106 Chapter VL 



when it wanted nourishment, or another card with the 

 word "out" when it wished to take its constitutional. 

 After long and tiresome attempts at training, Lubbock 

 succeeded with a small number of words. The con- 

 crete combination of the sound perception "food" with 

 the sight perception of a certain arrangement of letters 

 was gradually imprinted into the sensile memory of 

 the poodle, combined with which was the experience 

 of being fed, when its master mentioned "food.'' 

 Thus it happened that with the feeling of appetite 

 the phantasm of the label "food" was reproduced 

 in Van's imagination. But this is quite in keep- 

 ing with those laws of sensitive association of 

 representations which Wundt calls "contact associ- 

 ation." This is why the dog fetched the label "food" 

 when it felt hungry. We find therefore that our clever 

 poodle Van combined certain sense images with cor- 

 responding affections, both of which had been gained 

 by experience; and, furthermore, we find phonetic and 

 graphic symbols, the elements of oral and written lan- 

 guage. Now, if Van had been endowed with intelli- 

 gence, and were it merely a "limited intelligence of a 

 dog," the latter ought to have been developed by the 

 help of speech and been stirred up to independent 

 activity. Nevertheless this did not happen. The dog's 

 activity did not rise above combined sense representa- 

 tions mechanically impressed on its mind by the human 

 intelligence of its teacher. It did not contribute in the 

 least to its own further development. Nor did it ever 

 occur to Van to instruct its little friend Patience, its 

 mistress' lap-dog, in the new-fangled language; nor did 

 dear little Patience hit upon the obvious idea of imi- 



