THE INTELLIGENCE OF MAMMALS 239 



according to Thorndike, the learning of the cat may be 

 accounted for more simply. The sight of the means of 

 escape in the box, instead of calling up the idea of the pre- 

 viously experienced good taste of the fish, has become 

 associated simply with the movement necessary to effect an 

 escape. The consciousness involved in the acts consists 

 therefore of immediate sense impressions and the impulses 

 to action with which they have been associated; the animals 

 "have no images or memories at all, no ideas to associate." 



The learning of the animal, according to this view, is on 

 a level with the semi-conscious perfection of many of our 

 own activities, such as catching a ball and playing tennis, 

 where certain perceptions come to call forth very quickly 

 the appropriate motor response without the intervention 

 of ideas. We do not reason about our movements hi such 

 cases but the right ones come to be performed as the result 

 of stamping in the movements that brought success. Few 

 of us have paid particular attention to the movements of 

 the tongue in chewing food, but a little observation directed 

 to the subject cannot fail to impress one with the deftness 

 with which this member, otherwise so unruly, avoids being 

 bitten, and with the efficient way in which it helps to masti- 

 cate the food. The tongue probably performs many of its 

 movements instinctively, but it has doubtless learned a good 

 deal by experience, without being consciously directed. 



Thorndike's theory of the nature of animal intelligence 

 has the principle of parsimony in its favor, but its author 

 has endeavored to give it further support by a number of 

 experiments designed to test the presence of ideas in the 

 animal's inind. One of these was as follows: A cat was 

 made to go through a door into a box where she was shut in. 

 By pulling a loop the cat gets out and eats fish. After being 

 put in through the door a number of times and fed when- 



