120 Animal Intelligence 
They are to be explained not by the presence of general no- 
tions, but by the; absence. of notions of particulars.) The 
idea that animals react to a particular and absolutely de- 
fined and realized sense-impression, and that a similar 
reaction to a sense-impression which varies from the first 
proves an association by similarity, isa myth. . We shall see 
later how an animal does come in certain cases to discrimi- 
nate, in one sense of the word, with a great degree of deli- 
cacy, but we shall also see then what must be emphasized 
now, that naturally the animal’s brain reacts very coarsely 
to sense-impressions, and that the animal does not think 
about his thoughts at all. 
This puts a new face upon the question of the origin and 
development of human abstractions and consequent general 
ideas. It has been commonly supposed that animals had 
‘recepts ’ or such semi-abstractions as Morgan’s ‘predomi- 
nants,’ and that by associating with these, arbitrary and per- 
manent signs, such as articulate sounds, one turned them 
into genuine ideas of qualities. Professor James has made 
the simple but brilliant criticism that all a recept really 
means is a tendency to react in a certain way. But I have 
tried to show that the fact that an animal reacts alike to a lot 
of things gives no reason to believe that it is conscious of 
their common quality and reacts to that consciousness, be- 
cause the things it reacts to in the first place are not the 
hard-and-fast, well-defined ‘things” of human life. What 
“a ‘recept’ or ‘predominan ’ really stands for is no thing 
which can be transformed into a notion of a quality by 
being labelled with a name. | This easy solution of the 
problem of abstraction is impossible: A true idea of the 
problem itself is better than such a solution. 
My statement of what has been the course of develop- 
ment along this line is derived from observations of animals’ 
