Difficulties and Methods 7 



door, and when he came to close it there was a slight resist- 

 ance. These are the facts. His inference that there was even 

 a remotest intention on the part of his prisoner to hinder the 

 movement of the door is entirely gratuitous. Even the 

 simpler mental states that are supposed to have passed 

 through the mind of the spider were the products of Wundt's 

 own imagination " (322, p. 230). The fact that the anecdote 

 was a recollection of childhood, so that it would probably be 

 impossible to bring any evidence from the character of the 

 web or other circumstance against the suggestion of Mr. and 

 Mrs. Peckham, is a further instance of the unscientific use 

 of anecdotal testimony. 



An illustration of the third objection mentioned above, 

 the disadvantage of ignorance of the animal's individual his- 

 tory, is furnished by Lloyd Morgan. In describing his futile 

 efforts to teach a fox terrier the best way to pull a crooked 

 stick through a fence, he says that the dog showed no sign 

 "of perceiving that by pushing the stick and freeing the crook 

 he could pull the stick through. Each time the crook caught 

 he pulled with all his strength, seizing the stick now at the 

 end, now in the middle, and now near the crook. At length 

 he seized the crook itself and with a wrench broke it off. A 

 man who was passing . . . said, 'Clever dog that, sir; he 

 knows where the hitch do lie.' The remark was the charac- 

 teristic outcome of two minutes' chance observation " (282, 

 pp. 142-143). How many anecdotes of animals are based 

 on similar accidents? 



It will be seen that in both the cases just criticised the error 

 lies in the interpretation of the animal's behavior. Indeed, 

 a root of evil in the method of anecdote consists in the fact 

 that observation in this form is imperfectly divorced from in- 

 terpretation. The maker of an anecdote is seldom content 

 with merely telling one what the animal did and leaving future 



