The Study of Consciousness and Behavior 19 



their consciousness; he can allow that to run itself off 

 when he is sure of their temper and habits. A great 

 master of affairs is usually unsympathetic. His obser- 

 vation is not in the least dramatic or dreamful, he does 

 not yield himself to animal contagion or reenact other 

 people's inward experience. He is too busy for that, 

 and too intent on his own purposes. His observation, 

 on the contrary, is straight calculation and inference, 

 and it sometimes reaches truths about people's character 

 and destiny which they themselves are very far from 

 divining. Such apprehension is masterful and odious to 

 weaklings, who think they know themselves because they 

 indulge in copious soliloquy (which is the discourse of 

 brutes and madmen), but who really know nothing of 

 their own capacity, situation, or fate." 1 



Mr. Santayana elsewhere hints that both psychology and 

 history will become studies of human behavior considered 

 from without, - - a part, that is, of what he calls physics, 

 if they are to amount to much. 



Such a prediction may come true. But for the present 

 there is no need to decide which is better to study an 

 animal's self as conscious, its stream of direct experience, 

 or to study the intellectual and moral nature that causes its 

 behavior in thought and action and is known to many 

 observers. Since worthy men have studied both, both are 

 probably worthy of study. All that I wish to claim is the 

 right of a man of science to study an animal's intellectual 

 and moral behavior, following wherever the facts lead to 

 '' the sum total of human experience considered as dependent 

 upon the experiencing person," to the self as conscious, or to 

 a connection-system known to many observers and born 

 and bred in the animal's body. 



Reason in Common Sense, p. 154 ff. 



