STUDIES ON THE MENTAL LIFE OF ANIMALS. 561 



Morgan, the diti'erence between these two kinds of intelligence con- 

 sists simply in the greater complexity or simplicity of their associa- 

 tion. The superior animals are supposed to be capable of construct- 

 ing concepts more or less similar to our own, the association being the 

 same both in them and in man. The aptitude for forming rich and 

 complex associations constitutes intelligence, properly so called, as 

 opposed to reason defined as a faculty of analysis. From the point of 

 view of intelligence there is a regular gradation from man to the ani- 

 mal. That which distinguishes them is the presence of that rational 

 analytic faculty with which the faculty of speech is connected. We 

 also meet men in whom that analytic faculty is but slightly developed 

 and who nevertheless .show a high degree of intelligence. In the 

 human species these individuals are those whose mental life most 

 closely approximates to that of the superior animals; there is an 

 almost direct transition from one to the other. 



This theory can not be accepted. Human association is entirely 

 tranyformed by the intervention of inference, judgment, and com- 

 parison. It includes imitation, understood as a transferred associa- 

 tion. Its elements may exist in our consciousness in an isolated man- 

 ner, independently from the primitive association that united them, 

 etc. Our author says in plain terms that "'man is no more an animal 

 with language than an elephant is a cow with a proboscis."" The 

 species or genera should be no more confounded from the psychological 

 than from the physiological point of view. 



Progress from the psychological life of the animal to the mental life 

 of man has been effected by transforming the direct connections 

 between the terms of an association into indirect ones. It is essential 

 to understand that an animal has not a continuous and free mental life. 

 Its consciousness does not control the nuiltiple series of associations 

 which his life obliges him to form. Living in the present, his mind 

 is powerless to grasp the past or to previse the future. He possesses 

 only a fragmentary consciousness whose various elements are inter- 

 connected only in a confused manner; at each instance of time the ego 

 of the animal is made up of the consciousness of an association directed 

 with a view to an innnediate practical action, an association whose 

 terms are directly united, under the pressure of exterior circumstances; 

 there is no continuity imposed from w ithin. A\'ith man, on the con- 

 trary, the elements of an association may be dissociated and isolated 

 one from the other; they are not indissoluldy bound up with the 

 excitation that caused their appearance in consciousness, and with the 

 reaction which responded to that excitation. There is thus a series of 

 terms, very variable in number, l)ut always considerable in each indi- 

 vidual consciousness, which phiy freely, associating themselves with 



"Thoriidike, Inc. cit., ]>. 87. 



