238 THE CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION 



logical methods. It is unfortunately rendered worse by the 

 inclination of animal psychologists to see the intellectual 

 achievements of animals in the most brilliant light. . . . 

 Unbridled by scientific criticism the imagination of the ob- 

 server ascribes phaenomena in perfectly good faith to motives 

 which are entirely of its own invention. The facts reported 

 may be wholly true; the interpretation of the psychologist, 

 innocently woven in with his account of them, puts them 

 from first to last in a totally wrong light. You will find a 

 proof of this on nearly every page of the works on animal 

 psychology." (English Translation by Creighton & Titchener, 

 p. 341.) 



Wundt's warning against taking at their face value popular, 

 or even so-called scientific, accounts of wonderful feats per- 

 formed by animals is very salutary. The danger of sub- 

 jective humanization of bestial conduct is always imminent. 

 We are unavoidably obliged to employ the analogy of our own 

 animal nature and sentient consciousness as our principal clue 

 to an understanding of brute psychology, but we must beware 

 of pressing this analogy based on our own consciousness to the 

 uncritical extreme of interpreting in terms of our highest psychic 

 operations animal behavior that, in itself, admits of a far 

 simpler explanation. According to the principle of the mini- 

 mum, it is unscientific to assume in a given agent the presence 

 of anything that is not rigidly required for the explanation of 

 its observed phenomena. We must refrain, therefore, from 

 reading into the consciousness of an animal what is not really 

 there. We must abstain from transporting our own viewpoint 

 and personality into a brute, by imagining, with Darwin, that 

 we discern a "sense of humor," or a '^high degree of self-com- 

 placency" in some pet animal, like a dog. In general, we can 

 rest assured that animals are quite innocent of the motivation 

 we ascribe to them. All their manifestations of the psychic 

 order are adequately explicable in terms of sensory experience, 

 associative memory, instinct, and the various automatisms of 

 their innate and conditioned reflexes. There is no ground 



