DO ANIMALS REASON? 



483 



I i t 1 I I 



FIG. 2. 



into the same instinctive activities as before, and may even fail this 

 time to get out at all, or until a much longer period of miscellaneous 

 scrabbling at last happens to include the particular clawing or pok- 

 ing which works the mechanism. If one repeats the process, keeps 

 putting the cat back into the box after each success, the amount 

 of the useless action 

 gradually decreases, the 

 right movement is made 

 sooner and sooner, un- 

 til finally it is done 

 as soon as the cat is 

 put in. 



This sort of a his- 

 tory is not the history 

 of a reasoning animal. 

 It is the history of an animal who meets a certain situation with a 

 lot of instinctive acts. Included without design among these acts 

 is one which brings freedom and food. The pleasurable result of 

 this one gradually stamps it in in connection with the situation " con- 

 finement in that box," while their failure to result in any pleasure 

 gradually stamps out all the useless bitings, clawings, and squeez- 

 ings. Thus, little by little, the one act becomes more and more 

 likely to be done in that situation, while the others slowly vanish. 

 This history represents the wearing smooth of a path in the brain, 

 not the decisions of a rational consciousness. 



We can express graphically the difference between the conduct 

 of a reasoning animal and that of these dogs and cats by means of 



a time-curve. If, for instance, we let 

 perpendiculars to a horizontal line 

 represent each one trial in the box, 

 and let their heights represent in each 

 trial the time it took the animal to 

 escape (each three millimetres equal- 

 ing ten seconds), the accompanying 



I | | I j | I f I figure (Fig. 2) will tell the story of a 

 cat which, when first put in, took sixty 

 seconds to get out; in the second trial, 

 eighty; in the third, fifty; in the fourth, sixty; in the fifth, fifty; 

 in the sixth, forty, etc. This figure represents what did actually 

 happen with one cat in learning a very easy act. Suppose the cat 

 had, after the third accidental success, been able to reason. She 

 would then have the next time and in all succeeding times performed 

 the act as soon as put in, and the figure would have been such as we 

 see in Fig. 3. The thing is still clearer if, instead of drawing in the 



