F MENTAL, AS DISTINGUISHED FROM MOTOR EXPLORATION

We are still on the general topic of "discovery". Indeed, we are still
on the topic of perception; we come now to that form of perception
which is different from sense perception. The reasoner is an explorer,
and the culmination of his explorations is the perception of some fact
previously unknown to him.

Reasoning might be described as mental exploration, and distinguished
from purely motor exploration of the trial and error variety. Suppose
you need the hammer, and go to the place where it is kept, only to
find it gone. Now if you simply proceed to look here and there,
ransacking the house without any plan, that would be motor
exploration. But if, finding this trial and error procedure to be
laborious and almost hopeless, you sit down and think, "Where can that
hammer be? Probably where I used it last!" you may recall using it
for a certain purpose, in a certain place, go there and find it. You
have substituted mental exploration of the situation for purely motor
exploration, and saved time and effort. Such instances show the use of
reasoning, and the part it plays in behavior.

The _process_ of reasoning is also illustrated very well in these
simple cases. It is an exploratory process, a searching for facts. In
a way, it is a trial and error process. If you don't ransack the
house, at least you ransack your memory, in search for facts that will
assist you. You recall this fact {463} and that, you turn this way and
that, mentally, till some fact is recalled that serves your need. No
more in reasoning than in motor exploration can you hope to go
straight to the desired goal.

Animal and Human Exploration

Is man the only reasoning animal? The experimental work on animal
learning, reviewed in one of our earlier chapters, was begun with this
question in mind. Previous evidence on this point had been limited to
anecdotes, such as that of the dog that was found opening a gate by
lifting the latch with his nose, and was supposed to have seen men
open the gate in this way, and to have _reasoned_ that if a man could
do that, why not a dog? The objection to this sort of evidence is that
the dog's manner of acquiring the trick was not observed. Perhaps he
reasoned it out, and perhaps he got it by accident--you cannot tell
without watching the process of learning. You must experiment, by
taking a dog that does not know the trick, and perhaps first "showing
him" how to o