One more experiment which I made will close the discussion. The
following colors were placed from right to left: orange, blue, red,
yellow, black, green. I turned my back upon them, and therefore could
guide the horse by verbal commands only. I asked him to bring the
orange. Hans approached the yellow. I now called three times, allowing a
short interval between the calls. At the first "Go!" he passed from the
yellow to the red, at the second from the red to the blue, and at the
third from the blue to the orange, which he then proceeded to pick up
and bring to me. I had noted this same thing in Mr. von Osten's tests,
although there, there were often other factors entering in. By
exercising the utmost precision in facing the cloths, and by using, in
addition, suitable oral signs, I succeeded in getting Hans to bring,
successively, each one of the six cloths in the row, and without a
single error,--and all this in the presence of Mr. Schillings who did
not have the slightest notion of the secret of my success.
We need hardly say, in passing, that all that was true of the tests with
colored cloths, was also true of the tests in which the placards were
used. It was all the same to the horse whichever was placed before him.
We have thus tested all of the horse's supposed achievements. None of
them stood the critical test. It would have been gratifying to have
repeated some of the experiments and to have made Hans the object of
further psychological investigations, but unfortunately he was no longer
at my disposal after the publication of the report of the
December-Commission. Some may say that we have had almost enough of a
good thing, but we must bear in mind that many of the tests which were
carried out,--such as those in which the method was that of "procedure
without knowledge", those in which the ear-muffs were used, those in
which distractions were introduced,--had previously been made by other
persons (see pages 41f, 45, 63), and with other results, than ours. A
more thorough test, therefore, would have been doubly desirable.
CHAPTER III
THE AUTHOR'S INTROSPECTIONS
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