to do a second time what has once had a
disagreeable result is intelligent. We now say that the chick "knows"
that the worm is not good to eat. The instinctive action of pecking at
all worms is replaced by a refusal to peck at certain worms. Again,
taking the reverse case, we find that the chick which did not respond
to the sight of drinking water instinctively, but had to see the
mother drink first, acted intelligently, or through a state of
consciousness, when it imitated the old hen, and afterward drank of
its own accord. It now "knows" that water is the thing to drink.

The further question which comes upon us here concerns the animal's
acquisition of the action appropriate to carry out his knowledge. How
does he learn the muscular combinations which supplement or replace
the earlier instinctive ways of acting?

This question appears very clearly when we ask about the child's
acquisition of new acts of skill. We find him constantly learning,
modifying his habits, refining his ways of doing things, becoming
possessed of quite new and complex functions, such as speech,
handwriting, etc. All these are intelligent activities; they are
learned very gradually and with much effort and pains. It is one of
the most important and interesting questions of all psychology to ask
how he manages to bring the nervous and muscular systems under greater
and greater control by his mind. How can he modify and gradually
improve his "reactions"--as we call his responses to the things and
situations about him--so as to act more and more intelligently?

The answer seems to be that he proceeds by what has been called
Experimenting. He does not simply do things because he has
intelligence,--simply that is, because he sees how to do them without
first learning how; that is the older and probably quite erroneous
view of intelligence. The mind can not move the body simply by its
fiat. No man can do that. Man, like the little animal, has to try
things and keep on trying things, in order to find out the way they
work and what their possibilities are. And each animal, man, beast, or
bird has to do it for himself. Apart from the instinctive actions
which the child does without knowing their value at all, and apart
from the equally instinctive imitative way of doing them without
aiming at learning more by the imitations, he proceeds in all cases to
make experiments. Generally his experiments work through acts of
imitation. He imitates what he se