ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE. 45 



had six or eight times, inferred what was to be done, liicy 

 should have made the inference the seventh or ninth time. And 

 if there were in these animals any power of inference, however 

 rudimentary, however sporadic, however dim, there should iiave 

 appeared among the multitude some cases where an animal, 

 seeing through the situation, knows the proper act, does it, and 

 from then on does it immediately upon being confronted with the 

 situation. There ought, that is, to be a sudden vertical descent 

 in the time-curve. Of course, where the act resulting from the 

 impulse is very simple, very obvious, and very clearly defined, 

 a simple experience may make the association perfect, and wc 

 may have an abrupt descent in the time-curve without needing 

 to suppose inference. But if in a complex act, a series of acts 

 or an ill-defined act, one found such a sudden consummation in 

 the associative process, one might very well claim that reason 

 was at work. Now, the scores of cases recorded show no such 

 phenomena. The cat does not look over the situation, much less 

 think it over, and then decide what to do. It bursts out at once 

 into the activities which instinct and experience have settled on 

 as suitable reactions to the situation ' confinement zuhen hungry 

 with food outside.^ It does not ever in the course of its suc- 

 cesses realize that such an act brings food and therefore decide 

 to do it and thenceforth do it immediately from decision instead 

 of from impulse. The one impulse, out of many accidental 

 ones, which leads to pleasure, becomes strengthened and 

 stamped in thereby, and more and more firmly associated with 

 the sense-impression of that box's interior. Accordingly it is 

 sooner and sooner fulfilled. Futile impulses are gradually 

 stamped out. The gradual slope of the time-curve, then, shows 

 the absence of reasoning. They represent the wearing smooth 

 of a path in the brain, not the decisions of a rational con- 

 sciousness. 



In a later discussion of imitation further evidence that ani- 

 mals do not reason will appear. For the present, suthce it to 

 say, that a dog, or cat, or chick, who does not in his own im- 

 pulsive activity learn to escape from a box by pulling the proper 

 loop, or stepping on a platform, or pecking at a door, will not 

 learn it from seeing his fellows do so. Tliey are incapable of 



