and in the long run 2 will happen one third as often as 1 or 3 and, though always successful, must, by Smith’s theory, appear later and later, so that if the animal meets the situation often enough, he will eventually fail utterly in it!

Animals do, as a matter of fact, commonly repeat responses many times before changing them,[44] so that if only the law of exercise operated, learning would not be adaptive. It is the effect of 2 that gives it the advantage over 1 and 3. Of two responses to the same annoying situation, one continuing and the other relieving it, an animal could never learn to adopt the latter as a result of the law of exercise alone, if the former was, originally, twice as likely to occur. 1 1 2 would occur as often as 2 and exercise would be equal for both. The convincing cases are, of course, those where learning equals the strengthening to supremacy of an originally very weak connection and the weakening of originally strong bonds. An animal’s original nature may lead it to behave as shown below:—

and yet the animal’s eventual behavior may be to react to the situation always by 2. The law of effect is primary, irreducible to the law of exercise.

The Evolution of Behavior

The acceptance of the laws of exercise and effect as adequate accounts of learning would make notable differences in the treatment of all problems that concern learning. I shall take, to illustrate this, the problem of the development of intellect and character in the animal series, the phylogenesis of intellectual and moral behavior.

The difficulties in the way of understanding the evolution of intellectual and moral behavior have been that neither what had been evolved nor that from which it had been evolved was understood.

The behavior of the higher animals, especially man, was thought to be a product of impulses and ideas which got into the mind in various ways and had power to arouse certain acts and other ideas more or less mysteriously, in the manner described by the laws of ideo-motor action, attention, association by contiguity, association by similarity, suggestion, imitation, dynamo-genesis and the like, with possibly a surplus of acts and ideas due to ‘free will.’ The mind was treated as a crucible in which a multifarious solution of ideas, impulses and automatisms boiled away, giving off, as a consequence of a subtle chemistry, an abundance of thoughts and movements. Human behavior was rarely viewed from without as a series of responses bound in various ways to a series of situations. The student of animal behavior passed as quickly as might be from such mere externals to the inner life of the creature, making it his chief interest to decide whether it had percepts, memories, concepts, abstractions, ideas of right and wrong, choices, a self, a conscience, a sense of beauty. The facts in intellect and character that are due to learning, that are not the inherited property of the species and that consequently are beyond the scope of evolution in the race, were not separated off from the facts of original nature. The comparative psychologist misspent his energy on such problems as the phylogenesis of the idea of self, moral judgments, or the sentiment of filial affection.

At the other extreme, the behavior of the protozoa was either contemplated in the light of futile analogies,—for instance, between discriminative reactions and conscious choice, and between inherited instincts and memory,—or studied crudely in its results without observation of what the animals really did. The protozoa were regarded either as potential ‘conscious selves’ or as drifting lumps turned hither and thither by the direct effects of light, heat, gravity and chemical forces upon their tissues.