844 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



rounding things, together with the de- 

 velopment of structural capacity, has 

 led the beaver to build his dam, the bee 

 the honeycomb, the ant its village, the 

 bird its nest. In each case the regis- 

 tered impressions have led to action 

 made possible by long-continued con- 

 tact between structure and environ- 

 ment; the actions are the result of de- 

 velopment that has proceeded mite by 

 mite through unknown time. The brain 

 of neither bird nor beast nor man will 

 immediately co-ordinate radically new 

 impressions received in a radically new 

 environment into coherent action that 

 leads to definite result. 



Here is an example within the writ- 

 er's immediate knowledge: At the age 

 of seventeen a boy entered the service 

 of one of the large railway systems as 

 a clerk in the passenger department. 

 Through eleven years of enthusiastic 

 and concentrated endeavor to master 

 the details of the service he rose to the 

 head of the clerical force that is, the 

 reiterated impression upon his brain 

 cells of the functions of the passenger 

 service led to that co-ordination which 

 resulted in efficient action. Then he be- 

 came employed in the office of a large 

 coal-mining company. For several days 

 it was with the utmost difficulty that he 

 could bring his attention to bear upon 

 the new tasks. While seated at the 

 desk in the coal office the old railway 

 problems would chase through his 

 mind; when he began to write the ini- 

 tials of the Pittsburg Consolidated 

 Coal Company, he would find that he 

 had written the initials of the Pitts- 

 burg, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis 

 Railway Company; instead of the ini- 

 tials of the Pittsburg, Fairport and 

 Northwestern Dock Company, the ini- 

 tials of the Pittsburg, Fort Wayne and 

 Chicago Railway Company. The latter 

 initials in each case would appear upon 

 the paper before he knew it, actually 

 without his knowing that he had writ- 

 ten them. The entirely unfamiliar rou- 

 tine entailed by the custody of bank 

 accounts, coal leases, deeds and con- 

 tracts, reports of coal shipments, and 

 the handling of vouchers, became ad- 

 justed in his brain bit by bit through 

 many weeks, and it was months before 

 he could ' co-ordinate the new impres- 

 sions into broad and well-defined rea- 

 soning. If he had been utterly hungry 

 through all the period of the new serv- 

 ice, it might have taken years. 



Now, what can be expected of a dog 

 or a cat, whose mental processes have 

 been adjusted by inheritance and ex- 

 perience to life in the fields and jun- 

 gles, when placed in a box, utterly hun- 



gry, to study mechanical contrivances? 

 It is manifest that if the brain of a 

 dog or a cat would become adjusted to 

 the radically unfamiliar steps necessary 

 to release it from such a radically un- 

 familiar environment, that adjustment 

 could only come by extremely slow de- 

 grees. Voluntary perception is almost 

 beyond the limits of expectation, and 

 the leading of the animal through the 

 necessary steps would have to be re- 

 peated time after time before the im- 

 pressions upon its brain would reach 

 any degree of permanence, especially as 

 its brain would be lacking in attention, 

 and the repeated handling be an an- 

 noyance to it. But that by such tute- 

 lage the animals, or a proportion of 

 them, arrived at a knowledge of the 

 means necessary to escape from the box 

 is shown by Dr. Thorndike himself. 

 " If one repeats the process, keeps put- 

 ting the cat back into the box after 

 each success, the amount of useless ac- 

 tion gradually decreases, the right 

 movement is made sooner and sooner, 

 until finally it is done as soon as the cat 

 is put in." But he says : " This sort of 

 a history is not the history of a rea- 

 soning animal. It is the history of an 

 animal who meets a certain situation 

 with a lot of instinctive acts. . . . 

 Little by little the one act becomes 

 more and more likely to be done in that 

 situation, while the others slowly van- 

 ish. This history represents the wear- 

 ing smooth of a path in the brain, not 

 the decisions of a rational conscious- 

 ness." 



Wherein, however, does this differ 

 from the manner in which hundreds of 

 clerks in offices finally learn routine 

 work and mechnically go through the 

 motions necessary to its performance? 

 Do not the actions of thousands of la- 

 borers in field and factory seem to pro- 

 ceed from a wearing smooth of a path 

 in the brain, rather than from rational 

 consciousness? Yet they can not be 

 said to be devoid of reason. Is not a 

 great proportion of the daily actions of 

 any one of us gone through from force 

 of habit, almost by instinct? 



The word reason does not apply 

 alone to the mental processes of a 

 Helmholtz, but to the co-ordination, 

 however slight, of relations that result 

 in definite action even of a humble or- 

 ganism. Herbert Spencer has clearly 

 shown that instinct and reason differ in 

 degree and not in kind. 



Dr. Thorndike lays stress upon the 

 fact that 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, 



