Animal Behaviour

by C. Lloyd Morgan

“In smaller and livelier animals, with greater celerity and certitude in their motions, the feeling shows itself in more regular and often in more complex ways. Thus Felidæ, when young, and in very agile sprightly species, like the puma, throughout life, simulate all the actions of an animal hunting its prey—sudden, intense excitement of discovery, concealment, gradual advance, masked by intervening objects, with intervals of watching, when they crouch motionless, the eyes flashing and tail waved from side to side; finally, the rush and spring, when the playfellow is captured, rolled over on his back, and worried to imaginary death. Other species of the most diverse kinds, in which voice is greatly developed, join in noisy concerts and choruses; many of the cats may be mentioned, also dogs and foxes, capybaras and other loquacious rodents; and in the howling monkeys this kind of performance rises to the sublime uproar of the tropical forest at eventide.

“Birds are more subject to this universal joyous instinct than mammals, and there are times when some species are constantly overflowing with it; and as they are so much freer than mammals, more buoyant and graceful in action, more loquacious, and have voices so much finer, their gladness shows itself in a greater variety of ways, with more regular and beautiful motions, and with melody. But every species or group of species has its own inherited form or style of performance; and however rude and irregular this may be, as in the case of the pretended stampedes and fights of wild cattle, that is the form in which the feeling will always be expressed.”

That all this, which Mr. Hudson so graphically describes, belongs to the psychological aspect of animal behaviour and is directly prompted by conative tendencies whose immediate end is conscious satisfaction, the mere joy of unrestrained and healthy activity, may be freely admitted, without denying that all this exuberant psychical life owes its evolution to the fact that it is in consonance with and supplemental to biological ends which secure survival. It is with animals as it is with man; play is the preparation for earnest. As I have elsewhere said,[201] what our national games have done for the English race it is difficult to overestimate. They train us to use our bodies and expend our energies to the best advantage. An old soldier, watching a football match, said, “That’s the training for our future soldiers and sailors.” The playing fields are the finest school of organized co-operation in the world. But, apart from compulsion, a boy will not enter into the game with that zest through which alone it acquires real value for training, unless there be an immediate psychological end in the satisfaction he derives. And with animals practice and preparation for the business of life could not occur if the ultimate biological purpose of it all were not supplemented by the enjoyment it brings for its own sake.

But in animal play, as indeed in that of human youth, we are perhaps a little apt, in laying stress on the bodily skill and readiness of response to which it so effectually ministers, to forget that it is also a psychological training. In technical phraseology, we are disposed to fix our attention on the acquired co-ordination of act and movement rather than on the correlation of conscious data, which renders possible the skilful performance. And yet, rightly considered, the behaviour itself is simply the outcome of a conscious situation, duly elaborated, and knit together through the association and coalescence of its constituent data. It is a means to the unification of consciousness by bringing into relation scattered and, at first, quasi-independent sensory and emotional elements. Success is only attained through the concentration of attention and effort on that which is the centre of interest and also the focus of endeavour. And this close attention and well-directed effort, which are trained in the playful output of energy, are just the mental qualities which will stand the animal in good stead when the real incidence of life’s struggle comes upon it, when the reward of success is survival and the penalty of failure elimination. For they are not merely physical qualities, though their effects are bodily movements of attack and defence, of active escape, or merely “lying low.” They are essential psychological features of a unified and well-directed conative process.

In the fairly abundant play-time of animal life, this unification and direction of conative process can take form under conditions wherein the preliminary failures which accompany all forms of learning do not entail the severe penalty of elimination. If we may so put it, and so apply a deeply instructive parable, Natural Selection says to her more favoured children, in which conscious situations can be developed, “Here are the talents with which I have endowed you; make use of them till I come, as come I shall in due time.” This animal puts them out to usury in play; that animal keeps them laid up in the napkin of inactivity. Then Natural Selection, the austere one, comes; gives the commendation of survival to the animal that had learnt to put its talents to use in the period of preparation, and condemns to elimination that which had not traded with his talents at the bank of play. In animal life, on the perceptual plane, we have the same need for training in little things and seemingly unimportant matters in preparation for the stress and storm which may, nay must, come upon them, that we find in men and women on the higher ethical plane. To those who think that the play of animals is too trifling a thing to affect the question of survival, we would suggest the application, with a necessary difference, of the thought which Miss Edith Simcox puts into the following words: “Does it,” she says, “seem a trifling thing to say that in the hours of passionate trial and temptation a man can have no better help than his own past? Every generous feeling that has not been crushed, every wholesome impulse that has been followed, every just perception, every habit of unselfish action, will be present in the background to guide or to sustain. It is too late, when the storm has burst, to provide our craft with rigging fit to weather it; but we may find a purpose for the years that oppress us by their dull calm, if we elect to spend them in laying up stores of strength and wisdom and emotional prejudices of a goodly human kind, whereby, if need arises, we may be able to resist hereafter the gusts of passion that might else bear us out of the straightforward course.” To apply the thought, the trifles of play supply the psychological rigging which alone can save the animal craft in the coming storm of the struggle for existence. And the point on which we have to lay special stress in this section is, that it is psychological rigging—or, if this seems to lay too much emphasis on the genesis of conscious situations, we may at least urge that the psychological ropes are of co-ordinate importance with the biological spars.

