160 L. W. COLE 



or behaviorism, or forever to deny what many observers affirm. 

 is taking a promising direction. It is true that the professors 

 at the University of Pisa saw Galileo drop the weights, and saw 

 them reach the ground at the same moment, and yet refused 

 to believe the evidence of their senses. Animal psychology 

 which merely denies has had an influence in university circles 

 similar to the influence of Aristotle on the professors at Pisa, 

 but it has gained no such influence upon intelligent observers 

 elsewhere. Instead of denying all psychic traits to animals 

 would it not be better to deny our competence to explain more 

 than the merest trifle of animal behavior ? I believe that 

 Hunter's confirmation of my results should give a new stimulus 

 to investigators to devise ingenious new experiments suited to 

 find new facts. That avenue seems more hopeful than a denial 

 that there are new facts to be found, and affirming that animal 

 psychology must become a sort of "organic physics." 



It is of interest to observe also that while current mammalian 

 psychology cannot come out of the laboratory, common sense 

 observations continually find their way into it. In this paper 

 of Hunter's, for example, one animal is a "stranger" to another 

 and so pays close "attention" to the latter's movements. Pre- 

 liminary experiments make his animals "acquainted" with the 

 place and apparatus. The raccoons display a directness and 

 "sureness" in their behavior which defies the mathematics of 

 chance. Their "attention" was "distracted" by "yelling at 

 them at the top of my voice" (P. 71). (A procedure likely to 

 make them fierce beyond recall, and which, perhaps, explains 

 the last statement of Dr. Hunter's paper. It is gratifying to 

 learn that this method of distraction was used only infrequently.) 

 Attention and association are everywhere ascribed to the animals 

 and not the association so accurately described by Thorndike, 

 but association pure and undefined. Surely these are greater 

 and more gratuitous assumptions to make than that a horse 

 remembers his stable, even when distant from it, or that a raccoon 

 remembers the box from which it is difficult for him to escape. 



I realize that these remarks will expose me to the charge of 

 being as completely deceived as was Herr von Osten, but his 

 is not my position. My view is that "imageless thought," if 

 Hunter's hypothesis is deemed correct, or, at least sporadic, 

 images if my own explanation is accepted as the simpler one, 



