v INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE 65 



evidence of animal behaviour becomes especially valuable 

 as serving definitely to show how far the simpler factors 

 will carry us, and thereby to mark off lower from higher 

 stages of correlation. 



In the case of the chick then we may, on the analogy of 

 the human child which begins to eat something nasty, then 

 relinquishes and subsequently avoids it, impute the change 

 to the experience of an unpleasant feeling. How then are 

 we to describe what has happened ? A stimulus Ai, excit- 

 ing a movement, leads to the unpleasant experience Bi. 

 Henceforward the reaction is modified. Similar stimuli 

 A 2 , A 3 no longer prompt to the same motion. Clearly the 

 basis of this change is the relation A-B as experienced in 

 the case Ai-Bi, and one way of explaining the process would 

 be to say that the relation A-B being once apprehended is 

 inferred in any new case where A is found. In this instance 

 this would amount to saying that the chick connected a 

 certain bright yellow appearance in an object with an un- 

 pleasant taste, and thus formed a perception, and on the 

 basis of perception an idea of orange peel as yellow, peck- 

 able and nasty. There are reasons for denying any such 

 power on the part of the chick which it is not necessary to 

 examine in detail, but which amount to this that if the 

 chick had such power we should expect him to be capable 

 of many inferences and manipulations of experience of 

 which he is in fact incapable. It is however clear that the 

 feeling Bi, which quells the original response Ai, has some 

 lasting effect. In the end this effect is the same as would 

 be produced by an apprehension of the relation A-B. But 

 we do not suppose this apprehension to be formed. The 

 relation then must affect consciousness without being pre- 

 sent to consciousness. The response is correlated with its 

 result, but correlated by some less direct method. How 

 are we to understand this correlation ? We could only 

 answer this question adequately if we knew how it is that 

 modifications of the mind or of the physical organism are 

 rendered permanent. Confining ourselves to the facts that 

 we know, what we can say is this. The painful or un- 

 pleasant experience Bi tends to quell the reaction to Ai, and 

 the effect persists, in this sense, that in the future similar 



