ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE. 8l 



tions and perceptions, realized as such, and t,'encrui iiouons, 

 also realized as such. Now, what the phenomena in ani- 

 mals which we have been considering show is that they 

 have neither. Far from showing an advanced stage of men- 

 tality, they show a very primitive and unspecializcd sta're. 

 They are to be explained not by the presence of qcncral notions, 

 but by the absence of notions of particulars. The idea that 

 animals react to a particular and absolutely defmed and realized 

 sense-impression, and that a similar reaction to a sense-impres- 

 sion which varies from the first proves an association by simi- 

 larity, is a myth. We shall see later how an animal does come 

 in certain cases to discriminate, in one sense of the word, with a 

 great degree of delicacy, but we shall also see then what must 

 be emphasized now, that naturally the animal's brain reacts very 

 coarsely to sense-impressions, and that the animal does not think 

 about his thoughts at all. 



' This puts a new face upon the question of the origin and 

 development of human abstractions and consequent general 

 ideas. It has been commonly supposed that animals had ' re- 

 cepts' or such semi-abstractions as Morgan's ' predominants,' 

 and that by associating with these arbitrary and permanent 

 signs, such as articulate sounds, one turned them into genuine 

 ideas of qualities. Professor James has made the simple but 

 brilliant criticism that all a recept really means is a tendency to 

 react in a certain way. But I have tried to show that the fact 

 that an animal reacts alike to a lot of things gives no reason to 

 believe that it is conscious of their common quality and reacts 

 to that consciousness, because the things it reacts to in the tirst 

 place are not the hard-and-fast, well-defined ' things ' of human 

 life. What a ' recept ' or ' predominant ' really stands for is no 

 thing which can be transformed into a notion of a quality by 

 being labelled with a name. This easy solution of the problem 

 of abstraction is impossible. A true idea of the problem itself 

 is better than such a solution. 



My statement of what has been the course of development 

 along this line is derived from observations of animals' behavior 

 and Professor James' theory of the nature of and presumable 

 brain processes going with the abstractions and conceptions of 



