26 Chapter III. 



but forget that any, even the simplest formal syllogism, 

 is "a syllogism similar to ours," and will never cease to 

 be so, as long as psychological notions are submitted to 

 a critical analysis. A confusion of ideas evidently under- 

 lies the modern phrase of ''different degrees" of intelli- 

 gence. 1 Otherwise modern animal psychologists could 

 not ascribe to animals a power of formal reasoning and 

 deny it in the same breath. 



Although Romanes concedes that intelligence is a 

 power of formal reasoning, he nevertheless wants all 

 those activities of the animal, which result from sense 

 experience, to be regarded as intelligent. This is the 

 criterion of distinction between instinct and intelligence, 

 which he and nearly all modern zoologists strenuously 

 defend. But it has been adequately proven, that this 

 criterion is untenable. For even in human beings there 

 are activities due to sense experience, which plainly 

 result from mere combinations of sense representations 

 and not from formal syllogisms; and as it is these 

 very combinations that modern animal psychology calls 

 "the intelligence of animals," we must reject this view 

 of animal intelligence as absolutely uncritical, and trace 

 it back with Wundt to the fatal influence of that 

 "pseudo-psychology''', which wantonly changes the 

 actions of the animal psyche into logical processes of 

 thought. Such a distinction between instinct and intelli- 

 gence must be abandoned. 



How are we, then, to distinguish instinct from intelli- 

 gence in the psychic life of animals. The answer to this 



*) See Reimarus, "Allgemeine Betrachtungen ueber die T'riebe der 

 Thiere," Nos. 15, 16, 123. Even Alfred Espinas ("Des Societes 

 animales," 2d edition, 1878, p. 202) avows that it is wrong to take the 

 cognitive power of the animal for a "moindre degre de raison." 



