1898] ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE 271 



succeeded in getting an animal to change its way of doing a thing 

 for his. Nor was T, after repeated trials, able to modify the way 

 in which my dog lifted the latch of the gate. He did it with the 

 back of his head. I could not get him to do it (more gracefully) 

 with his muzzle. 



It is not my purpose to discuss Mr Thorndike's psychology ;il 

 analysis of the procedure of the cats. I think he is a little disposed 

 to emphasise the points in which he and I differ — though in many 

 cases the difference is more apparent than real. But in truth we 

 agree on more points than I care here to enumerate. I fully concur 

 in the opinion that what we have to deal with in animal intelli- 

 gence is a sequence of conscious situations ; that it is only through 

 analysis of mental complexes that we separate and isolate free 

 ideas ; that man can do this, and that the animal in all probability 

 can not. I am absolutely at one with him in the belief that the 

 method of animal intelligence to profit by chance experience without 

 rational foresight, and that unless such experience be individually 

 acquired, the data essential for intelligent progress are absent. 

 While in our attempts to realise the general nature of animal con- 

 sciousness there is a close similarity of treatment. In my Introduc- 

 tion to Comparative Psychology I devoted a good deal of space to an 

 analysis of the psychology of skill " in order that we may infer 

 what takes place in the minds of animals " ; and I said : — " When 

 I am playing a hard game of tennis, or when I am sailing a yacht 

 close to the wind in a choppy sea, self does not at all tend to 

 become focal. Hence, though I am a self-conscious beiug I am 

 not always self-conscious. And presumably when I am least self- 

 conscious, I am nearest the condition of the animal at the stage 

 of mere sense experience. I am exhilarated with the sense of 

 pleasurable existence, my whole being tingles with sentient life. 

 I sense, or am aware of, my own life and consciousness, in an 

 unusually subtle manner. Experience is vivid and continuous. 

 Such I take it to be the condition of the conscious but not yet self- 

 conscious animal." 



I can therefore cordially endorse Mr Thorndike's conclusions as 

 expressed in the following passages : 



" One who has watched the life of a cat or dog for a month or 

 more under test conditions, gets, or fancies he gets, a fairly definite 

 idea of what the intellectual life of a cat or dog feels like. It is 

 most like what we feel when consciousness contains little thought 

 about anything, when we feel the sense-impressions in their first in- 

 tention, so to speak, when we feel our own body, and the impulses 

 we give to it. Sometimes one gets this animal consciousness while 

 in swimming, for example. One feels the water, the sky, the birds 

 above, but with no thoughts about them or memories of how they 



