74 Animal Intelligence 
and very clearly defined, a single experience may make the 
association perfect, and we may have an abrupt descent 
in the time-curve without needing to suppose inference. \ 
But if in a complex act, a series of acts or an ill-defined act, 
one found such a sudden consummation in the associative 
process, one might very well claim that reason was at work. 
Now, the scores of cases recorded show no such phenomena. 
The cat does not look over the situation, much less think it 
‘Over, and then decide what to do. It bursts out at once 
into the activities which instinct and experience have 
settled on as suitable reactions to the situation ‘confinement 
‘when hungry with food outside.’ It does not ever in the 
course of its successes realize that such an act brings food 
and therefore decide to do it and thenceforth do it im- 
‘mediately from decision instead of from impulse. The one 
impulse, out of many accidental ones, which leads to pleas- 
ure, becomes strengthened and stamped in thereby, and 
more and more firmly associated with the sense-impression 
_ of that box’s interior.) Accordingly it is sooner and sooner 
fulfilled. Futile impulses are gradually stamped out. 
The gradual slope of the time-curve, then, shows the ab- 
sence of reasoning. They represent the wearing smooth of 
a path in the brain, not the decisions of a rational conscious- 
ness. 
Ina later discussion of imitation further evidence that 
animals do not reason will appear. For the present, suffice 
it to say, that a dog, or cat, or chick, who does not in his 
own impulsive activity learn to escape from a box by pulling 
‘the proper loop, or stepping on a platform, or pecking at a 
door, will not learn it from seeing his fellows do so. ' They 
are incapable of even the inference (if the process may be 
dignified by that name) that what gives another food will 
give it to them also.’ So, also, it will be later seen that an 
