Part 15

Dr. Thorndike lays stress upon the fact that a "cat which, when first put in, took sixty seconds to get out, in the second trial eighty, in the third fifty, in the fourth sixty, in the fifth fifty, in the sixth forty," etc., and remarks: "Suppose the cat had, after the third accidental success, been able to reason? She would then have, the next time and all succeeding times, performed the act as soon as put in." Not long ago the writer and a man whose high intelligence can not be questioned, in moments of relaxation were trying to do one of the familiar ring puzzles--endeavoring to separate a ring from two others of peculiar shape and then to join the three. After repeated trials, one would loosen it, but could not replace it; the other finally succeeded in replacing it, but could not loosen it. Then the one could replace it, but not loosen it; the other loosen, but not replace it, and each was closely watching the other all the time. It was half an hour or more before either could both loosen and replace the ring, occasional successful attempts not being repeated until after several succeeding failures. Contrast the relation of the brain of the dazed and indifferent and peculiarly bedeviled cat to the puzzle presented to it by the inside of the box with the earnest effort of the two men to solve the ring puzzle. Who has not found a task more difficult the fifth or sixth time than the second or third, and has only performed it with ease after repeated attempts of varying degrees of success and failure?

In conclusion, the writer begs leave to relate an incident, which has not before appeared in print, that profoundly impressed him with the belief that at least in one instance one particular animal displayed reason. One Sunday morning, a dozen years or more ago, he was standing on the bank of the Ohio River at the Sewickley Ferry. A family group, accompanied by a large Newfoundland dog, hailed the ferryman and got in his boat, leaving the dog, which persuasively barked and wagged his tail, on the bank. As the boat pulled out into the stream the dog whined, and then made ready to leap in after it. Then he stopped at the water's edge, and, with head down, gazed intently at the river for several seconds--it seemed a minute or more. Then he ran up the bank more than a hundred feet, stopped, looked at the receding boat, plunged into the stream, and swam vigorously. The current, bearing him down, made his course diagonal to the bank. A boy standing by my side said: "Isn't that a smart dog? If he'd been a crazy dog he'd have jumped in where he was, but he ran up the bank so the current wouldn't wash him down away from the boat."

But the dog, swimming with all his vigor, was borne past the boat when within twenty feet or so of it; he endeavored to straighten his course without success, and then, in a long semicircle, swam around to the near bank, landing two or three hundred feet below the place whence the ferryboat had started.

What this dog would have done if placed, utterly hungry, in a box from which he could only liberate himself by stepping on a platform or turning a wooden button, I do not know.

LOGAN G. MCPHERSON. PITTSBURGH, _August 3, 1899._

MR. FREDERIC D. BOND, of 413 South Forty-fourth Street, Philadelphia, writes: Of the accuracy of Dr. Thorndike's experiments I have no doubt, but certain facts connected with them seem to deprive the observations of much of their relevance.

Dr. Thorndike states that he arranged his experiments to give reasoning every chance to display itself, if it existed, and to observe those in which the acts required and the thinking involved were not far removed from the acts and feelings of ordinary animal life. Of these experiments one of the chief was to determine whether and in what way a cat would escape from a box opening by turning a button. Now, I submit that in this and the succeeding experiments the conditions Dr. Thorndike fancied to exist by no means did so. Simple as the release of a door by a button seems to us, the apparent simplicity arises merely from our empirical knowledge of what does happen in such a situation. Actually to think out the rationale of the matter, as an animal having no experience either personally or from heredity would have to do, involves very complex mental processes. The environment of a human being is vastly different from an animal's, though of this fact we constantly lose sight in reasoning; of mechanical appliances and principles, for example, an animal knows nothing, and yet we are too apt to suppose it regarding the world with a store of ancestral and individual experiences utterly foreign to it; and then, on its failing to do what, in the light of such experience, seems to us easy, we proceed to call into question its possession of reason....

