264 Animal Intelligence 
block, a pencil, a ribbon or a ball. _A student thus learns to 
respond to any plane surface inclosed by three straight lines 
regardless of its size, shape, color or other than geometrical 
meaning. | 
What happens in such cases is that the response, by being 
connected with many situations alike in the presence of the 
element in question and different in other respects, is bound 
firmly to that element and loosely to each of its concomitants. 
Conversely any element is bound firmly to any one response 
that is made to all situations containing it and very, very 
loosely to each of those responses that are made to only a 
few of the situations containing it. The element of triangu- 
larity, for example, is bound firmly to the response of saying 
or thinking ‘triangle’ but only very loosely to the response 
of saying or thinking white, red, blue, large, small, iron, steel, 
wood, paper and the like. |_A situation thus acquires bonds 
not only with some response to it as a gross total, but also 
with responses to each of its elements that has appeared in 
any other gross totals. } 
Appropriate response to an element regardless of its con- 
comitants is a necessary consequence of the laws of exercise 
and effect if an animal learns to make that response to the 
gross total situations that contain the element and not to 
make it to those that donot. Such prepotent determination 
of the response by one or another element of the situation 
is no transcendental mystery, but, given the circumstances, 
a general rule of all learning. The dog who responds ap- 
propriately to ‘beg’ no matter when, where, or by whom 
spoken, manifests the same laws of behavior. There is no 
difficulty in understanding how each element of a situation 
may come to tend to produce a response peculiar to it: s 
well as to play its part in determining the response to the 
situation asa total. There may be some difficulty in un,* « 
