U6 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



inquiry was appointed to investigate the whole affair; and upon this 

 commission sat a professor of psychology of the University of Berlin. 

 Though the foregone conclusion was reached that the performance did 

 not exhibit ' a scintilla of anything that may be regarded as thought/ 

 it certainly seems incongruous that so serious an inquiry should have 

 become desirable. Only one point of interest seems to have been 

 elicited, namely, that the horse's master or the bystanders may have 

 frequently been honestly unaware of giving the sign which the keen 

 senses of the horse caught as the indication to stop pawing. Perhaps 

 we need not too pointedly raise the question as to how far these exhibi- 

 tions intentionally deceive their audiences. Wherever systematic 

 training enters, it follows that the trainer must realize how wide is 

 the gap between what is done and what is pretended. Self-deception 

 on the part of the showman can not be held accountable for more than 

 a slight portion of this discrepancy. Yet still truer is it that if people 

 were not ready to credit such remarkable powers to the horse or the 

 dog, siich exhibitions would find no favor. It is partly because animals 

 can really do many things that are wonderful in themselves and, if 

 performed by men, would require considerable rational powers, that we 

 are inclined to credit them with capacities for learning similar to our 

 own. This tendency can be held in check only by an appreciation of 

 the complexity of even a simple piece of true reasoning, of how essential 

 it is to appraise an action in terms of the process that led to it, and 

 how indirect is the revelation of process that comes from the knowledge 

 of the result alone. When this simple lesson in psychology is clearly 

 recognized as furnishing a sound basis for judgment, there will be less 

 tendency to believe that horses can take unto themselves brains with a 

 capacity to multiply and read, as to believe that a horse has suddenly 

 sprouted wings, even though such a Pegasus is pictured on the posters 

 displayed in front of the exhibition hall. 



People would also less easily succumb to such deception if they 

 stopped to consider that in regard to these animal performances they 

 must earn the right to an opinion by some simple measure of initia- 

 tion into the arrangements of what impresses the uninitiated as a re- 

 markable exhibition. The first attitude is naturally that of wonder, 

 and in lack of any detailed knowledge of what the trick may be, the 

 tendency is strong to credit, at least in part, the explanations that are 

 advanced. Once this attitude is overcome and the kind of training that 

 prepares for the performance is understood, the whole affair loses its 

 marvelous aspect and becomes a mildly interesting demonstration of 

 animal training. A brief glimpse of the mechanism behind the scenes 

 is quite sufficient to balance the glare of the footlights and leave the 

 spectator in possession of his usual measure of human intelligence that 

 enables him to appraise sympathetically but sanely the intelligent 

 powers of animals. 



