DECEPTIVE APPEARANCES OF INTELLIGENCE 159 



of previous activity I do not pretend to say; but the case is 

 cited as an illustration of a possible way in which a certain 

 class of habits may be interpreted. 



Habit formation may be shown hi the action of individual 

 organs of our bodies. The stomach according to the re- 

 searches of Pawlow readily acquires habits, and the influence 

 of habit in the functioning of the intestines is generally 

 familiar. Between such habit formation and the increase 

 of an organ through action there is much in common, and 

 between these phenomena and the adaptive changes of an 

 organ in relation to its condition of stimulation there is 

 doubtless a fundamental kinship. What Roux has called 

 the " overcompensation of what is used" is a principle which 

 probably manifests itself in all these cases. 



DECEPTIVE APPEARANCES OF INTELLIGENCE 



There are a great many cases which have been adduced as 

 indicating intelligence and even a simple form or reasoning 

 which may be explained like the phenomena we have de- 

 scribed. It is frequently difficult to distinguish acts which 

 are instinctive from those which an animal has learned to 

 perform, and it is well in general to be guided by the prin- 

 ciple enunciated by Lloyd Morgan, which is a sort of special 

 case of the law of parsimony namely, that " In no case may 

 we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a 

 higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the out- 

 come of one which stands lower in the psychological scale." 

 One of the cases most suggestive of the power of forming 

 associations in the Ccelenterates is recorded by Fleure and 

 Walton whose account is as follows: 



"We have given a specimen of Actinia a scrap of filter- 

 paper about once in twenty-four hours, placing it on the 

 same tentacles each time. As a general rule the fragment was 



