THE INTELLIGENCE OF MAMMALS 253 



they were groping in a sort of intellectual fog. We are often 

 amazed at the obvious fallacies they fall into, like Mrs. 

 Eddy's famous method of proving propositions by inversion; 

 but the same people may exhibit an unusual degree of 

 keenness and practical sense hi the ordinary affairs of We. 

 In animals these intellectual faculties of a lower order are 

 developed in different ways according to the habits of the 

 species. Give a fox greater power of inferential thinking, 

 but decrease his alertness, curiosity, suspiciousness, and 

 quickness of perception, and he might fall a victim to the 

 hunter while his mind was occupied on some other subject. 

 In the development of these various intellectual qualities 

 there has been an enormous progress from the stupid mar- 

 supials to the apes and monkeys, during which the founda- 

 tions for the superstructure of reason were broadly laid. 

 Just as the various non-intelligent modifications of behavior 

 facilitate the development of intelligence, so do the diverse 

 manifestations of intelligence prepare the way for the advent 

 of reason. 



The question as to whether animals imitate acts from which 

 they see that other animals derive an advantage has an 

 important bearing on our views of their psychic development. 

 The word imitation is employed hi a very wide sense by 

 some writers such as Tarde and Baldwin, but it is more 

 commonly used to designate the performance of an act after 

 perceiving the act performed by another creature. In 

 imitation of this type we usually distinguish two kinds, 

 the instinctive, and the reflective or rational. In the first 

 the perception of another animal performing an act forms 

 the stimulus which sets off an innate tendency to perform 

 a similar act. In fishes which run in schools the turning 

 about of one individual may cause all the others to turn; 

 each individual has an innate proclivity to follow the 



