298 MIND IN EVOLUTION CHAP. 



To recognise what I have called the practical judgment 

 as something not identical with the association of ideas, 

 but as intermediate between habituation on the one side, 

 and general reasoning on the other, is, as it seems to me, 

 to find the key not only to the ordinary behaviour of the 

 higher animals, which we witness from day to day, but 

 also to those little acts of invention and ingenuity which 

 occasional observers recount. The observer who is not a 

 psychologist is apt to translate the animal's action into 

 abstract terms, as if it were the animal who made the 

 abstraction, and not the observer. The psychologist, 

 whose duty it is to prune the exuberance of imagination, 

 resolves the proceeding into an instance of association, 

 where it may be that association, if the term is to remain 

 distinct from what I have called the Practical Judgment, 

 cannot be made to cover all the facts. Thus Mr. Lloyd 

 Morgan writes as follows : 



" A well-known writer, Dr. Andrew Wilson, describes the case 

 of a dog which used to hunt a rabbit nearly every morning down 

 a curved shrubbery, and each time ran it into a drain at the end. 

 * The dog then appears to have come to the conclusion ' I quote 

 Dr. Wilson's words * that the chord of a circle is shorter than 

 its arc, for he raised the rabbit again, and, instead of following him 

 through the shrubbery as usual, he took the short cut to the drain, 

 and was ready and in waiting on the rabbit when he arrived, and 

 caught him. 5 It is here assumed that the dog perceived the 

 relation between a chord and its arc. I do not myself believe that 

 he did ; but that is not the question ; it is merely an ex- 

 pression of individual opinion. The question is : Can we or can 

 we not explain the dog's action as the outcome of sense-experience, 

 as indicative of intelligence profiting by association ? I do not see 

 how this can be denied. The terrier used to start the rabbit 

 nearly every morning, and each time saw it escape into the old 

 drain. There were thus ample opportunities for establishing an 

 association between rabbit and drain. That the sight of the 

 rabbit should suggest the drain into which it daily escaped, and 

 that when the idea was suggested, the dog should run there 

 directly, is a sequence not impossible, one would think, to sense- 

 experience." 



1 Comparative Psychology^ pp. 301, 302. It should be said that Mr. 

 Lloyd Morgan has in his latest work, Animal Behaviour, practically 

 given up the use of the term Association from a sense, as I gather, of its 

 ambiguity. 



