EVOLUTION OF THE HUMAN INTELLECT. 65 



he always asks if it has a mouth. The other day he was examining a plant, to 

 see if it had a mouth. He was told not to break it, and he said, "Oh, it won't 

 bite, because I can't find any mouth." 



iSTowhere in the animal kingdom do we find the psychological 

 elements of reasoning save where there is a mental life made np of 

 the definite feelings which I have called 'ideas/ but they spring up 

 like magic as soon as we get in a child a body of such ideas. If we have 

 traced satisfactorily the evolution of a life of ideas from the animal life 

 of vague sense impressions and impulses we may be reasonably sure 

 that no difficulty awaits us in following the life of ideas in its course 

 from the chaotic dream of early childhood to the logical world-view 

 of the adult scientist. 



In a very short time we have come a long way, from the simple 

 learning of the minnow or chick to the science and logic of man. The 

 general frame of mind which one acquires from the study of animal 

 behavior and of the mental development of young children makes our 

 hypothesis seem vital and probable. If the facts did eventually 

 corroborate it we should have an eminently simple genesis of human 

 faculty, for we could put together the gist of our contention in a few 

 words. We should say: 



"The function of intellect is to provide a means of modifying our 

 reactions to the circumstances of life so that we may secure pleasure, 

 the symptom of welfare. Its general law is that when in a certain 

 situation an animal acts so that pleasure results, that act is selected 

 from all those performed and associated with that situation so that 

 when the situation recurs the act will be more likely to follow than it 

 was before, that on the contrary the acts which when performed in a 

 certain situation have brought discomfort tend to be dissociated from 

 that situation. The intellectual evolution of the race consists in an 

 increase in the number, delicacy, complexity, permanence and speed of 

 formation of such associations. In man this increase reaches such a 

 point that an apparently new type of mind results, which conceals the 

 real continuity of the process. This mental evolution parallels the 

 evolution of the cell structures of the brain from fewer and simpler 

 and grosser to many and complex and delicate." 



Nowhere more truly than in his mental capacities is man a part of 

 nature. His instincts, that is his inborn tendencies to feel and act in 

 certain ways, show throughout marks of kinship with the lower animals, 

 especially with our nearest relatives physically, the monkeys. His 

 sense powers show no new creation. His intellect we have seen to be a 

 simple though extended variation from the general animal sort. This 

 again is presaged by the similar variation in the case of the monkeys. 

 Amongst the minds of animals that of man leads, not as a demigod from 

 another planet, but as a king from the same race. 



VOL. LX. — 5. 



