Experimental Study of Associative Processes 69 
it would be reasonable to ascribe to an animal) to enable a cat 
upon the ground to distinguish that the essential part of the 
process consists not in grasping the handle, but in depressing 
the latch; but the cat certainly never saw any one, after having 
depressed the latch, pushing the door posts with his legs; and 
that this pushing action is due to an originally deliberate inten- 
tion of opening the door, and not to having accidentally found 
this action to assist the process, is shown by one of the cases 
communicated to me; for in this case, my correspondent says, 
‘the door was not a loose-fitting one, by any means, and I was 
surprised that by the force of one hind leg she should have been 
able to push it open after unlatching it.’ Hence we can only 
conclude that the cats in such cases have a very definite idea as 
to the mechanical properties of a door: they know that to make 
it open, even when unlatched, it requires to be pushed — a very | 
different thing from trying to imitate any particular action which , 
they may see to be performed for the same purpose by man..' 
The whole psychological process, therefore, implied by the fact 
of a cat opening a door in this way is really most complex. 
First the animal must have observed that the door is opened by 
he hand grasping the handle and moving the latch. Next she 
must reason, by ‘the logic of feelings’ — ‘If a hand can do it, 
why not a paw?’ Then strongly moved by this idea she makes 
the first trial. The steps which follow have not been observed, 
so we cannot certainly say whether she learns by a succession 
of trials that depression of the thumb piece constitutes the 
essential part of the process, or, perhaps more probably, that her 
initial observations supplied her with the idea of clicking the 
thumb piece.| But, however this may be, it is certain that the. 
pushing with the hind feet after depressing the latch must 
be due to adaptive reasoning unassisted by observation; and 
only by the concerted action of all her limbs in the perform- 
ance of a highly complex and most unnatural movement is 
her final purpose attained.” (Animal Intelligence, pp. 420- 
422.) 
