The Mental Life of the Monkeys 239 
that is not only fitted to do more delicate work in parts, 
but is also alive, tender all over, functioning throughout, 
set off in action by anything and everything. And if one 
adds coérdinations allowing a freedom and a differentiation 
of action of the muscles used in speech comparable to that 
already present in connection with the monkey’s hand, he 
may well ask, “What more of a nervous mechanism do 
you need to parallel the behavior of the year-old child?” 
However, this is not the place to speculate upon the impor- 
tance to human development of our instinctive aimless 
activity, physical and mental, or to describe further its 
similarity and evident phylogenetic relationship to the in- 
stinctive behavior of the monkeys. Elsewhere I shall under- 
take that task. 
4\ In their method of learning, the monkeys do not ad- 
vance far beyond the generalized mammalian type, but in 
their proficiency in that method they do. | They seem at 
least to form associations very much faster, and they form 
very many more. They also seem superior in the delicacy 
and in the complexity of the associations formed and the 
connections seem to be more permanent. 
This progress may seem, and doubtless will to the thinker 
who looks upon the human intellect as a collection of func- 
tions of which ideation, judgment and reasoning are chief, 
to be slight. To my mind it is not so in reality. For it 
seems to me highly probable that the so-called ‘ higher’ in- 
tellectual processes of human beings are but secondary re- 
sults of the general function of having free ideas and that 
this general function is the result of the formation after the 
fashion of the animals of a very great number of associations. 
I should therefore say, “Let us not wonder at the com- 
parative absence of free ideas in the monkeys, much less at 
the absence of inferences or concepts. Let us not wonder 
