252 THE INTELLIGENCE OF MAMMALS 



marked drop after the first success, and a similar phenom- 

 enon is remarked by Hobhouse. Still less indicative of the 

 gradual stamping in process are the results of the experi- 

 ments of Davis and L. W. Cole on the raccoon. Davis 

 found that the time curves of two children in learning the 

 fastenings of a box were very similar to those of the raccoon, 

 and Lindley in his Study of Puzzles obtains very similar 

 results with young children. 



When Thorndike speaks of reasoning he evidently has in 

 mind a fairly typical process of ratiocination, and not the 

 simple process of the inferential type described above, 

 which we should most naturally expect in the animal mind. 

 A man would find his way out of a puzzle box after once 

 discovering the proper method, but granting that a cat has 

 a certain power of inference it would not be surprising that, 

 with her hazy consciousness of the situation, feeble and fluc- 

 tuating attention and indefinite memory of just what she 

 did before, several trials would be required to enable her 

 to solve her problem. It is quite easy to convict a cat of 

 stupidity by showing that she cannot reason in human 

 fashion. Whether she is capable of mental action of a 

 primitive inferential type is a quite different question. 



We are apt to overestimate the importance of the ability 

 to reason as if it were the chief thing of value in intelligent 

 behavior. There are other mental traits which may enable 

 an animal to get what it wants better than an increment of 

 reasoning power. General activity, power of attention, 

 interest, quickness of forming associations, delicacy of dis- 

 crimination, duration of memory and the ability to form 

 complex associations are all of the utmost importance in 

 many situations in an animal's life. We frequently meet 

 people who, when they are compelled to exercise their reason- 

 ing powers, act as if the effort were a painful one and as if 



