BASIS OF PSYCHICAL-SOCIAL INDIVIDUALITY 619 



instincts which are active in these animals. There is no indication that 

 analytic thought processes occur even in anthropoid apes, and higher types 

 of creative work are apparently outside the range of their mental capabilities. 

 On the whole, the actions of mammals are fixed even from a quantitative 

 point of view. Thus it seems that the distance which must separate a circus 

 trainer and a wild animal in order to avoid reactions of flight in the latter is 

 quite definite. A student of animal behavior, who knows the history of an 

 individual animal, should therefore be able to a large extent to predict its 

 attitudes and behavior in a certain constellation. 



Proceeding now from the other higher mammals to man, very pronounced 

 complications in the modes of reactions are observed. Not only does the 

 environment, which acts on us through our sense organs, induce changes 

 which have a much more varied and also more lasting effect on our behavior 

 than in other mammals, but abstraction and synthesis, in which the elements 

 in the environment are separated and then re-arranged in new combinations, 

 become very prominent. Thoughts develop, in which the constituents of the 

 environment may appear in combinations different from those in which they 

 occur under natural conditions; through shifting of these constituents new 

 concepts are formed. 



In man we have to deal largely with secondary mental mechanisms, condi- 

 tioned thought reflexes, which are much more complex than the simple 

 reflexes. Pictures and thoughts enter into these reflex chains which ulti- 

 mately end in tensions, in motor activity or in inhibitions. Just as a sound, 

 light, color or odor, so a thought, a sentence, or other symbols for more 

 complex experiences in general, can elicit conditioned reflexes. A further 

 complication arises when a thought calls forth other thoughts, thus leading 

 to an extension of thought reflexes. As we remember experiences, so, too, 

 we remember thoughts. Moreover, abstractions and syntheses may have 

 their first origin in sense impressions, but the material with which they deal 

 may have its origin also in our own thoughts or in the thoughts of others ; 

 once we have made the latter our own, no distinction exists between the 

 effects of the thoughts of others and those of our own thoughts. Thus 

 thoughts become the objects of abstraction and synthesis. These various 

 trains of thought make connection with the simpler non-conditioned, as well 

 as with the conditioned reflexes, which latter are established much more 

 readily and in much greater variety in man than in other mammals, and the 

 resulting various combinations form very finely balanced systems. Our atti- 

 tudes and actions are determined by these systems of conditioned and 

 unconditioned reflexes in combination with thoughts, representing primarily 

 true or false sense impressions and, based on these, reproductions of a real 

 or imaginary reality. Or thoughts may function as suggestions, and then they 

 are transferred into actions and attitudes and the content of the thoughts is 

 converted into vivid pictures of reality which rigidly fix actions and attitudes. 



Thoughts are especially effective in their function as suggestions if trans- 

 mitted to us in the form of a direct or implied command ; but in some respects, 

 in every thought there is included such a command. On the other hand, 



