THE INTELLIGENCE OF MAMMALS 239 
according to Thorndike, the learning of the cat may be 
accounted for more simply. The sight of the means of 
escape in the box, instead of calling up the idea of the pre- 
viously experienced good taste of the fish, has become 
associated simply with the movement necessary to effect an 
escape. The consciousness involved in the acts consists 
therefore of immediate sense impressions and the impulses 
to action with which they have been associated; the animals 
“have no images or memories at all, no ideas to associate.” 
The learning of the animal, according to this view, is on 
a level with the semi-conscious perfection of many of our 
own activities, such as catching a ball and playing tennis, 
where certain perceptions come to call forth very quickly 
the appropriate motor response without the intervention 
of ideas. We do not reason about our movements in such 
cases but the right ones come to be performed as the result 
of stamping in the movements that brought success. Few 
of us have paid particular attention to the movements of 
the tongue in chewing food, but a little observation directed 
to the subject cannot fail to impress one with the deftness 
with which this member, otherwise so unruly, avoids being 
bitten, and with the efficient way in which it helps to masti- 
cate the food. The tongue probably performs many of its 
movements instinctively, but it has doubtless learned a good 
deal by experience, without being consciously directed. 
Thorndike’s theory of the nature of animal intelligence 
has the principle of parsimony in its favor, but its author 
has endeavored to give it further support by a number of 
experiments designed to test the presence of ideas in the 
animal’s mind. One of these was as follows: A cat was 
made to go through a door into a box where she was shut in. 
By pulling a loop the cat gets out and eats fish. After being 
put in through the door a number of times and fed when- 
