Animal Behaviour

by C. Lloyd Morgan

We have already drawn attention to the fact that mere sentience, if it exists, has no power of guidance over organic behaviour; but consciousness, when it emerges, is a concomitant of nervous processes which determine the nature and direction of such nerve-changes as are the antecedents of intelligent behaviour. The steps by which this control is established are unknown. It is, indeed, probable that conscious guidance arises as an accompaniment of the differentiation of controlling centres from the automatic centres of the nervous system; but of how this takes place we are as ignorant as we are of many other differentiations in the course of embryological development and evolutional progress. Of those nervous arrangements within the brain which are the physiological concomitants of the far later mental processes of reflection, abstraction, generalization, and the formation of ideals, we are, if it be possible, even yet more profoundly ignorant. Nor would it serve any good purpose to indulge in speculation where there are not even the data to enable us so much as to hazard a probable guess. The utmost we are justified in attempting is to show how organic behaviour leads up to and affords the requisite data for the exercise of intelligence, and how both supply the necessary preliminary stages in the development and evolution of what, following Dr. Stout, we have termed ideational process. This we have endeavoured to do in preceding pages; and all that is now required is to conclude our inquiry with a brief summary by which the results, as affording some basis for evolutional continuity, may be focussed.

We regard reflex action and instinctive behaviour, broadly considered, as genetically prior to that which is intelligent. Their development in the individual and their evolution in the race are reached by the differentiation and integration of nerve-centres. In the abdominal region of the crayfish, for example, special centres are differentiated for the behaviour of each pair of swimmerets; but these are so integrated that the whole series of like abdominal appendages swing rhythmically with co-ordinated movements. Now, when a sensorium is developed, it does not have to group by an act of conscious selection and deliberate arrangement the multiplicity of scattered sensory data which it receives; it does not have to organize from diverse and hitherto unrelated elements some sort of system in experience: it receives them as a physiological heritage already grouped, and to some extent organized. Stimulus and response are organically linked; and within the response inherited co-ordinations, often exceedingly complex, afford a correlated group of sensory data. Just in so far as organic heredity has provided a working system of bodily parts, does consciousness receive systematic information of their orderly working. No doubt it is true that the development and evolution of the sensorium proceeds pari passu with the development and evolution of reflex actions compounded and co-ordinated to give rise to instinctive behaviour. No doubt the progress of the one is in close touch and relation with the progress of the other; for such relation receives the emphatic sanction of utility. Still it is none the less true that in individual development, as in racial evolution, the organic takes the lead. What is intelligently acquired is something added to that which has been engrained, through natural selection or otherwise, as a potentiality of the germinal substance. What we have first to note, then, is that organic evolution provides ready-grouped data to consciousness.

The second point is, that the germs of abstraction and generalization, or rather processes which are the precursors of abstraction and generalization, arise, and cannot fail to arise, in the genesis of experience from the performance of inherited responses, and from the coalescence of their results into a conscious situation. To a quite young chick I gave pieces of yellow orange peel, which were found to be distasteful and rejected. In Dr. Stout’s phraseology, they acquired meaning in experience. Can one doubt that the colour and taste were thus rendered predominant, and that the shape, size, and other qualities of the bits of orange peel remained practically unnoticed? Shortly afterwards the chick was given chopped and crumbled egg; the fragments of “white” were eaten, but the bits of hard-boiled yolk were untouched. They possessed a sufficient general resemblance to the orange peel to carry the same meaning. In many ways particular qualities of objects are emphasized in so far as they incite to behaviour; they form centres of biological interest, just as the abstract quality of ideational thought is the centre of rational interest on a higher plane of mental development. And in many ways objects presenting certain salient features in common, amid differences which remain unnoticed, are unconsciously grouped as the starting-points of similar perceptual situations, just as in the generalization of ideational thought similar relationships are deliberately grouped as the starting-points of like conceptual situations. Both are purposive and have an end, which we as investigators are able to assign; but only for reflection and conceptual thought are they also purposeful—the end being foreseen and realized, not only by the investigators, but by the agent concerned. And the purpose or end itself is in the two cases different. In the one case it is the biological end of practical behaviour; in the other case it is the rational end of explanation—abstraction and generalization being deliberately used as a means to this latter end. The question has again and again been asked: Do animals reason? And different answers are given by those who are substantially in agreement as to the facts and their interpretation, but are not in agreement as to their use of the word “reason.” Perhaps, if the question assume the form—Are animals capable of explaining their own acts and the causes of phenomena?—the position of those who find the evidence of their doing so insufficient may be placed in a clearer light. This is what is generally meant by the statement that animals have probably not reached the level of rational beings.

But even if they have not reached this level, their perceptual processes supply the antecedent conditions which are necessary if this level is to be attained in the course of further evolution. We have seen that, even in relatively simple cases, where conscious situations mark only the beginnings of intelligence, there is a biological emphasis of some, rather than others, among what we call the qualities of objects, and there is a grouping, on biological grounds, of certain things which have some quality in common—such, for example, as being fit for food. Here we have at the outset of perceptual development the germs of processes which are the precursors of the abstraction and generalization of ideational thought. And in the more complex conscious situations of the higher animals these processes attain to such degree of development as is necessary to secure more difficult and more remote biological ends, until all that is necessary, for their rational use, is the quickening touch of a new purpose, that of explanation.

