i2o Animal Intelligence 



They are to be explained not by the presence of general no- 

 tions, but by the absence of notions of particulars. The 

 idea that animals react to a particular and absolutely de- 

 fined and realized sense-impression, and that a similar 

 reaction to a sense-impression which varies from the first 

 proves an association by similarity, is a myth. We shall see 

 later how an animal does come in certain cases to discrimi- 

 nate, in one sense of the word, with a great degree of deli- 

 cacy, but we shall also see then what must be emphasized 

 now, that naturally the animal's brain reacts very coarsely 

 to sense-impressions, and that the animal does not think 

 about his thoughts at all. 



This puts a new face upon the question of the origin and 

 development of human abstractions and consequent general 

 ideas. It has been commonly supposed that animals had 

 'recepts ' or such semi-abstractions as Morgan's 'predomi- 

 nants,' and that by associating with these, arbitrary and per- 

 manent signs, such as articulate sounds, one turned them 

 into genuine ideas of qualities. Professor James has made 

 the simple but brilliant criticism that all a recept really 

 means is a tendency to react in a certain way. But I have 

 tried to show that the fact that an animal reacts alike to a lot 

 of things gives no reason to believe that it is conscious of 

 their common quality and reacts to that consciousness, be- 

 cause the things it reacts to in the first place are not the 

 hard-and-fast, well-defined ' things '' of human life. What 

 a ' recept' or 'predominan really stands for is no thing 

 which can be transformed into a notion of a quality by 

 being labelled with a name. This easy solution of the 

 problem of abstraction is impossible. A true idea of the 

 problem itself is better than such a solution. 



My statement of what has been the course of develop- 

 ment along this line is derived from observations of animals' 



