and stamped in thereby, and more and more firmly associated with the sense-impression of that box’s interior. Accordingly it is sooner and sooner fulfilled. Futile impulses are gradually stamped out. The gradual slope of the time-curve, then, shows the absence of reasoning. They represent the wearing smooth of a path in the brain, not the decisions of a rational consciousness. In a later discussion of imitation further evidence that animals do not reason will appear. For the present, suffice it to say, that a dog, or cat, or chick, who does not in his own impulsive activity learn to escape from a box by pulling the proper loop, or stepping on a platform, or pecking at a door, will not learn it from seeing his fellows do so. They are incapable of even the inference (if the process may be dignified by that name) that what gives another food will give it to them also. So, also, it will be later seen that an animal cannot learn an act by being put through it. For instance, a cat who fails to push down a thumb piece and push out the door cannot be taught by having one take its paw and press the thumb piece down with it. This _could_ be learned by a certain type of associative process without inference. _Were there inference, it surely would be learned._ Finally, attention may be called to the curves which show the way that the animal mind deals with a series of acts (_e.g._ curves for G, J, K, L and O, found on pages 45 to 55 and 60). Were there any reasoning the animals ought early to master the method of escape in these cases (see descriptions on pages 31 to 34) so as to do the several acts in order, and not to repeat one after doing it once, or else ought utterly to fail to master the thing. But, in all these experiments, where there was every motive for the use of any reasoning faculty, if such existed, where the animals literally lived by their intellectual powers, one finds no sign of abstraction, or inference, or judgment. So far I have only given facts which are quite uninfluenced by any possible incompetence or prejudice of the observer. These alone seem to disprove the existence of any rational faculty in the subjects experimented on. I may add that my observations of all the conduct of all these animals during the months spent with them, failed to find any act that even _seemed_ due to reasoning. I should claim that this quarrel ought now to be dropped for good and all,—that investigation ought to be directed along more sensible and profitable lines. I should claim that the psychologist who studies dogs and cats in order to defend this ‘reason’ theory is on a level with a zoölogist who should study fishes with a view to supporting the thesis that they possessed clawed digits. The rest of this account will deal with more promising problems, of which the first, and not the least important, concerns the facts and theories of _imitation_. IMITATION