THE INTELLIGENCE OF MAMMALS 253 
they were groping in a sort of intellectual fog. We are often 
amazed at the obvious fallacies they fall into, like Mrs. 
Eddy’s famous method of proving propositions by inversion; 
but the same people may exhibit an unusual degree of 
keenness and practical sense in the ordinary affairs of life. 
In animals these intellectual faculties of a lower order are 
developed in different ways according to the habits of the 
species. Give a fox greater power of inferential thinking, 
but decrease his alertness, curiosity, suspiciousness, and 
quickness of perception, and he might fall a victim to the 
hunter while his mind was occupied on some other subject. 
In the development of these various intellectual qualities 
there has been an enormous progress from the stupid mar- 
supials to the apes and monkeys, during which the founda- 
tions for the superstructure of reason were broadly laid. 
Just as the various non-intelligent modifications of behavior 
facilitate the development of intelligence, so do the diverse 
manifestations of intelligence prepare the way for the advent 
of reason. 
The question as to whether animals imitate acts from which 
they see that other animals derive an advantage has an 
important bearing on our views of their psychic development. 
The word imitation is employed in a very wide sense by 
some writers such as Tarde and Baldwin, but it is more 
commonly used to designate the performance of an act after 
perceiving the act performed by another creature. In 
imitation of this type we usually distinguish two kinds, 
the instinctive, and the reflective or rational. In the first 
the perception of another animal performing an act forms 
the stimulus which sets off an innate tendency to perform 
a similar act. In fishes which run in schools the turning 
about of one individual may cause all the others to turn; 
each individual has an innate proclivity to follow the 
