562 STTTDIES Oisr IHE MENTAL LIFE (1F ANIMALS. 



each other in an original and independent manner, B3' memory, 

 generalization, inference, etc., faculties properly human, the elements 

 of past associations intervene in the play of the present elements, and 

 this total may be organized with reference to a future action. An 

 important investigation for comparative psychology would consist in 

 attempting to find in the child and in the most elevated types of the 

 primates the first traces of this transformation of directly practical 

 association into a free and continuous mental life. We should thus be 

 able to ascertain, not the legendar}' account, but the real history of the 

 origin of our human faculty of association. 



"• Our work/' sa3^s Mr. Thorndike, "has rejected reason, compari- 

 son, or inference, perception of similarity, and imitation. It has 

 denied the existence, in animal consciousness, of any important stock 

 of free ideas or impulses, and so has denied that animal association is 

 homologous with the association of human psychology. It has homoi- 

 ogized it with a certain limited form of human association. It has 

 proposed, as necessary steps in the evolution of human faculty, a vast 

 increase in the number of associations, signs of which appear in the 

 primates, and a freeing- of the elements thereof into independent exist- 

 ence. It has given us an increased insight into various mental proc- 

 esses." It has convinced the writer, if not the reader, that the old 

 speculations about what an animal could do, what it thought, and how 

 what it thought grew into what human beings third\, "were a long- 

 way from the truth, and not on the road to it." 



I believe that our best service has been to show that animal intellection is made 

 up of a lot of specific connections, whose elements are restricted to them, and which 

 subserve practical ends directly, and to homologize it with the intellection involved, 

 in such human associations as regulate the conduct of a man playing tennis. The 

 fundamental phenomenon which 1 find presented in animal consciousness is one 

 which can harden into inherited connections and reflexes, on the one hand, and thus 

 connect naturally with a host of the })henomena of animal life ; on the other hand 

 it emphasizes the fact that our mental life has grown up as a mediation between 

 stimulus and reaction/' 



Theoretical science may derive a profit from these conclusions; but 

 the author thinks also that from all these investigations some of the 

 results possess considerable pedagog-ical interest. The associative 

 process requires the immediate personal experience of the animal. 

 Why not apply this psychological proceeding- to the education of the 

 child? There are young minds that have not, at first, the theoretical 

 intelligence for certain matters of knowledg-e that are taug-ht, such, 

 for example, as mathematical operations; often the teacher's theo 

 retical explanation escapes them. Why not, in this case, have 

 recourse to practical and personal "training-?"' Pedagogical methods 

 founded on imitation can not afi'ect certain minds; for them the best 



"Thorndike, loo. cit., pp. 108, 109. 



