ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE. 73 



simply leave the thing to accident, for any such imitation as he 

 supposes is out of the question. At all events, none of these 

 would naturally start to teach the trick by putting the animal 

 through the motions, which, were it a possible way, would 

 probably be a traditional one among trainers. On the whole, I 

 see in these data no reason for modifying our doi^nia that ani- 

 mals cannot learn acts without the impulse. 



Presumably the reader has already seen budding out of this 

 dogma a new possibility, a further simplification of our theories 

 about animal consciousness. The possibility is that animals 

 mav have no images o?- memories at all, no ideas to associate. 

 Perhaps the entire fact of association in animals is the presence of 

 sense-impressions with which are associated, by resultant pleas- 

 ure, certain impulses, and that therefore, and therefore only, 

 a certain situation brings forth a certain act. Returning to our 

 analysis of the association, this theory would say that there was 

 no (9) or (10) or? (3) or (4), that the sense-impression gave 

 rise, when accompanied by the feeling of discomfort, to the im- 

 pulse (5) directly, without the intervention of any representa- 

 tions of the taste of the food, or the experience of being outside, 

 or the sight of oneself doing the act. This theory might be 

 modified so as to allow that the representations could be there, 

 but to deny that they were necessary, were inevitably present, 

 that the impulse was connected to the sense-impression through 

 them. It would then claim that the effective part of the associa- 

 tion was a direct bond between the situation and the impulse, 

 but would not cut off the possibility of there being an aura of 

 memories along with the process. It then becomes a minor 

 question of interpretation which will doubtless sooner or later 

 demand an answer. I shall not try to answer it now. The 

 more radical question, the question of the utter exclusion of 

 representative trains of thought, of any genuine association of 

 ideas from the mental life of animals, is worth serious consider- 

 ation. I confess that, although certain authentic anecdotes and 

 certain experiments to be described soon, lead me to reject this 

 exclusion, there are many qualiues in animals' behavior which 

 seem to back it up. If one takes his stand by a rigid applica- 

 tion of the law of parsimony, he will find justification for this 

 view which no experiments of mine can overthrow. 



