230 MIND IN EVOLUTION CHAP. 



jumps, the kitten wanders and picks, the otter slips about 

 everywhere like ground lightning, the elephant fumbles 

 ceaselessly, the monkey pulls things about. This is, as 

 it were, the basal behaviour : the matrix out of which 

 more adaptive action is hewn. But it tends to persist, even 

 when the intelligent mode of conduct is fully formed. 

 Still more does the animal tend to relapse into it when his 

 intelligence fails. Under the pressure of desire he must 

 do something ; and he falls back on the action that is 

 native to him. Upon this tendency are superimposed the 

 results of experience. Experience selects some of these 

 actions, and applies them to this or that object. So 

 selected or applied, the acts tend to become habitual, and 

 are performed apart from those results which brought 

 them into being. They become in this way incorporated, 

 though less intimately, in the life of the animal, and 

 serve him as a form of play or recreation. But once 

 more, they give place on occasion to the actual desires of 

 the animal, and the thing necessary for their attainment. 

 We must take habit into account as a disturbing influence 

 in the work of intelligence, but we must not attribute to it 

 all that intelligence does. 



6. Probable reasons for imputing perceptual Learning. 



The question remains, whether, after all, any of the 

 tricks were learnt by perception. I have admitted, as the 

 detailed account shows, that other elements may in some 

 cases have entered in, and may not this be true even when 

 appearances suggested the contrary ? Is it not possible 

 that in each case, after a certain amount of random 

 endeavour, the animal hit by chance upon the appro- 

 priate movement, and finding that successful, repeated 

 it ? If this were so, to show the method would be 

 superfluous, and an animal should learn on the average 

 as quickly if left to itself as upon the method adopted by 

 me. 1 may say at once that the influence of imitation 

 cannot be finally established until comparative experiments 

 on a large scale have been conducted upon this point. 1 



1 As a beginning I myself borrowed two collies, mother and son, for 

 the purpose. My intention was to proceed as follows : Taking experi- 

 ment a, to show the method to the mother, and leave the son to discover 



