284 Animal Intelligence 
are stamped out; the impulses to perform them in that 
situation are weakened by reason of the positive discomfort 
or the absence of pleasure resulting from them. So the 
animal finally performs in that situation only the fitting act. 
| Here we have the simplest and at the same time the most 
widespread sort of intellect or learning in the world. There 
is no reasoning, no process of inference or comparison; 
there is no thinking about things, no putting two and two 
together; there are no ideas — the animal does not think 
of the box or of the food or of the act he is to perform. He 
simply comes after the learning to feel like doing a certain 
thing under certain circumstances which before the learning 
he did not feel like doing. ' Human beings are accustomed | 
to think of intellect as the power of having and controlling 
ideas and of ability to learn as synonymous with ability to 
have ideas. | But learning by having ideas is really one of 
the rare and isolated events in nature. There may be a 
few scattered ideas possessed by the higher animals, but the 
common form of intelligence with them, their habitual 
method of learning, is not by the acquisition of ideas, but 
by the selection of ‘rnpulbea | 
\ Indeed this same type of learning is found in man. | When 
we learn to drive a golf ball or play tennis or billiards, when 
we learn to tell the price of tea by tasting it or to strike a 
certain note exactly with the voice, we do not learn in the 
main by virtue of any ideas that are explained to us, by 
any inferences that we reason out. We learn by the grad- 
ual selection of the appropriate act or judgment, by its 
association with the circumstances or situation requiring 
it, in just the way that the animals do. 
From the lowest animals of which we can affirm intel- 
ligence up to man this type of intellect is found. With 
it there are in the mammals obscure traces of the ideas 
