Animal Psychology 183 



a sort of mental calendar on which he checks off the days? By no 

 means ! All it may mean is that if a horse works six days in the week, 

 there is a certain feeling of tiredness which has become associated with 

 that amount of work, just as a blind man can tell by his "feeling" how 

 many blocks he walked and when it is time to turn without counting 

 the blocks. 



We may then conclude that all animals may be conscious to some 

 extent ; that is, they may be aware of their actions, although this has 

 nothing to do with reasoning — with thinking. 



That veteran experimental psychologist, the late Professor William 

 Wundt, said, "Animals never think and human but seldom," and most 

 animal psychologists hold to this dictum, if, by "reason" is meant true 

 thinking, that is, a weighing of two or more sides of a problem and then 

 by a definite mental act coming to a decision or conclusion as to what 

 is to be done. In other words, thinking means to use abstract ideas and 

 to form conclusions. 



There are many writers who mean by the term "thinking" only an 

 ability to profit by past experience, so we must always find what a 

 writer means by his terms before we attempt to pass judgment on what 

 he says. Others likewise speak of "intelligence", which should mean 

 only the ability to think, as any associative memory. This is really 

 placing old labels on new bottles and is very confusing to the student 

 who wishes to know both the past and the present of a branch of science. 



The desires of the different men in animal psychology must also be 

 taken into consideration when reading their respective works. There 

 are those who wish to show that there is no real difference between man 

 and the lower animals. These insist that man has nothing distinct from 

 the lower animals except an articulate language, but that man's seeming 

 difference in the mental world is only a little greater development of 

 animal characteristics. Language by them is often said to be the cause 

 of man's greater mental ability in that he can by this means write down 

 his findings so that others may profit by them. 



Those who hold that man is something separate and distinct from 

 the animal, call attention to the fact that language but expresses 

 thought, and one must have thought before he can develop a language, 

 rather than language being the cause of thought. These men also insist 

 that there is no proof that any animal has ever "reasoned" out a problem 

 in the way mentioned in an earlier paragraph, and therefore no animal 

 lower than man can be said to have any "intelligence" in the classic 

 sense. 



These latter men would say that hundreds of thousands of cats, 

 dogs, and even apes (which are considered the more intelligent animals) 

 are very fond of warm places. Such animals have lain before hundreds 

 of thousands of open fires and enjoyed the warmth. They have seen 

 their masters keep the fire aglow by placing fuel upon it, and yet not 

 in a single instance has any animal drawn the very simple conclusion 



