Certain animal psychologists, however, refuse to reserve the
prerogative of intelligence for man. Bouvier’s “La Vie Psychique des
Insectes” (1918), for example, contains the following statement:
“Choice of a remarkably intellectual nature, is even more noticeable
in the instinctive manifestations of individual memory. The animal,
endowed with well-developed senses and nervous system, not only
reacts to new necessities by new acts, but associates the stored
up impressions of new sensations and thereby appropriately directs
its further activities. Thus, by an intelligent process, new habits
are established, which by heredity become part of the patrimony of
instinct, modifying the latter and constituting elements essential
to its evolution. Of these instincts acquired through an intelligent
apprenticeship Forel was led to say that they are reasoning made
automatic, and it is to them particularly that we may apply the idea
of certain biologists that instincts are habits which have become
hereditary and automatic.” (Smithson. Inst. Rpt. for 1918, p. 454.)
It is extremely doubtful, however, whether Bouvier is here using the
term intelligence in its proper sense. Indeed, his words convey the
impression that what he means by intelligence is an _ability to profit
by experience_. Now, ability to profit by experience may, under one
set of circumstances, involve the power of logical reflection and
inference, while, under another set of circumstances, it may imply
nothing more than the power of associative memory. In the latter case,
the facts are explicable without any recourse to psychic powers of
a superorganic nature, and, in point of fact, it often happens that
the very zoöpsychologists, who insist on attributing this sort of
“intelligence” to brutes, are most emphatic in denying that brutes are
endowed with _reason_. In any case, it is unfortunate that the word
intelligence is now used in two entirely different senses. This new and
improper sense, being unrelated to the etymology, and out of harmony
with the accepted use of the term, serves only to engender a confusion
of ideas. It should be suppressed, in order to avoid misunderstandings.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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