That the cats did finally learn to escape shows, according to Dr. Thorndike, "the wearing smooth of a path in the brain, not the decisions of a rational consciousness." May I ask Dr. Thorndike what possible reason could a cat have to suppose that what happened once must needs happen again? Does Dr. Thorndike fancy his own knowledge of a million like matters was acquired by reason, and not empirically elaborated by processes of exactly the same sort as the cats went through? Let this experiment be tried on a healthy infant of two years, and I am of the opinion that the results would be the same as with the cat; yet the infant undoubtedly carries on "thinking processes similar, at least in kind, to our own," which Dr. Thorndike implicitly denies to his cats.

The chief cause of the inability of students to reach concordant results in this matter of animal intelligence appears to lie in a certain uncritical assumption often made. That all consciousnesses have a certain field of presentations, that to this field they attain, that because of it they feel and will, are fundamental facts; but the belief that attention or feeling or will differs per se in different consciousnesses, other than as the field to which they are at the moment related, differs--this is an utterly unwarranted assumption. According to the action of its environment, each conscious being must know the world just so far as is needed to conform its existence thereto, or else it must perish; but whether such knowledge, which is acquired by experience only, be quite small, as with animals, or somewhat larger, as with man, there is no reason to suppose that the attention, feeling, or will of the animal differs in itself from the same psychological state in man.

MR. ANDREW VAN BIBBER, of Cincinnati, Ohio, says: Animals, and especially wild ones, have no bank account or reserve, and have to face new conditions daily, and yet they make a living where man would starve.

When I was out in Colorado and Utah, years ago, I used to know of animals removing the bait nicely from dangerous traps without springing the trap. I knew of a dog who went over a mile to call his owner to the aid of a boy who had broken his leg, and who would not be refused till understood. This is brutish "instinct," is it?--something that Dr. Thorndike can't define. Will "instinct" teach a tired, half-starved horse to eat oats if you set them before him? Dr. Thorndike would say "Yes," but Dr. Thorndike would be wrong unless that horse knew from personal past experience what oats were. What animals learn (like the human animal) they learn chiefly by experience. They accumulate facts in their minds and use them.

I served in the cavalry of the Armies of the Tennessee and the Cumberland, and I know that instinct will not cause a hungry horse to touch oats unless he knows from his own experience what oats are. We used to capture horses in Mississippi which had never seen oats. It is all corn down there. We would bring them into camp tired out and hungry, and would pour out our oats for them. Not one of them would touch the oats. You could leave the hungry horses hitched for twenty-four hours before oats, and not one grain would they touch. They would stand there and starve. We had to throw up their heads and fill their mouths full of oats. If we stopped there, they would spit them out. We had to grab their jaws and work them sideways until they had a good taste. Then they understood, and ate oats right along. Plenty of such horses in Mississippi to-day....

If Dr. Thorndike tried his intelligent "Experiment No. 11" with a two-year-old cat, why didn't he try it with a two-year-old human? I guess he would have found an equal amount of ignorance of the mechanism of door fastenings, which comes only with teaching, and would have produced only struggles and screaming.

THE TREND OF POPULATION IN MAINE.

_Editor Popular Science Monthly:_

SIR: In the article contributed to your magazine for the month of August on Recent Legislation against the Drink Evil, I notice what appears to me to be a misstatement of fact. The writer speaks of the results of prohibition in the State of Maine, and says, "In sixty-three years Maine has seen her commerce disappear and her population dwindle."

I have not investigated the matter of Maine's commerce, but I find that her population has not dwindled in any possible sense of the term during the period indicated above.

It is, perhaps, a common impression that Maine has had such an exodus of her people to other States of the Union that she has suffered a loss in population. What are the real facts of the case? The census taken by the Government in 1840 gave the State 501,000 people, and that taken in 1890, 661,000, which shows, during the interval between 1840 and 1890, an increase of 160,000. The increase in population even during the decade 1880-'90 was 13,000. Whether there has been a decrease since 1890 nobody at present knows, and will not know until the decennial census is taken next year.

In view of these facts, I feel justified in challenging the correctness of the gentleman's statement, quoted above.

