Experimental Study of Associative Processes 105 
main, unless animals attend only to their own impulses and 
the excitements thereof. But if the latter be true, it simply 
affirms our view from a more fundamental standpoint. 
In another set of experiments animals were put in boxes 
with whose mechanisms they had had no experience, and 
from which they might or might not be able to escape by->~ 
their own impulsive acts. The object was to see whether ‘ 
the time taken to form the association could be altered by 
my instruction. The results turned out to give a better 
proof of the inability fo form an association by being put. __ 
Through the act than any failure to change the time-curve. _ 
For 1t happened in all but one of the cases that the move- 
ment which the anintal made to open the door was different 
from the movement which I had put him through. Thus, 
several cats were put through (in Box C [button]) the follow- 
ing movement: I took the right paw and, putting it against 
the lower right-hand side of the button, pushed it round 
to a horizontal position. The cats’ ways were as follows: 
No. 1 turned it by clawing vigorously at its top; No. 6, 
by pushing it round with his nose; No. 7, in the course of 
an indiscriminate scramble at first, in later trials either by 
pushing with his nose or clawing at the top, settling down 
finally to the last method. Nos. 2 and § did it as No. 1 did. 
Cat 2 was tried in B (Oat back). I took his paw and pressed 
the loop with it, but he formed the habit of clawing and 
biting the string at the top of the box near the front. No.1 
was tried in A. I pressed the loop with his paw, but he 
formed the habit of biting at it. 
In every case I kept on putting the animal through the act 
every time, if at the end of two minutes (one in several 
cases) it had not done it, even after it had shown, by using 
a different way, that my instruction had no influence. I 
never succeeded in getting the animal to change its way for 
