o make up the man. He is fanatic in his
conviction, he has an eccentric mind which is crammed full of theories
from the phrenology of Gall to the belief that the horse is capable of
inner speech and thereby enunciates inwardly the number as it proceeds
with the tapping. From theories such as these, and on the basis of all
sorts of imagined emotional tendencies in the horse, he also managed to
formulate an explanation for the failure of the tests in which none of
the persons present knew the answer to the problem given the horse, and
also for the failure of those tests in which the large blinders were
applied. And he would often interfere with or hinder other tests which,
according to his point of view, were likely to lead us astray. And yet,
when the first tests with the blinders did turn out as unmistakably
sheer failures, there was such genuine surprise, such tragi-comic rage
directed against the horse, that we finally believed that his views in
the matter would be changed beyond a doubt. "The gentlemen must admit,"
he said at the time, "that after seeing the objective success of my
efforts at instruction, I was warranted in my belief in the horse's
power of independent thought." Nevertheless, upon the following day he
was as ardent an exponent of the belief in the horse's intelligence as
he ever had been.

And finally, after I could no longer keep from him the results of our
investigation, I received a letter from him in which he forbade further
experimentation with the horse. The purpose of our inquiries, he said,
had been to corroborate his theories. On account of his withdrawal of
the horse a few experimental series unfortunately could not be
completed, but happily the major portion of our task had been
accomplished.

THE HORSE OF MR. VON OSTEN

CHAPTER I

THE PROBLEM OF ANIMAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND "CLEVER HANS"

If we would appreciate the interest that has been aroused everywhere by
the wonderful horse solving arithmetical problems, we must first
consider briefly the present state of the problem of animal
consciousness.[C] Animal consciousness cannot be directly gotten at, and
the psychologist must therefore seek to appreciate it on the basis of
the animal's behavior and with the assistance of conceptions borrowed
from human psychology. Hence it is that animal psychology rests upon
uncertain foundations with the result that the fundamental principles
have been repeatedly questioned and agreement has no