climb up just as inevitably when I said, “My name is Thorndike,” or “To-day is Tuesday.” So cats would claw at the loop or button when the door was open. So cats would paw at the place where a loop had been, though none was there. The reaction is not to a well-discriminated object, but to a vague situation, and any element of the situation may arouse the reaction. The whole situation in the case of man is speedily resolved into elements; the particular elements are held in focus, and the non-essential is systematically kept out of mind. In the animal the whole situation sets loose the impulse; all of its elements, including the non-essentials, get yoked with the impulse, and the situation may be added to or subtracted from without destroying the association, provided you leave something which will set off the impulse. The animal does not think one is like the other, nor does it, as is so often said, mistake one for the other. It does not think _about_ it at all; it just thinks _it_, and the _it_ is the kind of “pure experience” we have been describing. In human mental life we have accurate, discriminated sensations and perceptions, realized as such, and general notions, also realized as such. Now, what the phenomena in animals which we have been considering show is that they have neither. Far from showing an advanced stage of mentality, they show a very primitive and unspecialized stage. They are to be explained not by the presence of _general_ notions, but by the absence of notions of _particulars_. The idea that animals react to a particular and absolutely defined and realized sense-impression, and that a similar reaction to a sense-impression which varies from the first proves an association by similarity, is a myth. We shall see later how an animal does come in certain cases to discriminate, in one sense of the word, with a great degree of delicacy, but we shall also see then what must be emphasized now, that naturally the animal’s brain reacts very coarsely to sense-impressions, and that the animal does not think about his thoughts at all.