Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/289

Rh form. But if wc take human beings at from 6 months to 3 years of age or later, we find plenty of traits that appear in the monkeys. In fact the human instinct which is perhaps of prime importance in human mentality, the instinct which perhaps is the real cause of many of our most boasted powers, has its clear prototype and homologue in the monkey. I refer to the instinctive enjoyment of physical and mental activity in general, to the tendencies to act and feel as much as possible, regardless of any ulterior practical considerations, which we sometimes call destructiveness or constructiveness and curiosity.

Even the casual observer, if he has any psychological insight, will be struck by the general, aimless, intrinsically valuable (to the animal's feelings) physical activities of a monkey compared with the specialized, definitely aroused, utilitarian activities of a dog or cat. Watch the latter and he does but few things, does them in response to obvious sense presentations, does them with practical consequences of food, sex-indulgence, preparation for adult battles, etc. If nothing that appeals to his special organization comes up, he does nothing. Watch a monkey and you cannot enumerate the things he does, cannot discover the stimuli to which he reacts, cannot conceive the raison d'être of his pursuits. Everything appeals to him. He likes to be active for the sake of activity.

The observer who has proper opportunities and takes proper pains will find this intrinsic interest to hold true of mental activity as well. No. 1 happened to hit a projecting wire so as to make it vibrate. He repeated this act hundreds of times in the few days following. He could not eat, make love to or get preliminary practise for the serious battles of life out of that sound. But it did give him mental food, mental exercise. Monkeys seem to enjoy strange places; they revel, if I may be permitted an anthropomorphism, in novel objects. They like to have feelings as they do to make movements. The fact of mental life is to them its own reward.

Finally in their method of learning, although monkeys do not reach the human stage of a rich life of ideas, yet they carry the animal method of learning by the selection of impulses and association of them with different sense impressions, to a point beyond that reached by any other of the lower animals. In this, too,they resemble man; for he differs from the lower animals not only in the possession of a new sort of intelligence but also in the tremendous extension of that sort which he has in common with them. A fish learns slowly a few simple habits. Man learns quickly an infinitude of habits that may be highly complex. Dogs and cats learn more than the fish, while monkeys learn more than they. In the number of things he learns, the complex habits he can form, the variety of lines along which he can learn them, and in their permanence when once formed, the monkey justifies his inclusion with man in a separate mental genus.