146 Animal Intelligence 



of objects. If attention rendered clear the idea, we should 

 not have the phenomena of incomplete forgetfulness lately 

 mentioned. The animal would get a definite idea of just 

 the exact thing done and would do it or nothing. The 

 human development of attention is in closest connection 

 with the acquisition of a stock of free ideas. 



SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS 



Besides attention there is another topic somewhat apart 

 from our general one, which yet deserves a few words. It 

 concerns animals' social consciousness, their consciousness 

 of the feelings of their fellows. Do animals, for example, 

 when they see others feeding, feel that the others are feeling 

 pleasure? Do they, when they fight, feel that the other 

 feels pain ? So level-headed a thinker as Lloyd Morgan has 

 said that they do, but the conduct of my animals would 

 seem to show that they did not. For it has given us good 

 reason to suppose that they do not possess any stock of iso- 

 lated ideas, much less any abstracted, inferred, or transferred 

 ideas. These ideas of others' feelings imply a power to trans- 

 fer states felt in oneself to another and realize them as there. 

 Now it seems that any ability to thus transfer and realize 

 an idea ought to carry with it an ability to form a trans- 

 ferred association, to imitate. If the animal realizes the men- 

 tal states of the other animal who before his eyes pulls the 

 string, goes out through the door, and eats fish, he ought to 

 form the association, ' impulse to pull string, pleasure of 

 eating fish.' This we saw the animal could not do. 



In fact, pleasure in another, pain in another, is not a 

 sense-presentation or a representation or feeling of an ob- 

 ject of any sort, but rather a 'meaning,' a feeling 'of the 

 fact that.'' It can exist only as something thought about. 



