248 THE INTELLIGENCE OF MAMMALS 



will be evident that we have a consciousness of an outlying 

 region beyond our immediate sphere of perception which 

 stands in a definite relation to the latter, and that the object 

 of our search lies in a certain direction. When the per- 

 ceptual and the ideal content of our minds get disjoined we 

 have the horrible consciousness of being lost. If the ideal 

 content were absent and we had nothing to depend upon 

 but a store of sensori-motor associations would we be able 

 to get back to our starting place? I think not. And with- 

 out this content I fancy the horse would be as helpless as 

 ourselves. 



Whether animals draw inferences of a simple sort is a 

 subject we shall dwell upon further in the chapter on the 

 mental life of apes and monkeys. It is not at all likely 

 that animals have any power of abstract or conceptual 

 reasoning; as Morgan remarks they probably "do not think 

 the therefore," but mental action essentially inferential in 

 character may not involve any processes of a complicated 

 kind. As Binet has attempted to make clear in his work 

 on the Psychology of Reasoning, there is a fundamental 

 similarity between reason and simple perception. The 

 shape and color of an orange recall the sensations of odor, 

 taste, touch and muscular movements which we have ex- 

 perienced in connection with such visual impressions in the 

 past. These various states are combined in a percept 

 which seems to us a simple object. The visual impression 

 has assimilated various other attributes, and we therefore 

 tend to act differently toward such appearances on the 

 basis of this association. The sweet taste may cause us to 

 reach out for the orange and we might justify our procedure 

 by a process of reasoning about the relation of the various 

 attributes of the object. But we certainly do not do so 

 before the sweetness of the orange is borne in upon us. 



