SOME RESULTS OF EXPERIMENT 153 
As at present advised, therefore, I see no reason for with- 
drawing from the position provisionally taken up. The 
utilization of chance experience, without the framing and 
application of an organized scheme of knowledge, appears to 
be the predominant method of animal intelligence. 
On this view, then, we may see in instinctive behaviour, 
and the multifarious automatic acts of animals, a means of 
providing experience of the right kind and on profitable lines. 
We may see in the play-instincts of the young a training 
ground for the more serious business of animal life—a theme 
developed by Professor Groos. We may see in the imitative 
tendency—the innate proclivity to follow a lead blindly and 
abt first unintelligently—a further means of providing those 
useful items of experience which intelligence finds so service- 
able. And we may see in the intelligence which can profit 
by chance occurrences that arise in these several ways all that 
suffices for the simple needs of animal existence. 
With some differences of opinion Dr. Thorndike and I have 
much in common in the conclusions to which we have been 
independently led as to the method and limits of animal 
intelligence. We seem to be in essential agreement in the 
belief that the method of animal intelligence is to profit by 
chance experience without rational foresight, and that unless 
such experience be individually acquired, the data essential for 
intelligent progress are absent. While in our attempts to 
realize the general nature of animal consciousness there is a 
close similarity of treatment. In my “Introduction to Com- 
parative Psychology” a good deal of space is devoted to an 
analysis of the psychology of skill “in order that we may infer 
what takes place in the minds of animals ;” and I said :— 
“When I am playing a hard game of tennis, or when I am 
sailing a yacht close to the wind in a choppy sea, self does not 
at all tend to become focal. Hence,, though I am a self- 
conscious being I am not always self-conscious. And pre- 
sumably when I am least self-conscious, I am nearest the 
condition of the animal at the stage of mere sense experience. 
I am exhilarated with the sense of pleasurable existence, my 
