"4. Movements calculated either to approach the body and seize it or to flee from it."
But when we have got thus far, we are brought up by the following sentence: "We are not in a position to determine whether these various acts are accompanied by consciousness, or whether they follow as simple physiological processes." Since, therefore, the fear, memory, instinct, perception, and choice, spoken of by M. Binet, may be merely physiological processes (though, of course, they may be accompanied by some dim unimaginable form of consciousness), it seems scarcely necessary to say more about them here.
I have now said all that is necessary, and all that I think justified by the modest scope of this work, concerning the process of construction in animals, and the nature of the constructs we may presume that they form. The process I hold to be similar in kind throughout the animal kingdom wherever we may presume that it occurs at all. But the products of the process seem to me to be presumably widely different. If we steadily bear in mind the fact that the world of man is a joint product of an external existence and the human mind, and then ask whether it is conceivable that the joint products of this external existence and the dog-mind, the bird-mind, the fish-mind, the bee-mind, or the worm-mind are exactly or even closely similar, we must, it seems to me, answer the question with an emphatic negative.
We will now consider the nature of the inferences of animals. It will be remembered that a distinction was drawn between perceptual inferences and inferences involving a conceptual element. As I use the words, perceptual inferences are a matter, at most, of intelligence; but conceptual inferences involve the higher faculty of reason.
It will be necessary here to say somewhat more than I have already said concerning inference. When I see an orange, that object is mentally constructed at the bidding of certain sight-sensations. All that is actually received is the stimulus of the retinal elements; the rest is suggested and supplied by the activity of the mind. It is sometimes said that this complementary part of the perception is inferred. So, too, when I hear a howl in the street which suggests the construct dog, it may be said that I infer the presence of the dog. And again, when the dog is perceived to be in pain, it may be said that this is an inference. Now, although the use of the word "inference" to denote the complementary part of a percept seems a little contrary to ordinary usage, still there are some advantages in so—with due qualification—employing it. But since, as it seems to me, the characteristic of the inference, if so we style it, in the formation of constructs by immediate association is its unconscious nature (i.e. unconscious as a process) we may perhaps best meet the case by speaking of these as unconscious inferences. When the inference is not immediate and unconscious, but involves a more individual conscious act of the mind in the perceptual sphere, we may speak of it as intelligent; and when the inference can only be reached by analysis and the use of concepts, we may call it rational.
Defining, therefore, "inference" as the passing of the mind from something immediately given to something not given but suggested through association and experience, we have thus three stages of inference: (1) unconscious inference on immediate construction (perceptual); (2) intelligent inference, dealing with constructs and reconstructs (perceptual); and (3) rational inference, implying analysis and isolation (conceptual).
Concerning unconscious inferences in animals, I need add nothing to that which I have already said concerning the process of construction. It is concerning the intelligent inferences[GU] of animals that I have now to speak.
I do not propose here to bring forward a number of new observations on the highly intelligent actions which animals are capable of performing. Mr. Romanes has given us a most valuable collection of anecdotes on the subject in his volume on "Animal Intelligence." It is more to my purpose to discuss some of the more remarkable of these, and endeavour to get at the back of them, so as to estimate what are the mental processes involved. In doing so, the principle I adopt is to assume that the inferences are perceptual, unless there seem to be well-observed facts which necessitate the analysis of the phenomena, the formation of isolates, and therefore the employment of reason (as I have above defined it). In doing this, I shall seem to differ very widely from Mr. Romanes and other interpreters of animal habits and intelligence. But I believe that the divergence is less wide than it seems. I believe that it is largely, but I fear not entirely, a question of the terms we employ.