NOTES AND LITERATURE 



THE PRESENT-DAY CONCEPTION AND STUDY OF 

 ANIMAL PSYCHOLOGY 



The latest issue— or one among the Latest issues— in that long 

 series of admirable honks called the " Bibl iotheo.ue <le Philosophic 

 Contemporaine" (Felix Alcan, Paris) is Professor Georges 1 

 Bonn's "La Nouvelle Psychologie Animale." In 1909 Bohn 

 published his interesting "La Xaissanee de 1' Intelligence," 2 in 

 which he set out with characteristic French lucidity his position 

 in the field of the new animal psychology, a position based at 

 once on a considerable amount of personal observation and 

 experimentation and on a thorough familiarity with the work of 

 the whole modern school of experimental animal psychologists. 



In the present smaller and simpler or more general statement 

 — by general I do not mean vague— Professor Bohn restates with 

 admirable understanding, restraint, definiteness and clearness, 

 the conditions and the conclusions of the modern experimental 

 study of animal reactions of the psychic and pre-psychic order. 

 The conclusions, to be sure, can be held to be those of no other 

 student than Bohn himself until other students give their formal 

 adherence to them. But despite the inevitable disagreements 



in toto, Professor holm's conclusions and attitudes-ill find the 

 adherence of a considerable body of animal psychologists. 



The essentials of this position are its strongly "mechanical" 

 tendency, i. e., its attempt to make physics and chemistry and 

 mechanics go as far as possible in explaining both stimuli and 

 reactions; its strong leaning away from finalistic explanations, 

 I. e., the explanations of adaptation and of Darwinian selection ; 

 its rather sharp classification into three separate categories of the 

 behavior of the invertebrates less the articulates, the articulates, 

 and the vertebrates, respectively; its conception of these three 

 categories of behavior as standing not as three successive stages 