So far, then, we reach the following conclusion: that if we classify the behaviour of the higher and more intelligent animals under two heads, the one comprising all those acts which are of direct biological value in enabling the animal to escape elimination under the immediate stress of the struggle for existence, and the other including all those acts which are of indirect preparatory or educative value, the latter, which are under their biological aspect not less important than the former, are under their psychological aspect of perhaps even greater importance. For the conditions of actual struggle are not those under which mental development could most easily be furthered, though they are those in which it is most effectually tested. Hence, the more intelligent animals pass through a period during which they are more or less shielded from the incidence of natural selection by their parents, and this is the period of play and of psychological education. And the tendency to play is so far organic, in that it is dependent on inherited instinctive propensities, and so far psychological in that it is accompanied by a felt want, which constitutes a conative impulse finding its appropriate end in the consciousness of satisfaction. But play—if we accept the term as the group-name for all these modes of behaviour which fall under our second class, those of indirect biological value—does not cease with the period of youth; it occupies all the intervals in the more serious business of animal life. And no discussion of animal behaviour can be adequate which does not assign to this class its due place, alike in biological and in psychological evolution.

The whole value of experience lies in the linkage and coalescence of the data afforded to consciousness. It is true that an inherited nervous system supplies the organic conditions of that physiological linkage and functional coalescence of which experience is the psychological expression. It is true that this physical integration secures a ready-made grouping of the conscious data which are the concomitants of orderly molecular changes in the brain or analogous sensorium. Still, it also remains true that the value of experience lies in the further linkage and coalescence that is acquired by the individual in the course of what we may fitly call its education. Every step in this education gets its psychological sanction through the satisfaction it affords in consciousness; and the time of acquisition is not during the stress of examination in the actual struggle for existence, but rather in the youthful period and in the subsequent intervals of preparation and practice during the play-time of animal life.

The examination analogy—if, indeed, it may not be rightly regarded as something more than an analogy—may be pressed a little further as a means of fixing our attention on two points which are worthy of consideration. The first is that, in the preparation for the examination, specific practice as much of it is, cramming is not the system exemplified by the higher animals. A good all-round education in the acquisition of conscious situations more or less coalescent into a unified system of experience, and in their effective utilization without unnecessary delay and bungling along more or less converging lines of practical behaviour; this is what secures a “pass” in survival, especially where the circumstances of life have reached a considerable degree of complexity. The instinctive act, with its relatively definite response to a question which is almost certain to be set to every candidate for survival, is that, which is the analogue in behaviour to the result of a system of cram. Organic nature does employ this system in the lower classes of her school; definite responses are ground into merely instinctive types generation after generation, and the right answers are given, automatically and unintelligently, whenever the oft-recurrent questions are set. But this will not do when the questions require the exercise of intelligence, when they are of the nature of problems, with just those delicate but not unimportant shades of difference which baffle the candidate who has been drilled in a merely mechanical fashion. Hence the cramming of instinct does not suffice for animals whose environment presents problems of greater variety and greater complexity. Intelligence is required to meet the particular combinations as they arise. The greyhound, which is loosed on a hare, has never seen that hare run in exactly that way over that special tract of country. But he has been trained in such situations, and is thus prepared to meet the special problem in its details as they present themselves in the light of the experience he has gained of other like problems. And his skill in pursuit has not only been gained through education in coursing. In a thousand ways, as puppy and dog, he has learnt how to use well those sinewy limbs. The training of his whole life is brought to bear on the question immediately before him.