ORGANIC MOVEMENTS 107 



we hardly can avoid psychological terminology, and in fact 

 nobody would blame us for applying it, after we have stated 

 emphatically that we make use of it only in the sense of a 

 descriptive analogy. 



Apes and dogs, it is true, learn a good deal ; there is 

 an " historical basis " to their acting of a very complicated 

 character indeed, but their acting lacks all that we call 

 " abstraction." This would seem to be the chief reason 

 why they invent nothing, and have nothing resembling 

 language except quite superficially. Wundt has well said 

 somewhere that animals have no language not for any 

 reason of their organisation, but because they have nothing 

 to talk about. It is very strange indeed how absolute the 

 lack of a real inventive or imitative faculty is even in 

 the highest apes. Thorndike observed some apes kept in a 

 sort of stable with several doors that might easily be opened ; 

 he opened a door several times very carefully and distinctly 

 in order to show the apes the mechanism of opening, but not 

 one of them followed his manipulations. Only after one of 

 the animals had succeeded in opening the door by chance 

 did it notice what opening was, and thus " learn " opening. 

 Even then his fellows did not profit by their companion's 

 experience : each animal had to learn by personal experi- 

 ence, realising absolutely by chance what opening was. 



Certainly there exists even in apes that which our term 

 " historical basis of reacting " expresses. The specificity of 

 their behaviour is determined by their individual history, 

 i.e. by the specificity of the stimuli that occurred to them, 

 and by the effects of these stimuli. But the individual 

 combination of the elements of their experience is far less 

 complicated and far less variable than it is in man. Some 



