Ants and Some Other Insects: An Inquiry Into the Psychic Powers of These Animals
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Ants and Some Other Insects - Auguste Forel
Auguste Forel
Ants and Some Other Insects: An Inquiry Into the Psychic Powers of These Animals
Published by Good Press, 2022
goodpress@okpublishing.info
EAN 4064066233105
Table of Contents
Ants and Some Other Insects An Inquiry into The Psychic Powers of these Animals With an Appendix on The Peculiarities of Their Olfactory Sense By Dr. August Forel Late Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Zurich Translated from the German By Prof. William Morton Wheeler American Museum of Natural History, New York Chicago The Open Court Publishing Company London Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Ltd. 1904
ANTS AND SOME OTHER INSECTS.
EXPLANATION OF THE FIGURES.
THE PROVINCE OF COGNITION.
THE REALM OF WILL.
THE REALM OF FEELING.
PSYCHIC CORRELATIONS.
APPENDIX. THE PECULIARITIES OF THE OLFACTORY SENSE IN INSECTS.
Biology, Evolution, Etc.
Darwin and After Darwin
Darwinism Illustrated
An Examination of Weismannism
The Primary Factors of Organic Evolution
On Germinal Selection
On Orthogenesis (Definite Evolution)
A Mechanico-Physiological Theory of Organic Evolution
A First Book in Organic Evolution
The Principles of Bacteriology
The Open Court
An Illustrated Monthly Magazine
SUBSCRIPTION FORM
THE MONIST
The Monist Advocates the Philosophy of Science
Monism Means a Unitary World-Conception
SUBSCRIPTION FORM
Ants and Some Other Insects
An Inquiry into
The Psychic Powers of these Animals
With an Appendix on
The Peculiarities of Their Olfactory Sense
By
Dr. August Forel
Late Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Zurich
Translated from the German
By
Prof. William Morton Wheeler
American Museum of Natural History, New York
Chicago
The Open Court Publishing Company
London
Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Ltd.
1904
Table of Contents
Copyright
, 1904
THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING CO.
CHICAGO
ANTS AND SOME OTHER INSECTS.
Table of Contents
When
discussing the ant-mind, we must consider that these small animals, on the one hand, differ very widely from ourselves in organisation, but on the other hand, have come, through so-called convergence, to possess in the form of a social commonwealth a peculiar relationship to us. My subject, however, requires the discussion of so many complicated questions that I am compelled to assume acquaintance with the work of others, especially the elements of psychology, and in addition the works of P. Huber, Wasmann, von Buttel-Reepen, Darwin, Romanes, Lubbock, my Fourmis de la Suisse, and many others. Since the functions of the sense-organs constitute the basis of comparative psychology, I must also refer to a series of articles entitled Sensations des Insectes
which I have recently published (1900-1901) in the Rivista de Biologia Generale, edited by Dr. P. Celesia. In these papers I have defined my position with respect to various authors, especially Plateau and Bethe.
Very recently Bethe, Uexkull, and others have denied the existence of psychic powers in invertebrate animals. They explain the latter as reflex-machines, and take their stand on the ground of the so-called psycho-physical parallelism for the purpose of demonstrating our inability to recognise mental qualities in these animals. They believe, however, that they can prove the mechanical regularity of behavior, but assume unknown forces whenever they are left in the lurch in their explanations. They regard the mind as first making its appearance in the vertebrates, whereas the old Cartesians regarded all animals, in contradistinction to man, as mindless (unconscious) machines.
The Jesuit father E. Wasmann and von Buttel-Reepen are willing, on the other hand, to accept the inductive inference from analogy as a valid scientific method. Like Lubbock, the lecturer and others, they advocate a comparative psychology of the invertebrates and convincingly demonstrate the existence of psychic faculties in these animals. Wasmann, however, puts a very low estimate on the mental powers of the higher vertebrates and, in my opinion, improperly, denies to them any ability of drawing inferences from experience when in the presence of new conditions (this alone he designates as intelligence); he believes that man alone possesses an immortal soul (independent of natural laws?) in addition to the animal mind.
It is necessary, first of all, to arrive at some common understanding concerning the obscure notion psychic
in order that we may avoid logomachy, and carrying on theology in the sense of Goethe’s Mephistopheles. Two concepts are confounded in an obscure manner in the word psychic
: first, the abstract concept of introspection, or subjectivism, i. e., observation from within, which every person knows only, and can know only, in and by himself. For this let us reserve the term consciousness.
Second, the activity
of the mind or that which determines the contents of the field of consciousness. This has been included without further ado with consciousness in the wider sense, and thence has arisen the confusion of regarding consciousness as an attribute of the mind. In another place I have designated the molecular wave of activity of the neural elements as neurocyme.
We cannot speak of the consciousness of human beings other than ourselves without drawing an inference from analogy; quite as little ought we to speak of a consciousness of forgotten things. The field of our consciousness is constantly changing. Things appear in it and disappear from it. Memory, through association, enables us to recall, more or less directly and with more or less difficulty, things which appear to be momentarily absent from consciousness. Moreover, both the experience of self-observation and the phenomena of hypnotism teach us experimentally that many things of which we seem to be unconscious, are nevertheless present in consciousness or have been. Indeed, certain sense-impressions remain, at the moment of their occurrence, unconscious so far as our ordinary consciousness or superconsciousness is concerned, although they can be subsequently recalled into consciousness by suggestion. Whole chains of brain-activities, (dreams, somnambulism, or secondary consciousness) seem ordinarily to be excluded from the superconsciousness, but may subsequently be associated by suggestion with the remembered contents of consciousness. In all these cases, therefore, what seems to be unconscious is after all proved to be conscious. The above-mentioned phenomena have frequently led to mystical interpretations, but they are explainable on a very simple assumption. Let us assume—and this is quite in harmony with observation—that the fields of the introspectively