ii4 Animal Intelligence 



Before leaving the topic an account may be given of ex- 

 periments similar to the one described above as performed 

 on Cats 3 and 4, which were undertaken with Cat 13 and 

 Dogs i, 2 and 3. 



Cat 13 was fed with pieces of fish at the top of the wire 

 netting 45 times, to accustom it to climbing up when it saw 



to do so, but as if the stimulus in question made immediate connection with 

 the response itself or an intimately associated impulse. 



The experiments had in this respect both a negative or destructive and a 

 positive or constructive meaning. On the one hand, they showed that animal 

 learning was not homologous with human association of ideas ; that animal 

 learning was not human learning minus abstract and conceptual thought, 

 but was on a still 'lower' level. On the other hand, the first positive evi- 

 dence that animals could, under certain circumstances, learn, as man so 

 commonly does, by the indirect connection of a response with a situation 

 through some non-sensory relic or representative of the latter, came from my 

 experiments. 



It was perhaps natural that the more exciting denial of habitual learning 

 by ideas should have attracted more attention than the somewhat tedious 

 experiments to prove that under certain conditions they could so learn. 

 At all events, a perverse tradition seems to have grown up to the effect that 

 I denied the possibility of animals having images or learning in any case by 

 representative thinking. 



There is some excuse for this tradition in the fact that whereas the proof 

 that the habitual learning of these dogs and cats did not require 'ideas' 

 is clear and emphatic, my evidence that certain features of then- behavior 

 did require ' ideas ' is complicated and imperfect. 



The fact seems to be that a 'free idea' comes in the animals or in man 

 only as a result of a somewhat elaborate process of analysis or extraction from 

 a gross total sensory process. The primary level or grade of experience, 

 common to animals and little babies, comprises states of mind such as an 

 adult man gets if lost in anger, fear, suffocation, dyspepsia, looking at a 

 panorama of unknown objects with head upside down, smelling the mixture 

 of odors of a soap factory, driving a golf ball, dashing to the net in a game of 

 tennis, warding off a blow, or swimming under water. For a man to get a 

 distinct controllable percept of approaching asthma, of a carpet loom seen 

 upside down, or of a successful 'carry through,' or 'smash' or 'lob,' 

 so that one knows just what one is experiencing or doing, and can recall 

 just what one experienced or did, requires further experience of the element 

 in question contemplation of it in isolation or dealings with it in many varied 



