ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE. 



Thus, the associations in human Hfe, which cumpaic wiih 

 the simple connections learned by animals, are associations in- 

 volving connections between novel, complex, and often incon- 

 stant sense-impressions and impulses to acts similarly novel, 

 complex and often inconstant. Man has the elements of mr.'^t 

 of his associations in isolated form, attended to separately, y — 

 sessed as a permanent fund, recallable at will, and multi- 

 fariously connected among themselves, but with these associa- 

 tions which we have mentioned, and with others like them, he 

 deals as the animals deal with theirs. The process, in the 

 man's mind, leaving out extraneous mental stuff, may be homo- 

 logous to the association-process in animals. Of course, by 

 assiduous attention to the elements of these associations, a man 

 may isolate them, may thus get these associations to the same 

 plane as the rest. But they pass through the stage we have 

 described, even then, and with most men, stay there. The 

 abstraction, the naming, etc., generally come from observers of 

 the game or action, and concern things as felt by them, not by 

 the participant. 



Criticism of Previous Theories. 



We may now look for a moment at what previous writers 

 have said about the nature of association in animals. The com- 

 plaint was made early in this book that all the statements had 

 been exceedingly vague and of no value, except as retorts to 

 the ' reason' school. In the course of the discussion I have 

 tried to extricate from this vagueness definite statements about 

 imitation, association of ideas, association by ideas. There is 

 one more theory, more or less hidden in the vagueness ; the 

 theory that association in animals is the same as association in 

 man, that the animal mind differs from the human mind only 

 by the absence of reason and what it implies. Presumably, 

 silence about what association is, means that it is the associa- 

 tion which human psychology discusses. When the silence is 

 broken, we get such utterances of this theory as the following : 



" I think we may say then that the higher animals are able 

 to proceed a long way in the formation and definition of highly 

 complex constructs, analogous to but probably differing some- 



