248 THE INTELLIGENCE OF MAMMALS 
will be evident that we have a consciousness of an outlying 
region beyond our immediate sphere of perception which 
stands in a definite relation to the latter, and that the object 
of our search lies in a certain direction. When the per- 
ceptual and the ideal content of our minds get disjoined we 
have the horrible consciousness of being lost. If the ideal 
content were absent and we had nothing to depend upon 
but a store of sensori-motor associations would we be able 
to get back to our starting place? I think not. And with- 
out this content I fancy the horse would be as helpless as 
ourselves. 
Whether animals draw inferences of a simple sort is a 
subject we shall dwell upon further in the chapter on the 
mental life of apes and monkeys. It is not at all likely | 
that animals have any power of abstract or conceptual | 
reasoning; as Morgan remarks they probably “do not think 
the therefore,” but mental action essentially inferential in | 
character may not involve any processes of a complicated 
kind. As Binet has attempted to make clear in his work 
on the Psychology of Reasoning, there is a fundamental 
similarity between reason and simple perception. The 
shape and color of an orange recall the sensations of odor, 
taste, touch and muscular movements which we have ex- 
perienced in connection with such visual impressions in the 
past. These various states are combined in a percept 
which seems to us a simple object. The visual impression 
has assimilated various other attributes, and we therefore 
tend to act differently toward such appearances on the 
basis of this association. The sweet taste may cause us to 
reach out for the orange and we might justify our procedure 
by a process of reasoning about the relation of the various 
attributes of the object. But we certainly do not do so 
before the sweetness of the orange is borne in upon us. 
