136 ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR 



entire activities to other men and women, believing that they feel 

 and think as we do, have the same desires, needs and the same 

 satisfactions and pleasures as we have when we see that their 

 behaviour, in the same environing conditions, is similar to ours. 

 It is quite impossible to give scientific demonstration of this 

 assurance that we have that other human beings introspect and 

 feel and think very much as we do. The solipsistic attitude denies 

 that we can assert this of other men and women than ourself. 

 Strictly (on this attitude) I alone think and all else — if there is 

 anything else — is the object of my thought. It is not only 

 pedantic but is intellectually dishonest on the part of anyone who 

 speaks or writes about it — thereby plainly assuming that other 

 similar thinking human beings exist. Apart from merely playing 

 intellectually with the matter one must come to this conclusion. 

 Further, the demonstration we seek is easily obtained when we 

 reflect that we live in community with other men and women, 

 that we praise or blame, punish or reward them, and contemplate 

 their behaviour not as we contemplate the working of a machine, 

 but with emotion. And from the biological point of view the 

 demonstration is complete since community satisfies the urges 

 of life as we have them. Without the evolution of gregariousness 

 man would not have attained the power over inanimate nature 

 that he now exerts. 



We also extend the results of introspection to animals lower in 

 complexity of structure and behaviour than ourselves. Biologic- 

 ally this is strictly justified. All life, as we shall show from the 

 analysis of reproduction, is one thing, and the decomposition into 

 groups and races is only the most convenient way of its investiga- 

 tion. So far, then, as the structure and behaviour of the lower 

 animals resemble those in ourselves, we impute somewhat similar 

 states of consciousness to them and we believe that they have 

 needs and desires and feelings of pleasure and pain. As the 

 structure and behaviour differ more and more from those that we 

 observe in ourselves, so the extension becomes the more difficult. 



48^. The Organism as a Monad. But even when we reject 

 the solipsistic attitude it is still proper to argue that the organism 

 is a monad. We use the Leibnitzian conception here, not at all 

 metaphysically but in the naive biological sense. 



(i) The universe of an organism is simply all those things with 

 which it has relations. Thus the universe of a Bacillus may be 



