ix LEARNING AMONG HIGHER ANIMALS 181 



superfluous to quote further examples. Mr. Thorndike 

 himself would probably have been impressed by those 

 referred to if he had not entertained an exaggerated 

 conception of the " perfection" of what we have called 

 explicit memory, or memory in its stricter sense. 



..." Real memory is an absolute thing, including every- 

 thing but forgetful ness. If the cat had real memory it would, 

 when after an interval dropped into a box, remember that from 

 this box it escaped by doing this or that and consequently, either 

 immediately or after a time of recollection, go do it, or else it 

 would not remember and would fail utterly to do it." l 



'he statement is so astonishing that one would take it for 

 mere slip, but that much of Mr. Thorndike's argument 

 is founded upon it. A moment's self -recollection is enough 

 to show that memories of past events or of things learnt 

 ire of all degrees of completeness. That it should take 

 Pour or five trials to teach a cat a novel sort of trick is 

 ;rtainly no more than one would expect on the hypothesis 

 lat a clear grasp of the relations involved was being 

 gradually formed and fixed in memory. What Mr. 

 Thorndike's experiments prove, so far, is not that cats 

 and dogs are invariably educated by the association process, 

 i.e., by habituation alone, but, on the contrary, that at least 

 some cats and dogs conform in at least one point to the 

 methods of acquisition by concrete experience they learn 

 in a very few instances. 2 



4. Failure to learn by being put through an action. 

 What we may call the sense-impulse theory of associa- 

 tion implies that an animal can only learn to do a thing by 

 doing it, and so getting the pleasure of success associated 

 with the doing. Now, if one puts an animal through an 

 act to show him how it is done, and if he can learn in this 

 way, the theory breaks down. For to have his limbs 

 mechanically moved by the hand is quite a different thing 

 from moving them himself. The set of sensations involved 

 would be, apart from the perception of the movement, in the 

 main different. In particular, the impulse to move would 

 be absent. This case therefore is critical for the sense- 



1 P. 98. 



2 On the question of the value of time-curves see above, p. 156, note. 



