EEASON. 327 



of his congenital blindness, whatever hereditary endowments 

 he may have had in the way of forming perceptive inferences 

 relating to sight, were largely aborted by disuse, if not also 

 thrown out of gear. The other consideration is that, during 

 these twelve years his faculties of perceptive inference were 

 not lying idle, but were thrown with all the greater strength 

 into his perceptions arising from touch and hearing. It is 

 therefore abundantly probable that, even upon this lowest 

 plane of inference, the strong organization which had been 

 formed between this faculty and the perceptions of touch 

 and hearing, made it all the more difficult for this faculty to 

 form a new organization with the perceptions of sight. 

 Further tlian this, I think it is not improbable that the 

 human mind, in being so habitually concerned with processes 

 of inference on higher planes, would not be so ready to build 

 up by unconscious association a mechanism of perceptive or 

 automatic inference, as would the less highly elaborated mind 

 of an animal similarly situated. Still, notwithstanding these 

 considerations, I feel that it would be well w^orth while to try 

 the experiment of keeping an animal blindfolded from the 

 time of its birth till it is a year or two old, and then to see, 

 when the blindfolding was removed, whether or not its facul- 

 ties of perceptive inference resemble those of a similar 

 animal soon after its birth. 



That inference of what I have called the second stage also 

 occurs in animals no one will dispute, although, of course, 

 some psychologists may object to my calling this particular 

 case of the association of ideas by the name of inference. I 

 have already said in the chapter which deals with ^lemory 

 and the Association of Ideas, that it is impossible to say 

 which are really the lowest animals that possess these 

 faculties ; and therefore it is still more impossible to say | 

 where in the animal kingdom inference of the first or of the 

 second stage begins : we can only say that wherever there is 

 visual or other sensuous perception which, as a perception, 

 requires to form an estimate of distance or other simple rela- 

 tion not immediately given by sensation, but mentally 

 deduced from sensation — there we must suppose that in- 

 ference of the first stage obtains ; and that wherever there is 

 an association of ideas, such that the occurrence of one 

 perception arouses an inferred knowledge of a complement of 

 that perception, or an inferred anticipation of a future event 