We have seen that, through what Dr. Stout terms “manipulation,” and Professor Groos “experimentation”—names applied to a type of behaviour widely exemplified among the higher animals,—things, as the nuclei of conscious situations, become differentiated from the environment. One can hardly question that a fly to the trout, a ball to the kitten, a bone to the puppy are things distinguished from their surroundings, and that they become marked off as special centres of interest. Here on the perceptual plane is a process which is the antecedent of the conception of quasi-independent objects on the ideational plane. For rational thought the thing, as object, is not only the centre of a practical situation leading to behaviour of direct or indirect biological value, but is the nucleus around which we build all the qualities which are ascertained by more elaborate manipulation and experimentation carried out deliberately and of set purpose for rational ends. It becomes capable of definition with the aim of explaining what are its characteristics as an object.

There can be little doubt that the higher animals become intimately and practically acquainted with their environment. The dog who accompanies his master in many a ramble, the horse who carries him again and again over all the surrounding country, has a good perceptual knowledge of a somewhat extended environment. And this, again, is the precursor of the far more extended conceptual knowledge which leads up at last to a rational conception of the universe of objects in their varied relationships. But only through the concentration of thought rendered possible by much true abstraction and generalization,—only through disentangling the relationships and regrouping them for the purpose of framing an ideal scheme,—only, in short, by explanation and for the sake of explanation is this difficult process brought to a more or less successful issue.

Again, there can be little doubt that the higher animals, in the course of experience begotten of behaviour, reach a perceptual sensing of the bodily self, through experience derived from the non-projecting senses, in pain and sickness, and often, we may hope, in the sense of well-being, and the joy of existence. They do not probably set this self in antithesis to the not-self. That comes with reflection, and is the result of ideal construction based on the analysis of experience, with a view to reaching some explanation of the genesis of experience. But in their perceptual awareness of the embodied self, they have that kind of consciousness which affords the necessary data, for the later conception of the self—when experience is polarized into its subjective and objective aspects and thus is explained, so far as science can explain it; suggesting, indeed, long ere science has attained this end, metaphysical explanations by reference to underlying causes—too often accepted as an easy substitute for the difficult tracing out of the antecedent conditions which science endeavours painfully and by slow steps to formulate.

It is unnecessary to do more than remind the reader that we have found that such processes as attention and imitation pass through instinctive and intelligent stages which are the precursors of the ideational stage, where they reach a higher expression as deliberately conscious acts. In the young bird that instinctively pecks at some small, perhaps moving, thing, which forms the starting point of a piece of responsive behaviour, we have attention in the germ. When experience has caused the thing to acquire meaning, attention passes into a succeeding intelligent phase; but only when we desire to explain this meaning, and attention thus has a deliberate purpose, do we find it entering upon its higher ideational career. So, too, as we have seen, imitation is at first a specialized form of instinctive behaviour, where the response is seen to resemble that which stimulates it. Later it becomes intelligent when the repetition of the imitative behaviour is due to the satisfaction it introduces into the conscious situation. Then, at last, it reaches the ideational stage, where reflection gives rise to an ideal, which is to be realized in conduct. The imitation by the child of its older companions is at first probably intelligent; but when the child begins to consider why it imitates these and not those among its companions, he is passing to the ideal stage, and imitation becomes the sincerest form of hero-worship. The boy who merely imitates his elder brothers playing at soldiers because he gets satisfaction from so doing, becomes the subaltern who has his ideal soldier, and will face death firmly rather than fall below his conception of how such a soldier should behave.

We need not again attempt to indicate how among animals we have the perceptual precursors of the æsthetic and ethical concepts. But we may remind the reader that we endeavoured to show that intercommunication had its foundation in instinctive sounds; and that it passed into the intelligent stage in the perceptual life, when these sounds acquired meaning, and hence became guides to behaviour. This is especially instructive from our present standpoint, since it is probable that the passage of communication from the indicating to the descriptive stage afforded the conditions under which rational thought was evolved. For such thought it is essential that attention should be focussed on the relationships of things. And no description is possible without making distinctly present to consciousness these relationships, in time and space, the data for which are abundantly present in the perceptual life, though lurking in the background, and needing something to fix them and to aid consciousness in distinguishing them clearly. In descriptive communication parts of speech, or their initial equivalents, afford fixation points for these relationships, and serve to render them distinct. If the reader will try to describe even the simplest occurrence without introducing the symbols for the relations which the events bear to each other, his failure will serve to bring home how essential a feature this is. In social communication, then, we probably have the key to the passage from perceptual to ideational process; and in this passage description is the antecedent of, and affords the conditions to, explanation. Words, moreover, as we have already said, form the pegs upon which we can hang up, for ready reference, the products of abstraction and generalization, or, to modify the analogy, they form the bodies of which these products are the rational soul.