THE CHICAGO EXPERIMENTS WITH RACCOONS 159 



regard them as established. This seems to me to be an item of 

 progress. The psychology of mammals must now cease to be 

 a mere generalization of the psychology of cats. And two of 

 my former students, Professor DeVoss and Miss Rose Ganson, 

 have recently shown what I believe to be an excellent reason 

 why cats may not be expected to behave the same as animals 

 with less defective vision. 



We have, then, been driven from the cover Of accounting for 

 all mammalian behavior by the sensori-motor hypothesis alone, 

 and psychologists are free at last to try to learn how animals 

 differ in their behavior, instead of denying all differences. This 

 will help enormously, for it may enable us finally to discover a 

 psychology of the higher animals which can explain as well as 

 deny, which can be taken out of the laboratory and yet bear the 

 light of day and the scrutiny of intelligent persons who observe 

 animals. This we have not had. When you meet an observer 

 of horses, who thinks his horse remembers its home, you do not 

 convince him by denying his statements and the evidence he 

 gives, or by calling him "naively anthropomorphic," or by telling 

 him that he did not record the date of the occurrence, or by 

 hurling at him the anathema of "anecdotal psychologist" with 

 opinions "too trivial for serious analysis or notice". A science 

 which can only deny everything and explain nothing is no 

 science and will never receive nor deserve confidence. It 

 certainly was legitimate in 1898 to start by denying the worth 

 of anecdotes of animals for comparative psychology, but only 

 if by denying them we should eventually find a way to explain 

 them, or at least to explain observations of animal behavior 

 which are made almost every day. Experimental animal 

 psychology is now sixteen years old. Consequently it must 

 soon cease to be a generalization of the behavior of cats and 

 take some step which promises eventually to explain animal 

 behavior. Otherwise it must confess bankruptcy and its inferi- 

 ority to common sense, and remain a sort of science which 

 cannot emerge from the laboratory and which cannot be believed 

 by the psychologist himself the moment he emerges from it. 



I am in no hurry for this science to make progress but I should 

 like to see it take a direction which promises something. I do 

 not think that a devoted effort to adhere to an objective nomen- 

 clature, or to hang the fate of progress on some word, as behavior, 



