50 E. L. THORNDIKE. 



finement to A, so as to get from it the association, ' impulse to 

 turn faucet, mc getting a drink,' one will surely, if thirsty, turn 

 the faucet, though he had never done so before. If one can 

 from an act witnessed learn to do the act, he in some way 

 makes use of the sequence seen, transfers the process to him- 

 self ; in the common human sense of the word, he imitates. 

 This kind of imitation is surely common in human life. It may 

 be apparent in ontogeny before any power of inference is 

 shown. After that power does appear, it still retains a wide 

 scope, and teaches us a majority, perhaps, of the ordinary 

 accomplishments of our practical life. 



Now, as the writers of books about animal intelligence have 

 not differentiated this meaning from the other possible ones, it is 

 impossible to say surely that they have uniformly credited it to 

 animals, and it is profitless to catalogue here their vague state- 

 ments. Many opposers of the 'reason' theory have presup- 

 posed such a process and used it to replace reason as the cause 

 of some intelligent performances. The upholders of the 

 reason theory have customarily recognized such a process and 

 claimed to have discounted it in their explanations of the vari- 

 ous anecdotes. So we found Mr. Romanes, in the passage 

 quoted, discussing the possibility that such an imitative process, 

 without reason, could account for the facts. In his chapter on 

 Imitation in ' Habit and Instinct,' Principal C. Llo3'd Morgan, 

 the sanest writer on comparative psychology, seems to accept 

 imitation of this sort as a fact, though he could, if attacked, 

 explain most of his illustrations by the simple forms. The 

 fact is, as was said before, that no one has analyzed or system- 

 atized the phenomena, and so one cannot find clear, decisive 

 statements to quote. 



At any rate, whether previous authorities have agreed that 

 such a process is present or not, it is worth while to tackle the 

 question; and the formation of associations by imitation, if it 

 occurs, is an important division of the formation of associations 

 in general. The experiments and their results may now be 

 described. 



