ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the fundamental problems of animal psychology. Not everybody, however, who meditates on the nature of animal activity, has by this fact alone the right to term himself an animal psychologist. There are three main ways of explaining this activity. The first is, to regard the animal as a living machine and to explain its actions as the outcome of purely mechanical causation. The case is somewhat different when we come to a second way of explaining animal activity, the physiological one. The man who adopts this physiological way of explanation, that is, the man who tries to analyse the actions of animals into physiological stimulation of sense-organs and nerves, the contractions of muscles and secretion of glands. The third way of explaining animal behaviour, and the only one that leads to real psychology of animals is, that of explaining it in terms of psychic phenomena, of trying to find out the psychic phenomena that underlie their behaviour.
