238 THE INTELLIGENCE OF MAMMALS 



elation. If there were any element of inference involved 

 there ought to be, according to him, a sudden vertical de- 

 scent of the time curve. " Where the act resulting from the 

 impulse is very simple, very obvious, and very clearly de- 

 fined, a simple experience may make the association per- 

 fect, and we may have an abrupt descent in the time curve 

 without needing to suppose inference. But if in a complex 

 act, a series of acts or an ill-defined act one found a sudden 

 consummation in the associative process, one might very 

 well claim that reason was at work. Now, the scores of 

 cases recorded show no such phenomena. The cat does not 

 look over the situation, much less think it over, and then 

 decide what to do. It bursts out at once into the activities 

 which instinct and experience have settled on as suitable 

 reactions to the situation, 'confinement wJien hungry with 

 food outside.' It does not ever in the course of its successes 

 realize that such an act brings food and therefore decide to 

 do it and thenceforth do it immediately from decision 

 instead of from impulse. The one impulse, out of many 

 accidental ones, which leads to pleasure, becomes strength- 

 ened and stamped in thereby, and more and more firmly 

 associated with the sense-impression of that box's interior. 

 Accordingly it is sooner and sooner fulfilled. Futile im- 

 pulses are gradually stamped out. The gradual slope of 

 the time curve, then, shows the absence of reasoning. They 

 represent the wearing smooth of a path in the brain, not the 

 decisions of a rational consciousness." 



Even ideas are unnecessary, according to Thorndike, to 

 account for most feats of animal intelligence. The cat, 

 which after having made a lucky movement and escaped 

 from the box and got some fish, might be supposed to asso- 

 ciate the appearance of the mechanism of escape with the 

 idea of the pleasure resulting from eating the food. But, 



