1 6 The Animal Mind 



ties" (89, p. 66). Romanes is evidently guided by the same 

 desire to humanize animals. 



Now these writers were not led to take such an attitude 

 merely out of general sympathy with the brute creation, like 

 Montaigne ; they had an ulterior motive ; namely, to meet the 

 objection raised in their time against the doctrine of evolu- 

 tion, based on the supposed fact of a great mental and moral 

 gulf between man and the lower animals. They wished to 

 show, as Darwin clearly states, that this gulf is not absolute 

 but may conceivably have been bridged by intermediate stages 

 of mental and moral development. While this argument 

 against evolution was being pressed, the evolutionary writers 

 were very unsafe guides in the field of animal psychology, 

 for they distinctly "held a brief for animal intelligence," 

 to use Thorndike's phrase. In more recent times interest in 

 both the positive and the negative sides of the objection drawn 

 from man's superiority has died out, and such special plead- 

 ing has become unnecessary. 



\ On the other hand, the fact that the greater part of the 

 experiments on animals were until the last ten or fifteen years 

 performed by physiologists has given rise to an opposite ten- 

 dency in interpreting the animal mind: the tendency to 

 make purely biological concepts suffice as far as possible 

 for the explanation of animal behavior and to assume the 

 presence even of consciousness in animals only when it is 

 absolutely necessary to do so. Loeb in 1890 suggested the 

 theory which he has since elaborated, that the responses 

 of animals to stimulation, instead of being signs of " sensa- 

 tion," are in every way analogous to the reactions of plants 

 to such forces as light and gravity; hence unconscious "trop- 

 isms" (235). " Bethe in 1898 attempted to explain all the com- 

 plicated behavior of ants and bees, which the humanizing 

 writers had compared with our own civilization, as a result of 



