1 8 The Animal Mind 



lowest forms, the descending method with the highest forms. 

 We cannot afford to abandon the psychological study of 

 animals, for our knowledge of the nervous processes under- 

 lying the higher mental activities is very slight; physiology 

 here fails us, and psychology must be left in command of 

 the field. The danger besetting the attempt at a purely 

 physical explanation of animal behavior is that the facts shall 

 be unduly simplified to fit the theory. Thus Bethe's effort 

 at explaining the way in which bees find their way back to 

 the hive as a reflex response, or tropism, produced by "an 

 unknown force," is highly questionable; the facts seem to 

 point toward the exercise of some sort of memory by the bees. 

 It is always possible, further, that the tropism is accompanied 

 by consciousness. A physiologist from Saturn might reduce 

 all human activities to tropisms, says Claparede in a striking 

 passage. "The youth who feels himself drawn to medical 

 studies, or he who is attracted to botany, can no more account 

 for his profoundest aspirations than the beetle which runs 

 to the odor of a dead animal or the butterfly invited by the 

 flowers ; and if the first shows a certain feeling corresponding 

 to these secret states of the organifm (a feeling of ' predilec- 

 tion' for such a career, etc.), how can we dare to deny to the 

 second analogous states of consciousness?" (75). If it is 

 argued that we have no direct, but only an inferential, knowl- 

 edge of the processes in an animal's mind, the argument is 

 equally valid against human psychology, for 'the psychologist 

 has only an inferential knowledge of his neighbor's mind (77). 

 Wasmann defends the animal mind from a different point of 

 view. For one thing, he believes that mental processes may 

 act causally upon bodily states. He accepts, in other words, 

 what is called iriteractionism, as opposed to parallelism. 

 Further, although he strongly opposes the doctrineTnatthe 

 reactions of animals are unconscious tropisms, and constantly 



