234 MIND IN EVOLUTION CHAP. 



to lower down, I noticed her " shortening," slipping her 

 trunk along the stick as she got the end nearer towards 

 her. These minor adjustments suggest the dominance 

 of an effort to effect a certain external change : to pull in 

 a stick, pull out a bolt, open a door. They thus 

 correspond to what in human experience we know as 

 ideomotor action action in which we deal with the 

 objects of perception not in accordance with a fixed 

 habitual response, but in such a manner as to produce in 

 them a certain change which we desire. 



These indications, slight as they may be, 1 suggest and 

 the result would hold, apart from the question of imitation 

 that what the animals learnt was not merely to respond 

 in a particular way to a particular object, but to produce a 

 certain change in that object as a means to securing their 

 food. If this view is correct we have here in an 

 elementary form the equivalent in action of the practical 

 judgment or idea. That is to say, we have a series of 

 muscular movements directed towards a certain proximate 

 end, which end is supported and made valuable by the fact 

 that it is a means to something further. Action is directed 

 towards the end A. A is in itself indifferent, but is valuable 

 to the animal as a means to B. This relation, A B, the 

 animal has had opportunities of perceiving. We have, 

 therefore, if the observations are correctly analysed, the 

 clearest evidence that it is the knowledge of this sequence 

 applied by the animal which determines its behaviour. In 

 human experience the means and the end in such a case 

 form the content of ideas, and their combination would be 

 called a judgment. The above observations suggest that, 

 if animals have not such ideas, they have something which 

 can perform an equivalent function. To put it differently, 

 I would define a practical idea as the function which directs 

 action, not necessarily in accordance with habit or instinct, 

 to the production of a certain perceptible result. It is, 

 further, a necessary part of such an idea that it rests on a 



1 I much regret that I did not make more frequent notes on points of 

 this kind, the significance of which did not occur to me at first. I have 

 tried in the text to render fairly the impression left on my memory by 

 many of the experiments, in the hope that in future experiments special 

 attention may be given to this point. 



