Experimental Study of Associative Processes 123 
under test conditions, gets, or fancies he gets, a fairly defi- 
nite idea of what the intellectual life of a cat or dog feels 
like. It is most like what we feel when consciousness con- 
tains little thought about anything; when we fee nTSe- 
_ impressions in their hist intention, so to speak, when we feel 
our own body, and the impulses we give to it. Sometimes 
one gets this animal consciousness while in swimming, for 
example” One feels the water, the sky, the birds above, but 
with no thoughts about them or memories of how they looked 
at other times, or esthetic judgments about their beauty ; 
one feels no ideas about what movements he will make, but 
feels himself make them, feels his body throughout. Self- 
consciousness dies away. Social consciousness dies away. 
The meanings, and values, and connections of things die 
away. One feels sense-impressions, has impulses, feels the 
movements he makes; that is. at 
“This pictorial description may be supplemented by an ac- 
count of some associations in human life which are learned in 
the same way as are animal associations ; associations, there- 
fore, where the process of formation is possibly homologous 
with that in animals. | When a man learns to swim, to play 
tennis or billiards, or to juggle, the process is something like 
what happens when the cat learns to pull the string to get 
out of the box, ‘provided, of course, we remove, in the man’s 
case, all the‘accompanying mentality which is not directly 
concerned in learning the feat.1\ Like the latter, the former 
1 A man may learn to swim from the general feeling, ‘I want to be able to 
swim.” While learning, he may think of this desire, of the difficulties of the 
motion, of the instruction given him, or of anything which may turn up in 
his mind. This is all extraneous and is not concerned in the acquisition of 
the association. Nothing like it, of course, goes on in the animal’s mind. 
Imagine a man thrown into the water repeatedly, and gradually floundering 
to the shore in better and better style until finally, when thrown in, he swims 
off perfectly, and deprive the man of all extraneous feelings, and you have 
