8o Animal Intelligence 



makes use of the sequence seen, transfers the process to 

 himself; in the common human sense of the word, he 

 imitates. This kind of imitation is surely common in 

 human life. It may be apparent in ontogeny before any 

 power of inference is shown. After that power does appear, 

 it still retains a wide scope, and teaches us a majority, per- 

 haps, of the ordinary accomplishments of our practical life. 



Now, as the writers of books about animal intelligence 

 have not differentiated this meaning from the other possible 

 ones, it is impossible to say surely that they have uniformly 

 credited it to animals, and it is profitless to catalogue here 

 their vague statements. Many opposers of the ' reason' 

 theory have presupposed such a process and used it to replace 

 reason as the cause of some intelligent performances. The 

 upholders of the reason theory have customarily recognized 

 such a process and claimed to have discounted it in their 

 explanations of the various anecdotes. So we found 

 Mr. Romanes, in the passage quoted, discussing the possi- 

 bility that such an imitative process, without reason, could 

 account for the facts. In his chapter on Imitation in 

 ' Habit and Instinct,' Principal C. Lloyd Morgan, the sanest 

 writer on comparative psychology, seems to accept imita- 

 tion of this sort as a fact, though he could, if attacked, 

 explain most of his illustrations by the simple forms. The 

 fact is, as was said before, that no one has analyzed or 

 systematized the phenomena, and so one cannot find clear, 

 decisive statements to quote. 



At any rate, whether previous authorities have agreed 

 that such a process is present or not, it is worth while to 

 tackle the question; and the formation of associations by 

 imitation, if it occurs, is an important division of the forma- 

 tion of associations in general. The experiments and their 

 results may now be described. 



