It seems sure from these experiments that the animals were unable to form an association leading to an act from having seen the other animal, or animals, perform the act in a certain situation. Thus we have further restricted the association process. Not only do animals not have associations accompanied, more or less permeated and altered, by inference and judgment; they do not have associations of the sort which may be acquired from other animals by imitation. What this implies concerning the actual mental content accompanying their acts will be seen later on. It also seems sure that we should give up imitation as an _a priori_ explanation of any novel intelligent performance. To say that a dog who opens a gate, for instance, need not have reasoned it out _if he had seen another dog do the same thing_, is to offer, instead of one false explanation, another equally false. Imitation in any form is too doubtful a factor to be presupposed without evidence. And if a general imitative faculty is not sufficiently developed to succeed with such simple acts as those of the experiments quoted, it must be confessed that the faculty is in these higher mammals still rudimentary and capable of influencing to only the most simple and habitual acts, or else that for some reason its sphere of influence is limited to a certain class of acts, possessed of some _qualitative difference_ other than mere simplicity, which renders them imitable. The latter view seems a hard one to reconcile with a sound psychology of imitation or association at present, without resorting to instinct. Unless a certain class of acts are by the innate mental make-up especially tender to the influence of imitation, the theory fails to find good psychological ground to stand on. The former view may very well be true. But in any case the burden of proof would now seem to rest upon the adherents to imitation; the promising attitude would seem to be one which went without imitation as long as it could, and that is, of course, until it surely found it present.