ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE. 3 



out of these associative processes have arisen human conscious- 

 nesses with their sciences and arts and rehgions. The associa- 

 tion of ideas proper, imagination, memory, abstraction, general- 

 ization, judgment, inference, have here their source. And in 

 the metamorphosis the instincts, impulses, emotions and sense- 

 impressions have been transformed out of their old natures. 

 For the origin and development of human faculty we must look 

 to these processes of association in lower animals. Not only 

 then does this department need treatment more, but promises to 

 repay the worker better. 



Although no work done in this field is enough like the 

 present investigation to require an account of its results, the 

 method hitherto in use invites comparison by its contrast and, 

 as I believe, by its faults. In the first place, most of the books 

 do not give us a psychology, but rather a eulogy^ of animals. 

 They have all been about animal intelligence^ never about 

 animal stupidity. Though a writer derides the notion that 

 animals have reason, he hastens to add that they have marvel- 

 lous capacity of forming associations, and is likely to refer to 

 the fact that human beings only rarely reason anything out, 

 that their trains of ideas are ruled mostly by association, as if, 

 in this latter, animals were on a par with them. The history 

 of books on animals' minds thus furnishes an illustration of the 

 well-nigh universal tendency in human nature to find the mar- 

 velous wherever it can. We wonder that the stars are so big 

 and so far apart, that the microbes are so small and so thick 

 together, and for much the same reason wonder at the things 

 animals do. They used to be wonderful because of the 

 mysterious, God-given faculty of instinct, which could almost 

 remove mountains. More lately they have been wondered at 

 because of their marvellous mental powers in profiting by ex- 

 perience. Now imagine an astronomer tremendously eager to 

 prove the stars as big as possible, or a bacteriologist whose 

 great scientific desire is to demonstrate the microbes to be very, 

 very little ! Yet there has been a similar eagerness on the part 

 of many recent writers on animal psychology to praise the 

 abilities of animals. It cannot help leading to partiality in de- 

 ductions from facts and more especially in the choice of facts 



