238 THE INTELLIGENCE OF MAMMALS 
ciation. If there were any element of inference involved 
there ought to be, according to him, a sudden vertical de- 
scent of the time curve. “ Where the act resulting from the 
impulse is very simple, very obvious, and very clearly de- 
fined, a simple experience may make the association per- 
fect, and we may have an abrupt descent in the time curve 
without needing to suppose inference. But if in a complex 
act, a series of acts or an ill-defined act one found a sudden 
consummation in the associative process, one might very 
well claim that reason was at work. Now, the scores of 
cases recorded show no such phenomena. The cat does not 
look over the situation, much less think it over, and then 
decide what to do. It bursts out at once into the activities 
which instinct and experience have settled on as suitable 
reactions to the situation, ‘confinement when hungry with 
food outside.’ It does not ever in the course of its successes 
realize that such an act brings food and therefore decide to 
do it and thenceforth do it immediately from decision 
instead of from impulse. The one impulse, out of many 
accidental ones, which leads to pleasure, becomes strength- 
ened and stamped in thereby, and more and more firmly 
associated with the sense-impression of that box’s interior. 
Accordingly it is sooner and sooner fulfilled. Futile im- 
pulses are gradually stamped out. The gradual slope of 
the time curve, then, shows the absence of reasoning. They 
represent the wearing smooth of a path in the brain, not the 
decisions of a rational consciousness.” 
Even ideas are unnecessary, according to Thorndike, to 
account for most feats of animal intelligence. The cat, 
which after having made a lucky movement and escaped 
from the box and got some fish, might be supposed to asso- 
ciate the appearance of the mechanism of escape with the 
idea of the pleasure resulting from eating the food. But, 
