^O E. L. THORNDIKE. 



probable that an experience should be followed by keen pleasure 

 fifty times and not be attended to with might and main, unless 

 animals attend only to their own impulses and the excitements 

 thereof. But if the latter be true, it simply affirms our view 

 from a more fundamental standpoint. 



In another set of experiments animals were put in boxes 

 with whose mechanism they had had no experience, and from 

 which they might or might not be able to escape by their own 

 impulsive acts. The object was to see whether the time taken 

 to form the association could be altered by my instruction. The 

 results turned out to give a better proof of the inability to form 

 an associadon by being put through the act than any failure to 

 change the time-curve. For it happened in all but one of the 

 cases that the movement which the animal made to open the 

 door was different from the movement which I had put him 

 through. Thus, several cats were put through (in Box C [But- 

 ton] ) the following movement : I took the right paw and, put- 

 ting it against the lower right-hand side of the button, pushed 

 it round to a horizontal position. The cats' ways were as fol- 

 lows : No. I turned it by clawing vigorously at its top ; No. 6, 

 by pushing it round with his nose; No. 7, in the course of an 

 indiscriminate scrabble at first, in later trials either by pushing 

 with his nose or clawing at the top, settling down finall}' to the 

 last method. Nos. 2 and 5 did it as No. i did. Cat 2 was 

 tried in B (o at back). I took his paw and pressed the loop 

 with it, but he formed the habit of clawing and biting the string 

 at the top of the box near the front. No. i was tried in A. I 

 pressed the loop with his paw, but he formed the habit of bit- 

 ing at it. 



In every case I kept on putting the animal through the act 

 every time, if at the end of two minutes (one in several cases) 

 it had not done it, even after it had shown, by using a different 

 way, that my instruction had no influence. I never succeeded 

 in getting the animal to change its way for mine. Moreover, 

 if any one should fancy that the animal really profited by my 

 instruction so as to learn what result to attain, namely, the turn- 

 ing of a certain button, but chose a way of his own to turn it, 

 he would be deluding himself. The time taken to learn the act 

 with instruction was no shorter than without. 



