Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/121

 L. T. HOBHOUSE, Mind in Evolution. 107 term which in the previous stage merely influences action, is now brought explicitly into consciousness." "We may describe the increased complexity by describing this stage as the correlation of relations, the one set being perceptual, the other practical. Both are essentially concrete, that is to say, we deal in this stage not with the relation as such but with two or more related objects of experience." The only point upon which I am not clear in these and some other passages is the statement that the related term is brought explicitly into consciousness. So many passages, like the last above quoted, state with much emphasis that the relations are only implicit in the concrete experience as a whole, and that it is in this sense only that relations can be said to be perceived by animals, that when we are told that their behaviour is in many cases determined by the relation between itself and the end to be gained we may take it that the author's view is that the animal does not make explicit and focal to consciousness the relation as such between means to be employed and end to be attained, and that there is nothing of the nature of intentional correlation. If this justly expresses his opinion I am in complete agreement with the spirit of his interpretation and do not think that anything I have written conflicts in spirit with his own conclusions. Mr. Hobhouse has not been content to rely on second-hand information concerning the behaviour of animals. He has con- ducted careful and well-devised experiments to test the mental capacity of dogs, cats, a seal, an elephant, and two monkeys, a Khesus and a chimpanzee. Did space permit these latter might be profitably compared with those of Dr. Thorndike and Mr. Kinnaman. On the whole, making due allowance for the personal equation, the results of taking the monkey into the psychological laboratory are remarkably concordant. And Mr. Hobhouse would agree with Mr. Kinnaman's statement that : "In these experiments, as in Dr. Thorndike's, there appeared no case that could be in- terpreted as reasoning in the higher senses of that term ". Animal behaviour, when submitted to serious investigation, is thus, so far as present inquiry has enabled us to form an opinion, restricted to the practical and the concrete, and is limited to what Dr. Stout calls the perceptual plane. In this general conclusion there is essential agreement. Differences of opinion very largely centre around the use of terms, and modes of stating the common inter- pretation. Desirous of laying emphasis on the continuity of mental process Mr. Hobhouse, for example, discusses his stages of correlation in terms of the syllogism. The chick on the basis of yesterday's experience infers to-day that the cinnabar caterpillar will, if seized, be nasty, and is therefore to be avoided. " Inference is essentially one function, from the simplest case of the chick, up to the highest elaboration of experience by the human intellect." The first stage of intelligent correlation "is comparable to a syllogism in which