ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE IO9 



emphasizes the fact that our mental life has j^rown up a., .» 

 mediation between stimulus and reaction. The old view of 

 human consciousness is that it is built up out of elementary sen- 

 sations, that very minute bits of consciousness come first and 

 gradually get built up into the complex web. It looks for the 

 beginnings of consciousness to little feelings. This our view 

 abolishes and declares that the progress is not from little and 

 simple to big and complicated, but from direct connections to 

 indirect connections in which a stock of isolated elements play.** 

 a part, is from ' pure experience ' or undifferentiated feelings, 

 to discrimination, on the one hand, to generalizations, abstrac- 

 tions, on the other. If, as seems probable, the primates disphiy 

 a vast increase of associations, and a stock of free-swimming 

 ideas, our view gives to the line of descent a meaning which it 

 never could have so long as the question was the vague one 

 of more or less ' intelligence.' It will, I hope, when supported 

 by an investigation of the mental life of the primates and of the 

 period in child life when these directly practical associations be- 

 come overgrown by a rapid luxuriance of free ideas, show us 

 the real history of the origin of human faculty. It turns out 

 apparently that a modest study of the facts of association in 

 animals has given us a working hypothesis for a comparative 

 psychology. 



b 



