ix LEARNING AMONG HIGHER ANIMALS 177 



the intellectual life of a cat or dog feels like. It is most like 

 what we feel when consciousness contains little thought about 

 anything, when we feel the sense-impressions in their first in- 

 tention, so to speak, when we feel our own body, and the im- 

 pulses we give to it. Sometimes one gets this animal consciousness 

 while in swimming, for example. One feels the water, the sky, 

 the birds above, but with no thoughts about them or memories 

 of how they looked at other times, or aesthetic judgments about 

 their beauty ; one feels no ideas about what movements he will 

 make, but feels himself make them, feels his body throughout. 

 Self-consciousness dies away. Social consciousness dies away. 

 The meanings, and values, and connections of things die away. 

 One feels sense-impressions, has impulses, feels the movements he 

 makes ; that is all. 



This pictorial description may be supplemented by an account 

 of some associations in human life which are learned in the same 

 way as are animal associations ; associations, therefore, where the 

 process of formation is possibly homologous with that in animals. 

 When a man learns to swim, to play tennis or billiards, or to 

 juggle, the process is something like what happens when the cat 

 learns to pull the string to get out of the box, provided, of course, 

 we remove, in the man's case, all the accompanying mentality 

 which is not directly concerned in learning the feat. Like the 

 latter, the former contains desire, sense-impression, impulse, act 

 and possible representations. Like it, the former is learned 

 gradually. Moreover, the associations concerned cannot be 

 formed by imitation. One does not know how to dive just by 

 seeing another man dive. You cannot form them from being 

 put through them, though, of course, this helps indirectly, in a 

 way that it does not with animals. One makes use of no feelings 

 of a common element, no perceptions of similarity. The tennis 

 player does not feel, " This ball coming at this angle and with 

 this speed is similar in angle, though not in speed, to that other 

 ball of an hour ago, therefore I will hit it in a similar way." He 

 simply feels an impulse from the sense-impression. Finally, the 

 elements of the associations are not isolated. No tennis-player's 

 stream of thought is filled with free-floating representations of any 

 of the tens of thousands of sense-impressions of movements he has 

 seen and made on the tennis-court. Yet there is consciousness 

 enough at the time, keen consciousness of the sense-impressions, 

 impulses, feelings of one's bodily acts. So with the animals. 

 There is consciousness enough, but of this kind." * 



It would be out of place to examine Mr. Thorndike's 

 interesting paper in full detail, but we may consider 



1 Pp. 83, 84. 



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