iee, 



- 



152 Habit and Instinct. 



habits which are acquired as opposed to those which are 

 congenital ; and on it depends, as we shall hereafter see, 

 the whole of mental as contrasted with merely biologi 

 evolution. 



Let us he quite clear as to what is here meant by 

 conscious selection. By it is meant, that activities are 

 determined by the associative effects produced in conscious- 

 ness; or, in other words, that they are due to experience. 

 The organism that profits by experience, avoiding this 

 because it has been found unsatisfactory, and choosing 

 that because previous trial has shown it to be 

 exercises conscious selection. 



The foundations of animal intelligence * rest on indi- 

 vidual choice or selection, which in turn is dependent 

 upon association, and the suggestion it renders possible. 

 For how could a chick learn to avoid cinnabar caterpillars 

 if the sight of their black and golden-ringed bodies had not 

 become associated with their distastefulness, and that so 

 intimately and with such a nicety of mechanism that the 

 instinctive tendency to peck at any small object at suitable 

 distance is arrested by the restraining impulse due to the 

 associated taste ? A single experience is often sufficient to 

 establish an association. I noticed that one of my seven- 



* The reader may be referred for a comparison of the " mentality of the 

 higher animals " with that of man to Lecture xxiv. in Professor Wundt's 

 "Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology." "The criterion of 'in- 

 telligent ' associative action and of intelligent action proper [that to which 

 I should restrict the term ' rational,' and * intellectual '], can," he says, 

 "only be this that the effect of association does not go beyond the 

 connection of particular [or at most 'generic* as distinguished from 

 ' general '] ideas, whether directly excited by sense-impressions, or only 

 reproduced by them, while intellectual activity in the narrower sense of 

 the word presupposes a demonstrable formation of concepts, judgments, and 

 inferences, or an activity of the constructive imagination " (Eng. Trans., 

 p. 357). In Professor Wundt's opinion, in which I concur, "the animal 

 actions which border most closely on the realm of human understanding give 

 us no warrant for inferring the existence of true concepts, judgments, 

 and [logical] inferences " (ibid. p. 359). 



