Vol. XXI 

 1904 



1 Wheeler, The Study of Anijnal Behavior. 2^3 



The conscientious student, however, is not without a means of 

 circumventing, so to speak, all these tactics of the pseudopsycholo- 

 gist. He can apply another principle within easy reach, namely 

 "Occam's razor": "Complicated explanations are inadmissible 

 when simpler ones will suffice." We are not, for example, to 

 accept human reasoning as an explanation of any animal behavior, 

 till simpler processes, like instinct and associative memory, have 

 been tried and found wanting. At the present time all cool-headed 

 students are unanimous in the opinion that animals show no evi- 

 dences of being able to form abstract concepts, much less to con- 

 struct judgments and draw conclusions from them after the manner 

 of reasoning human beings. In so far as they are not instinctive 

 those animal actions which are commonly attributed to reason 

 may be completely or almost completely explained as the result of 

 associative memory (association of ideas), or at most as an exercise 

 of what has been called the "practical judgment." All of these 

 processes, however, are much simpler than human ratiocination.^ 



The fact that in man the reasoning powers are the latest to 

 develop and, in cases of mental disease, the first to disintegrate, 

 leaving nearly intact the emotional and volitional processes, indi- 

 cates that the reason has been a late acquisition during the history 

 of animal life. It may well be peculiarly human. And while it is 



' Interesting treatment of this and many otiier subjects relating to animal 

 behavior will be found in the following important works : C. Lloyd Morgan's 

 ' Habit and Instinct ' and ' Comparative Psychology ' ; W. Wundt's ' Lectures 

 on the Human and Animal Mind'; L. T. Hobhouse's ' Mind in Evolution' ; 

 A. Forel's ' Psychic Powers of Ants, etc' (translated in 'The Monist', 1903- 

 1904) ; J. Loeb's Physiology of the Brain'; H. Driesch's ' Die Seele als ele- 

 mentarer Naturfaktor ' (not yet translated) ; E. Wasmann's ' Instinct and 

 Intelligence.' The works of Morgan, Wundt, Hobhouse and Forel deserve 

 the first rank on account of their sanity and philosophical breadth of view. 

 Loeb's work is remarkable on account of its original and destructive criticism. 

 Driesch's work is noteworthy for its highly, not to say ultra-, objective method. 

 Wasmann's work abounds in keen and instructive criticism of the humanizing 

 school of animal psychologists. He is an advocate of the mediaeval psychol- 

 ogy of the church. Although his persistent efforts to crush the facts of modem 

 psychology into the Procrustean bed of scholastic definition and terminology 

 will certainly not meet with general approval, his above mentioned work as 

 well as his numerous papers on the behavior of ants, etc., contain many valu- 

 able observations. 



