can. We wonder that the stars are so big and so far apart, 

 that the microbes are so small and so thick together, and 

 for much the same reason wonder at the things animals 

 do. They used to be wonderful because of the mysterious, 

 God-given faculty of instinct, which could almost remove 

 mountains. More lately they have been wondered at be- 

 cause of their marvelous mental powers in profiting by 

 experience. Now imagine an astronomer tremendously 

 eager to prove the stars as big as possible, or a bacteriologist 

 whose great scientific desire is to demonstrate the microbes 

 to be very, very little ! Yet there has been a similar eager- 

 ness on the part of many recent writers on animal psychology 

 to praise the abilities of animals. It cannot help leading to 

 partiality in deductions from facts and more especially in 

 the choice of facts for investigation. How can scientists 

 who write like lawyers, defending animals against the charge 

 of having no power of rationality, be at the same time 

 impartial judges on the bench? Unfortunately the real 

 work in this field has been done in this spirit. The level- 

 headed thinkers who might have won valuable results 

 have contented themselves with arguing against the theories 

 of the eulogists. They have not made investigations of 

 their own. 



In the second place, the facts have generally been derived 

 from anecdotes. Now quite apart from such pedantry as 

 insists that a man's word about a scientific fact is worthless 



