The Conception of the Animal Mind

Higher Mental Faculties.

The grasping of the objective inner relationship between two things is a performance superior to instinctive action. Such a capacity has been proved for anthro poids, lower apes, dogs, white rats and fowls. We may accord ingly assume that the faculty is present generally in higher mam mals and in birds. Fowls were trained to pick corn grains from one of two grey papers of different tints, for instance from the lighter of the two. Then the two papers were replaced by another pair. Of these the grey paper to which the birds had previously been trained was now the darker of the two. The fowls went by preference to the now lighter paper. They behaved in the same way with any other arrangement of pairs of papers chosen out of the four used. There is then a relative but no absolute knowledge. The same kind of relative appreciation regarding pairs of grey pa pers has been shown to exist in lower apes and in a pointer dog. In the case of the rats two spaces were lit to different intensities. One of these two was the place in which they were fed. Kohler's chim panzees were offered two boxes distinguished by having front boards of different sizes. One of these, for instance that with the larger front board, contained food. After the animals had learnt to go to the right box, other pairs of front boards were put in. The animals always chose that which was the bigger at the moment, without regard to the absolute size. In all these cases, a comprehension of relation, a transposition, occurs just as when we recognize a tune even when it is transposed into another key.

Until lately no psychological explanation had been suggested for this faculty. The Kohler-Wertheim theory of Gestalt (form) which has been developed in the last decade and was first applied in human psychology appears to fill this gap. For it relates as much to the physiological as to the psychological side of the phenomenon. Our perceptions are not simple summations or additive configurations of sensations, composed of separate elementary sensations. Rather the sensory impressions make themselves felt to us as specific, rigid, unified impressions of the whole situation. These are more than the sum of the parts. Rather they are spatial forms, melodies or intellectual associa tions (Gestalten). According to the theory in question these Gestalten can be transposed. The physiological processes which form the basis of the phenomena or experiences of Gestalten themselves participate in the character of these phenomena. And Kohler has actually attempted to show that in physics there exists a non-additive, super-geometrical form arrangement which may have a real meaning. The physiological occurrences, according to the Gestalt theory, have themselves the properties of a Gestalt.

Finally the highest accomplishment of animals, the capacity to abstract, has been demonstrated in anthropoids. Nadie Kohts first showed a chimpanzee a number of bone disks of various colours and shapes. Then she succeeded in getting the animal to choose these particular disks out of a heap containing others as well. The chimpanzee succeeded further in solving an even more difficult problem. A hemispherical bowl of a certain colour was shown to it and then the ape chose out of the collection of vari ously coloured bone disks a disk having the identical colour of the bowl. The animal abstracted the idea of the colour from the very different shapes of the two coloured objects. It considered the colour alone. It was due likewise to such a faculty of abstracting that the Teneriffe chimpanzees were able to drag in a fruit lying out of arm's reach by using all sorts of objects without regard to their shapes, as if they were sticks. Possibly the Gestalt theory

might provide a physiological explanation, at least in principle, for this most complex behaviour. Yerkes has corroborated the pres ence of this faculty by quite other methods.

Whether or not animals have ideas or conception is still most debatable. If a dog or a cat makes no effort to reach its food from the moment when the food is removed from its sight, it may well be concluded that these animals have no memory-image of what they have just seen. In spite of the highly perfected training performances of many higher animals, there is no reason why independent ideas should necessarily be associated with the accom panying memory processes. The observed behaviour can well be explained by the associated coupling of the sensory impressions with inborn instincts, or body movements which have become habit through practice. Up to now, it is impossible to decide whether in animals, as in ourselves, a conscious separation of im mediate and reproduced sensory impressions exists, or if such is at least foreshadowed. The anthropoid apes form an exception once more. Their "insight," the fact that they make "discoveries," would appear to be explicable only on the assumption that they are gifted with objective conceptions. Kohler is of the opinion that the higher animals know "separate things," and not only diffuse "experience complexes." He points to the enormous im portance of the "comprehension of meaning" for the formation of concepts, for an insight into the "meaning" of the connection be tween events. "To be able to see things in the surrounding world, it is necessary for an animal to have experience of the meaning, of the structure, of that part of its surroundings." (Koffka.) The mental life of human beings has both an objective and a subjective side. The objective side of consciousness includes per ception, sensation and conception, or in short all that is con nected with the outside world surrounding us. The subjective side, on the other hand, concerns that part of our inner lives which belongs to us alone, our real interior world, or in other words emotions and the phenomena of will. The importance of the emo tions in the whole mental life is so great that many psychol ogists see in them the basis of all mental phenomena. But what is the state of affairs in animals? S. J. Holmes regards pleasure and displeasure as the most powerful factors regulating the conduct of animals. Whilst in dealing with the objective side of the animal mind we were obliged to resort to analogies with our own mental experiences in order to attempt to form a picture of this part of a possible inner life of animals, we are even worse off in regard to their feelings. Objectively the mind cannot be experienced. How then is it possible to arrive at the innermost emotions of animals? Here, too, we are obliged to depend on our only means of study of the animal mind, namely analogy, which unfortunately is very uncertain. In the animals most nearly related to ourselves we observe behaviour which coincides closely with certain expressions of our own inner life. This is so convincing that the objection that the mode of procedure is questionable might easily be over ridden. It becomes difficult for our emotions to refuse to accept these connecting links. Yet even with the mammals our confi dence in the analogy is shaken. In the remaining vertebrates, and more particularly in the invertebrates, which are so differently constituted from ourselves, this convenient tool must be foregone.