292 The Animal Mind 



sciousness was more absorbed by the effects of present 

 stimulation and less occupied with ideas than a human 

 mother's would have been. 



Thorndike (704) was the first to point out how scanty is 

 the evidence in favor of the possession of ideas by the 

 lower animals. In addition to the fact that his dogs and 

 cats dropped off their useless movements so slowly, he ad- 

 duced the observation that while after a time the cats which 

 had been caused to enter a puzzle-box and let themselves 

 out before being fed would of their own accord go into the 

 box, cats that had been from the first dropped into the box 

 at the top never learned to go in of their own accord. He 

 argued that if a cat had been able to have the idea of being 

 in the box, as a necessary prelude to food, it would have 

 been able to pass from the idea of being dropped in to that 

 of going in itself. This argument, however, is not fully con- 

 vincing. The experience of being picked up and dropped 

 into a box is very different from that of walking through 

 a door. To the human mind, accustomed to more re- 

 fined analysis of its experiences, one of these would suggest 

 the other, but we cannot argue that because such a con- 

 nection is not made in the animal's mind, therefore the 

 latter is incapable of ideas, any more than we could con- 

 clude a total absence of ideas from the consciousness of a 

 man to whom a primrose by the river's brim does not 

 suggest thoughts of the moral government of the universe. 

 Moreover, several observers have reported precisely this 

 ability to get the habit of jumping into a box from being 

 dropped in; our rabbits (756), which were put into a box 

 for safe keeping between experiments, within two days 

 acquired the trick of running to the box and scrambling 

 into it, the whole experience being a prelude to food. 



The same comments, precisely, apply to Thorndike's 



