6 The Animal Mind 



the slide had been accidentally left open for some little 

 while. When I came to shut it, I found that there was an 

 unusual resistance. As I looked more closely, I found that 

 the spider had drawn a large number of thick threads directly 

 under the lifted door, and that these were preventing my clos- 

 ing it. . . ." 



"What was going on in the spider's mind?" Wundt asks, 

 and points out that it is unnecessary to assume that she 

 understood and reasoned out the mechanical requirements 

 of the situation. The whole matter can be explained, he 

 thinks, in a simpler way. "I imagine that as the days went 

 by there had been formed in the mind of the spider a deter- 

 minate association on the one hand between free entry into 

 the cage and the pleasurable feeling attending satisfaction of 

 the nutritive impulse, and on the other between the closed 

 slide and the unpleasant feeling of hunger and inhibited im- 

 pulse. Now in her free life the spider had always employed 

 her web in the service of the nutritive impulse. Associations 

 had therefore grown up between the definite positions of her 

 web and definite peculiarities of the objects to which it was 

 attached, as well as changes which it produced in the positions 

 of certain of these objects, leaves, small twigs, etc. The 

 impression of the falling slide, that is, called up by association, 

 the idea of other objects similarly moved which had been held 

 in their places by threads properly spun; and finally there 

 were connected with this association the other two of pleasure 

 and raising, unpleasantness and closing, of the door" (446, 



PP- SSJ-IS 2 )- 



The Peckhams remark in criticism of this observation: 



"Had Wundt been familiar with the habits of spiders, he 

 would have known that whenever they are confined they walk 

 around and around the cage, leaving behind them lines of 

 web. Of course many lines passed under his little sliding 



