108 SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE ORGANISM 



authors, like Wasmann, for instance, have said aptly that 

 animals may possess a " sensorial memory ' (" sinnliches 

 Gedachtnis ") but nothing more. 1 



It seems to me that analysis must keep especially to 

 one point of the characteristics of acting in order to state 

 well in what the differences in behaviour between man and 

 higher animals have their foundations. We have said on 

 another occasion that the term " element " as a part of the 

 analysis of action means something relative. Everything 

 in the stimuli and effects concerned in the creation of the 

 historical basis may be regarded as an " element " in some 

 way. Single words or letters may be the elements of a 

 phrase ; in a landscape the elements may be whole parts 

 of it, or the individual bodies in it, or some parts of the 

 individual bodies, or anything else. Now I think a fair 

 description of the behaviour even of higher animals would 

 be, that they are far less capable than man of resolving 

 data into elements. They cling to the combinations in the 

 form in which they have occurred, at any rate they do not 

 go farther than to resolve what is given into individual 

 bodies ; a stick and a bone are as it were the very letters 

 of a dog's alphabet. 



And from all this follows the comparatively small 

 range of their power of combination : for it follows that 

 their association is only by contiguity, be it in space or in 

 time, but never by similarity or contrast in the real sense, 

 and therefore the material to be combined in acting, 

 according to individualised circumstances, is very small. 



1 But I do not agree with "\Vasmann when he tries to regard this "sinn- 

 liches Gedachtnis " as akin to instinct ; for it is the chief criterion of instinct 

 that it does not rest upon a " historical basis." 



