EVOLUTION OF THE HUMAN INTELLECT. 59 



the animal finally came to drop entirely the profitless acts and to take 

 the nail out and open the door as soon as the box was put in his cage. 

 He had, we should say, learned to get in. 



The process involved in the learning was evidently a process of 

 selection. The animal is confronted by a state of affairs or, as we may 

 call it, a '^situation.' He reacts in the way that he is moved by his 

 innate nature or previous training to do, by a nimiber of acts. These 

 acts include the particular act that is appropriate and he succeeds. In 

 later trials the impulse to this one act is more and more stamped in, 

 this one act is more and more associated with that situation, is selected 

 from amongst the others by reason of the pleasure it brings the animal. 

 The profitless acts are stamped out; the impulses to perform them in 

 that situation are weakened by reason of the positive discomfort or the 

 absence of pleasure resulting from them. So the animal finally per- 

 forms in that situation only the fitting act. 



Here we have the simplest and at the same time the most wide- 

 spread sort of intellect or learning in the world. There is no reasoning, 

 no process of inference or comparison; there is no thinking about 

 things, no putting two and two together ; there are no ideas — the animal 

 does not think of the box or of the food or of the act he is to perform. 

 He simply comes after the learning to feel like doing a certain thing 

 under certain circumstances which before the learning he did not feel 

 like doing. Human beings are accustomed to think of intellect as the 

 power of having and controlling ideas and of ability to learn as synony- 

 mous with ability to have ideas. But learning by having ideas is really 

 one of the rare and isolated events in nature. There may be a few scat- 

 tered ideas possessed by the higher animals, but the common form of 

 intelligence with them, their habitual method of learning, is not by the 

 acquisition of ideas, but by the selection of impulses. 



Indeed this same type of learning is found in man. When we learn 

 to drive or play tennis or billiards, when we learn to tell the price of 

 tea by tasting it or to strike a certain note exactly with the voice, we 

 do not learn in the main by virtue of any ideas that are explained to 

 us, by any inferences that we reason out. We learn by the gradual 

 selection of the appropriate act or judgment, by its association with 

 the circumstances or situation requiring it in just the way that the 

 animals do. 



From the lowest animals of which we can affirm intelligence up to 

 man this type of intellect is found. With it there are in the mammals 

 obscure traces of the ideas which come in the mental life of man to 

 outweigh and hide it. But it is the basal fact. As we follow the 

 development of animals in time we find the capacity to select impulses 

 growing. We find the associations thus made between situation and 

 act growing in number, being formed more quickly, lasting longer and 



