REACTION OF THE HORSE 237 



And so he declared that " if you use Latin script Hans 

 becomes confused and will be out of sorts for several 

 weeks thereafter." Mr. von Osten is, and ever will re- 

 main, the schoolmaster, and will never become the psy- 

 chologist, the " soul-vivisectionist ". Who would work a 

 child with such puzzling questions ? and Hans was to him 

 like a child. Thus the old man believed himself to be a 

 witness of a continuous, organic development of the 

 animal soul — a development which in reality had no other 

 existence than in his own imagination. 



Added to this pedantry was an extraordinary un- 

 critical attitude of mind, induced by his obsession by one 

 favorite idea, which blinded him to all objections. He met 

 objectionable observations on the part of others in one of 

 two ways. One method was by attributing to Hans certain 

 remarkable qualities, such as an extraordinary keenness of 

 hearing and a wonderful power of memory, or again, cer- 

 tain defects, such as moodiness and stubbornness, — which 

 as a matter of fact, were only so many back-doors by 

 which he might escape from the necessity of ofifering ade- 

 quate explanations. When Hans was able to give off-hand 

 a gentleman's name which he had heard years before, it 

 was called a case of extraordinary memory. When the 

 horse insisted that 2 times 2 was 5, he maintained that 

 it was an example of animal stubbornness. There was 

 still a simpler method of overcoming inconvenient objec- 

 tions and that was by ignoring them altogether. The 

 number i, the simplest and most fundamental in the 

 system of numbers, was one of the most difficult for Hans. 

 (Page 671). Mr. von Osten was aware of this, but 

 thought little of it. During the very first visit of Pro- 

 fessor Stumpf, Mr. von Osten asked the horse: "By 

 how much must you increase the numerator of the frac- 



