June 17, 1898.] 



ECIENCE, 



823 



be found in the figure given. What an 

 animal once acquires is long in being lost, 

 and this power of retention thus renders 

 the power of acquisition a big factor in the 

 struggle for existence. But these experi- 

 ments give better information than this 

 quantitative estimate of the value of past 

 experience, for they demonstrate conclu- 

 sively that the animals have no real mem- 

 ory. The cat or dog that is put into a box 

 from which he has escaped thirty or forty 

 times, after an interval of fifty days without 

 any experience with it, will escape quicker 

 than he did in his first experience and will 

 reach a perfect mastery of the association 

 in much fewer trials than he did before, but 

 he will reach it gradualhj. If he had true 

 memory he would, when put in the box 

 after the interval, after a while think, " Oh, 

 yes! pulling this string let me out," and 

 thenceforth would pull the string as soon as 

 dro2}2}ed in the box. In the case of genuine 

 memory you either know a thing and do it 

 or forget it utterly and fail to do it at all. 

 So with a man recalling the combination to 

 a safe, for instance. But the memory of 

 the animal is only that of a billiard plaj^er 

 who hasn't played for a long interval and 

 who gradually recovers his skill. No bil- 

 liard player keeps thitiking, "Two years 

 ago I hit a ball placed like this in such and 

 such a way." And the cat or dog does not 

 think, " When I was in this box before, I 

 got out by pulling that string." Not only 

 the gradual recovery of skill, but also the 

 actions of the animal show this. In case 

 of an association only partially permanent 

 the animal claws around the vital spot, or 

 claws feebly and intermittently, or varies 

 its attacks on the loop or what not, by in- 

 stinctive bitings and squeezings. Memory 

 in animals is permanence of associations, 

 not conscious realization that a . certain 

 event or sequence occurred in the past. 



So much for some of the experiments 

 and what theoretical consequences they 



seem directly to involve. The general 

 view which the entire investigation has 

 forced upon me is that animals do not 

 think about things at all, that consciousness 

 is for them always consciousness in its first 

 intention, ' pure experience,' as Lloyd 

 Morgan says. They feel all their sense- 

 impressions as we feel the sky and water 

 and movements of our body when swim- 

 ming. They see the thumb-latch as the 

 ball-player sees the ball speeding toward 

 him. The.y depress the thumb-piece, not 

 because they think about the act, but just 

 because they feel like doing so. And so 

 their mental life never gets bej^ond the 

 limits of the least noticeable sort of human 

 intellection. Conception, inference, judg- 

 ment, memory, self- consciousness, social 

 consciousness, imagination, association and 

 perception, in the common acceptation of 

 the terms, are all absent from the animal 

 mind. Animal intellection is made up of 

 a lot of specific connections, whose elements 

 are restricted to them, and which subserve 

 practical ends directly, and is homologous 

 with the intellection involved in such 

 human associations as regulate the conduct 

 of a man playing tennis. The fundamental 

 phenomenon which I find presented in ani- 

 mal consciousness is one which can harden 

 into inherited connections and reflexes, on 

 the one hand, and thus connect naturally 

 with a host of the phenomena of natural 

 life ; on the other hand, it emphasizes the 

 fact that our mental life has grown up as a 

 mediation between stimulus and reaction. 

 The old view of human consciousness is 

 that it is built up out of elementary sensa- 

 tions, that very minute bits of consciousness 

 come first and gradually get built up into 

 the complex web. It looks for the begin- 

 nings of consciousness to little feelings. 

 This our view abolishes, and declares that 

 the progress is not from little and simple 

 to big and complicated, but from direct 

 connections to indirect connections in 



