Experimental Study of Associative Processes 69 



it would be reasonable to ascribe to an animal) to enable a cat 

 upon the ground to distinguish that the essential part of the 

 process consists not in grasping the handle, but in depressing 

 the latch ; but the cat certainly never saw any one, after having 

 depressed the latch, pushing the door posts with his legs ; and 

 that this pushing action is due to an originally deliberate inten- 

 tion of opening the door, and not to having accidentally found 

 this action to assist the process, is shown by one of the cases 

 communicated to me ; for in this case, my correspondent says, 

 'the door was not a loose-fitting one, by any means, and I was 

 surprised that by the force of one hind leg she should have been 

 able to push it open after unlatching it.' Hence we can only 

 conclude that the cats in such cases have a very definite idea as 

 to the mechanical properties of a door : they know that to make 

 it open, even when unlatched, it requires to be pushed a very 

 different thing from trying to imitate any particular action which 

 they may see to be performed for the same purpose by man. 

 The whole psychological process, therefore, implied by the fact 

 of a cat opening a door in this way is really most complex. 

 First the animal must have observed that the door is opened by 

 the hand grasping the handle and moving the latch. Next she 

 must reason, by ' the logic of f eelings ' 'If a hand can do it, 

 why not a paw ? ' Then strongly moved by this idea she makes 

 the first trial. The steps which follow have not been observed, 

 so we cannot certainly say whether she learns by a succession 

 of trials that depression of the thumb piece constitutes the 

 essential part of the process, or, perhaps more probably, that her 

 initial observations supplied her with the idea of clicking the 

 thumb piece. But, however this may be, it is certain that the 

 pushing with the hind feet after depressing the latch must 

 be due to adaptive reasoning unassisted by observation ; and 

 only by the concerted action of all her limbs in the perform- 

 ance of a highly complex and most unnatural movement is 

 her final purpose attained." (Animal Intelligence, pp. 420- 

 422.) 



