INTRODUCTION 13 



weighed -together, and not in isolation. A former in- 

 structor of mathematics in a German gymnasium, a pas- 

 sionate horseman and hunter, extremely patient and at 

 the same time highly irrascible, liberal in permitting the 

 use of the horse for days at a time and again tyrannical 

 in the insistence upon foolish conditions, clever in his 

 method of instruction and yet at the same time possessing 

 not even the slightest notion of the most elementary con- 

 ditions of scientific procedure, — all this, and more, goes 

 to make up the man. He is fanatic in his conviction, he 

 has an eccentric mind which is crammed full of theories 

 from the phrenology of Gall to the belief that the horse 

 is capable of inner speech and thereby enunciates in- 

 wardly the number as it proceeds with the tapping. From 

 theories such as these, and on the basis of all sorts of 

 imagined emotional tendencies in the horse, he also 

 managed to formulate an explanation for the failure of 

 the tests in which none of the persons present knew the 

 answer to the problem given the horse, and also for the 

 failure of those tests in which the large blinders were 

 applied. And he would often interfere with or hinder 

 other tests which, according to his point of view, were 

 likely to lead us astray. And yet, when the first tests 

 with the blinders did turn out as unmistakably sheer 

 failures, there was such genuine surprise, such tragi- 

 comic rage directed against the horse, that we finally 

 believed that his views in the matter would be changed 

 beyond a doubt. " The gentlemen must admit," he said 

 at the time, " that after seeing the objective success of 

 my efforts at instruction, I was warranted in my belief 

 in the horse's power of independent thought." Never- 

 theless, upon the following day he was as ardent an ex- 



