Note 15 — Chapter II · Animal Intelligence; an Experimental Study of the Associative Processes in Animals[4] (continued 2)

One result of the application of experimental method to the study of the intellect of animals was the distinction of learning by the selection of impulses or acts from learning by the selection of ideas. The usual method of learning in the case of animals other than man was shown by the studies reprinted in this volume to be the direct selection, in a certain situation, of a desirable response and its association with that situation, not the indirect selection of such a response by the selection of some idea which then of itself produced the response. The animals did not usually behave as if they thought of getting freedom or food in a certain way and were thereby moved to do so, but as if the stimulus in question made immediate connection with the response itself or an intimately associated impulse.

The experiments had in this respect both a negative or destructive and a positive or constructive meaning. On the one hand, they showed that animal learning was not homologous with human association of ideas; that animal learning was not human learning minus abstract and conceptual thought, but was on a still ‘lower’ level. On the other hand, the first positive evidence that animals could, under certain circumstances, learn, as man so commonly does, by the indirect connection of a response with a situation through some non-sensory relic or representative of the latter, came from my experiments.

It was perhaps natural that the more exciting denial of habitual learning by ideas should have attracted more attention than the somewhat tedious experiments to prove that under certain conditions they could so learn. At all events, a perverse tradition seems to have grown up to the effect that I denied the possibility of animals having images or learning in any case by representative thinking.

There is some excuse for this tradition in the fact that whereas the proof that the habitual learning of these dogs and cats did not require ‘ideas’ is clear and emphatic, my evidence that certain features of their behavior did require ‘ideas’ is complicated and imperfect.

The fact seems to be that a ‘free idea’ comes in the animals or in man only as a result of a somewhat elaborate process of analysis or extraction from a gross total sensory process. The primary level or grade of experience, common to animals and little babies, comprises states of mind such as an adult man gets if lost in anger, fear, suffocation, dyspepsia, looking at a panorama of unknown objects with head upside down, smelling the mixture of odors of a soap factory, driving a golf ball, dashing to the net in a game of tennis, warding off a blow, or swimming under water. For a man to get a distinct controllable percept of approaching asthma, of a carpet loom seen upside down, or of a successful ‘carry through,’ or ‘smash’ or ‘lob,’ so that one knows just what one is experiencing or doing, and can recall just what one experienced or did, requires further experience of the element in question—contemplation of it in isolation or dealings with it in many varied connections. So for a cat to get a distinct controllable percept of a loop, or of its own clawing or nosing or pulling, it must have the capacity to analyze such elements out of the total gross complexes in which they inhere, and also certain means or stimuli to such analysis.

This capacity or tendency the cats and dogs do, in my opinion, possess, though in a far less degree than the average child. They also suffer from lack of stimuli to the exercise of the capacity. Their confinement, for the most part, to the direct sensory experience of things and acts, is due in part to the weakness of the capacity or tendency of their neurones to act in great detail, and in part to the lack of such stimuli as visual exploration of things in detail, manual manipulation of the same thing in many ways, and the identification of elements of objects and acts by language. They get few free ideas because they are less ready than man to get them under the same conditions and because their instinctive behavior and social environment offer conditions that are less favorable. The task of getting an animal to have some free ideational representative of a red loop or of pushing up a button with the nose may be compared with that of getting a very stupid boy to have a free ideational representative of acceleration, or of the act of sounding th. The difference between them and man which is so emphasized in the text, though real and of enormous practical importance, is thus not at all a mysterious gap or trackless desert. We can see our way from animal to human learning.