272 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



with the natural course of events." 11 In this breaking away from 

 the inherited way of doing things we seem to have a sort of organic 

 initiative which, if we may not call it intelligence, must, after all, 

 develop into it. 



Observations on higher animals have been numerous, and Darwin 

 quotes with approval a statement of Eengger that when he first gave 

 eggs to his monkeys in Paraguay, " they smashed them, and thus lost 

 much of their contents; afterwards they gently hit one end against 

 some hard body, and picked off the bits of shell with their fingers." 12 

 Kinnaman, 13 in his extended study of the intelligence of two monkeys, 

 found that they could learn to manipulate a complex series of locks 

 and latches on a box, and that they made some progress in choosing 

 better methods by eliminating useless acts and in making short cuts. 

 He also tested men with the same apparatus and found that some were 

 slower than the monkeys in finding how to open the box. While there 

 was no evidence of ability to count, one of the monkeys could recog- 

 nize position as far as three and the other as far as six. 



All this is a clear advance on the mental processes of lower forms, 

 which can not be explained solely by the mechanical response of a 

 better organized nervous system. The change from the animal's cus- 

 tomary behavior is too great and the variations too sudden for me- 

 chanical organization to account for them. And yet Kinnaman's 

 report shows little method in it all. The monkeys knew enough to 

 know when they had failed, which is more than can be said of the 

 fishes until it has been battered into their nervous system through 

 repeated blows on their heads, and they gradually improved on their 

 method by making short cuts. But Thorndike's fishes also showed 

 this improvement, though much more slowly. And this seems to mark 

 an important difference in mental life. Monkeys do not need to 

 wait until a certain mode of behavior has been worked into the 

 mechanism of their organism by the operation of natural selection, 

 as do paramecia, nor is it necessary that the external constraint, which 

 encourages inhibition, be continued for so long a time as in the case 

 of fishes. But, after all, the reasoning of monkeys seems to be of the 

 same associative sort as that of fishes, and there is certainly no con- 

 vincing evidence that they are able to get beyond this. Kinnaman 

 thought that their action indicated generic images which enabled them 

 to carry over something from a previous experience to a new situation, 

 but we have already seen that even in man consciousness of the process 

 is not necessary to the utilization of experience and it is difficult to 

 see what a generic image of which we are unconscious could be. In- 

 deed, on the theory of evolution, consciousness as an originating force 

 in the learning process would seem to be much less necessary to the 



" " Descent of Man," second edition, p. 78. 



13 Am. Jour, of Psychology, Vol. 13, pp. 98 and 173. 