There can be no room for doubt that Maine has sustained considerable losses in population from farm desertion, but no statistics can be presented to show that the State has, during the time stated above, been dwindling in the number of people living within her borders.

J. EARLE BROWN. WOONSOCKET, R. I., _August 17, 1899._

Editor's Table.

_EDUCATION AND CHARACTER-BUILDING._

It is many years ago now since Mr. Spencer, in his Study of Sociology, remarked upon the exaggerated hopes commonly built upon education. With the courage that is characteristic of him, he went counter to a current of opinion which was then running with perhaps its maximum force. He said that the belief in the efficacy of education to remold society had taken so strong a hold of the modern world that nothing but disappointment would avail to modify it. This was in the year 1872; since then the disappointment has in a measure come, and many are prepared to accept his views to-day, who, twenty-seven years ago, thought they proceeded from a mind fundamentally out of sympathy with modern progress. Facts indeed are accumulating from year to year to prove the soundness of the philosopher's contention that "cognition does not produce action," and that a great variety of knowledge may be introduced into the mind without in the least inclining the individual to higher modes of conduct.

We are reminded of Mr. Spencer's line of argument by an article lately published in the London Spectator, entitled Influence on the Young. The writer sees clearly that enthusiastic educationists undertake far more than they can perform. "The character forms itself," he says, "assimilating nutriment or detriment, as it were, from the air, which the parents or teachers, for all their pains, can in no way change." There seems indeed to be in the young, he remarks, a distinct tendency to resist influence. Father and son will be opposed in politics; very pious people too often find, to their sorrow, their children growing up far otherwise than they could wish. The man who is very settled in his habits is as like as not to have a boy who can not be persuaded to take a serious view of life. The most unexceptionable home lessons seem to be of no avail against the attractive power of light companions. Evidently, Nature is at work in ways that men can not control. If there is a law of "recoil," as the writer in the Spectator hints, we may be pretty sure it serves some good purpose. It introduces, we can see at once, a diversity which makes for the progress, and perhaps also for the stability, of society. Two practical questions, however, suggest themselves: (1) What can we reasonably hope from education? and (2) What can we do to make a wholesome _milieu_ for the rising generation?

With regard to education, it is evident that we can not know the best it can do until it has been reduced to a science--until, that is to say, as a result of the joint labors of practical educators and psychologists, we can claim to possess a reasonable degree of certainty as to the best arrangement and sequence of studies and the best methods of stimulating the mind and imparting knowledge. Upon these important questions there is still considerable diversity of opinion. Some educators think we should be very sparing of abstractions in the instruction of younger pupils. Others are of a contrary opinion. Professor Baldwin, for example, in his little work on The Mind, says that "grammar is one of the very best of primary-school subjects." He also recommends mathematics. These are questions which, it seems to us, admit of being finally settled. Allowance must of course be made for the varying capacities of individual children, but this need not stand in the way of the establishment of some general doctrine as to the law of development of the human mind. We shall then further require a true theory of method in education, so that we may know by what means the best results in the imparting of knowledge and the development of the capacities of the individual mind may be obtained. Assuming that these vantage points have been gained, education should be for every mind an eminently healthful and invigorating process, which is more than can be said for the forms of education that have prevailed in the past. These, while developing certain faculties, have, to a great extent, stunted others--have indeed, in too many cases, fatally impaired the natural powers of the mind. A notable paper, which appeared in the first number of this magazine, was one by the late Dr. Carpenter on The Artificial Cultivation of Stupidity in Schools. Professor Baldwin, in the work already cited, seems to be of the opinion that the process of cultivating stupidity, or at least mental shiftlessness, is in full blast to-day in many of our secondary schools owing to the prominence given to language studies. The science of education must at least put an end to this, and insure that the youths who are committed to the public schools shall not be subjected to any mind-destroying exercises. We can hope, however, that it will do much more. The mind, like the body, grows by what it feeds upon; and it is hard to conceive that suitable kinds of knowledge could be imparted in a natural manner, so as to awaken interest and develop the perceptive and reasoning powers, without at least preparing the mind for the reception of right sentiments.

