As at present advised, therefore, I see no reason for withdrawing from the position provisionally taken up. The utilization of chance experience, without the framing and application of an organized scheme of knowledge, appears to be the predominant method of animal intelligence.
On this view, then, we may see in instinctive behaviour, and the multifarious automatic acts of animals, a means of providing experience of the right kind and on profitable lines. We may see in the play-instincts of the young a training ground for the more serious business of animal life--a theme developed by Professor Groos. We may see in the imitative tendency--the innate proclivity to follow a lead blindly and at first unintelligently--a further means of providing those useful items of experience which intelligence finds so serviceable. And we may see in the intelligence which can profit by chance occurrences that arise in these several ways all that suffices for the simple needs of animal existence.
With some differences of opinion Dr. Thorndike and I have much in common in the conclusions to which we have been independently led as to the method and limits of animal intelligence. We seem to be in essential agreement in the belief that the method of animal intelligence is to profit by chance experience without rational foresight, and that unless such experience be individually acquired, the data essential for intelligent progress are absent. While in our attempts to realize the general nature of animal consciousness there is a close similarity of treatment. In my “Introduction to Comparative Psychology” a good deal of space is devoted to an analysis of the psychology of skill “in order that we may infer what takes place in the minds of animals;” and I said:--“When I am playing a hard game of tennis, or when I am sailing a yacht close to the wind in a choppy sea, self does not at all tend to become focal. Hence, though I am a self-conscious being I am not always self-conscious. And presumably when I am least self-conscious, I am nearest the condition of the animal at the stage of mere sense experience. I am exhilarated with the sense of pleasurable existence, my whole being tingles with sentient life. I sense, or am aware of, my own life and consciousness, in an unusually subtle manner. Experience is vivid and continuous. Such I take it to be the condition of the conscious but not yet self-conscious animal.”