62 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



reasoner, we must answer either by invoking some mysterious capacity, 

 the presence of which we cannot demonstrate, or by taking the differ- 

 ence we actually do find. That is the difference in the quality and 

 quantity of associations of the animal sort. Even if we could never 

 see how it came to cause the future intellectual life, it would seem 

 wiser to believe that it did than to resort to faith in mysteries. Surely 

 there is enough evidence to make it worth while to ask our second 

 question, 'How might this difference cause the life of ideas and reason- 

 ing ?' 



To answer this question fully would involve a most intricate treat- 

 ment of the whole intellectual life of man, a treatment which cannot 

 be attempted without reliance on technical terms and psychological 

 formulas. A fairly comprehensible account of the general features of 

 such an answer can however be given. The essential thing about the 

 thinking of the animals is that they feel things in gross. The kitten 

 that learned to respond differently to the signals 'I must feed those 

 cats' and 'I will not feed them,' felt each signal as a vague total in- 

 cluding the tone, the movements of my head, etc. It did not have an 

 idea of the sound of I, another of the sound of must, another of the 

 sound of feed, etc. It did not turn the complex impression into a lot 

 of elements, but felt it, as I have said, in gross. The dog that learned 

 to get out of a box by pulling a loop of wire did not feel the parts of 

 the box separately, the loop as a definite circle of a certain size, did not 

 feel his act as a sum of certain particular movements. The monkey 

 that learned to know the letter K from the letter Y did not feel the 

 separate lines of the letter, have definite ideas of the parts. He Just felt 

 one way when he saw one total impression and another way when he 

 saw another. 



Strictly human thinking on the contrary has for its essential charac- 

 teristic the breaking up of gross total situations into a number of par- 

 ticular feelings. When in the presence of ten jumping tigers, we not only 

 feel like running, but also feel the number of the tigers, their color, their 

 size, etc. When instead of merely associating some act with some 

 situation in the animal way, we think the situation out, we have a num- 

 ber of particular feelings of its elements. In some cases it is true we re- 

 main restricted to the animal sort of feelings. The sense impressions 

 of suffocation, of the feeling of a new style of clothes, of the pressure 

 of 10 feet of water above us, of malaise, of nausea and such like, 

 remain for most of us vague total feelings to which we react and which 

 we feel most acutely, but which do not take the form of definite ideas 

 that we can isolate or combine or compare. Such feelings we say are not 

 parts of our real intellectual life. They are parts of our intellectual 

 life if we mean by it the mental life concerned in learning, but they 

 are not if we mean by it the life of reasoning. 