So much the science of education, when it is fairly established, may reasonably be expected to do. It will deal with the mind upon true hygienic principles. There remains the more serious question how such a moral atmosphere can be created as will incline the young to take a right view of knowledge and its uses. Knowledge, it is hardly necessary to say, is power, just as money is power; and it is quite as needful that the idea of social service should be associated with the one as with the other. The best social service which, perhaps, any man can render is to give to the world the example of high disinterestedness and general nobility of character; and knowledge should be valued not as conferring individual distinction, but according as it expands and liberalizes the mind. The poet Coleridge has said with some truth that

"Fancy is the power That first unsensualizes the dark mind, Giving it new delights; and bids it swell With wild activity; and peopling air, By obscure fears of beings invisible, Emancipates it from the grosser thrall Of the present impulse, teaching self-control, Till Superstition with unconscious hand Seat Reason on her throne."

The mind having been "unsensualized," the next step is to moralize and humanize it, otherwise Reason on her throne may act not much more wisely than other monarchs have done. The classic example of the worship of reason is not reassuring as to the infallibility of the goddess. The question, then, as to how intellectual education and the education of the moral sentiments may go hand in hand is one that comes home to every member of the community. We all help to make the moral atmosphere and create the moral ideals of our time; and there is no use in looking for high standards in our colleges and other institutions of learning if we have low standards in our homes. The youth who hears nothing talked of at home but money is not likely to take much interest in instruction that does not bear directly on the question of making money. The youth who hears money spoken of in the home circle simply as a means of personal enjoyment and glorification will need something more than a few lectures on political or social economy to make him take a different view of it. We may employ excellent men and women as teachers, but their success from a moral point of view will always be limited by the general tone of the community.

It is evident, then, that no very special directions can be given for solving the problem with which we are concerned. Still, the posing of the problem and the indication of the conditions on which its solution depends may awaken in a few minds a new sense of their responsibility in the matter, and it is a gain for even one to go over to the right side. It would be quite as easy for _the whole_ of society to live on a somewhat higher plane as it is for it to live on its present plane. It would simply mean that the average man would treat the average man a little better than he does now: whatever one gave he would thus get in return, and the burdens which are always associated with mutual distrust would be proportionately lightened.

The philosopher whom we began by quoting has indicated ways in which the craze for legislative shortcuts is working against the moral improvement of society. He holds that parental responsibility has been seriously impaired by legislative encroachments in the matter of education and otherwise. Book learning has become to the modern world a kind of fetich; and minds that ought to be in contact with the facts of life are stupefied, and so far prevented from getting their normal moral growth by being drilled in studies that bring no real profit. We can not bear the idea that one of our human brethren should not be able to read and write; but, provided he possesses these accomplishments, we ask no questions as to what use he makes of them. We have before us a police description of a criminal who graduated at one of the most celebrated universities on the Continent, who studied afterward for the Church, who was for several years an elder, and who possesses--so we are distinctly informed--fine literary tastes. The gentleman with all these advantages is a fugitive from justice. With all his knowledge and accomplishments he got no hold of the principles of right conduct, and--there are not a few like him. We need not only a science of education, but a science of government, the most valuable part of which will probably be that which shows us with demonstrative force what things government ought to leave alone. It is quite possible we should find the moral atmosphere materially improving if only the natural reactions between the individual and his environment were not interfered with. The course of Nature, we may feel assured, provides not less for moral than for mental growth, and if either process is defectively carried on we may safely attribute it to some ill-advised attempt we are making to improve on natural institutions. Science has done much for the world in the past, but it has yet to do much more. It will yet give us a light to our feet in matters educational and political, and will liberate us from many of the yokes and trammels we have foolishly imposed upon ourselves. Mankind will then look into the face of Nature and see in it a new beneficence and brighter promises for the future of the race.

_THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION AT COLUMBUS._