292 THE BIRD WATCHER 
animal. Indeed, WM€n we think of what all children 
can pretend, and what many grown-up people believe, 
we should not expect too much of birds. The guille- 
mot, we will say, upon seeing a young bird which, by 
calling up memories, takes the place of its own, 
becomes, in imagination, its parent-——so that the 
sympathy it shows for it is not wider than that 
between parent and child. In other cases the feelings 
aroused in an animal when it sees, let us say, one 
of its fellows subjected to suffering or danger which it 
has been accustomed, itself, to fear and shun, may 
relate to itself only, so that any apparently sympathetic 
actions arising out of them would be due to that 
failure to distinguish between what is in the mind 
and what is outside of it (subjective and objective) 
that has often been remarked in savages—or, if not 
remarked, is at least attributed to them. Of this 
hypothesis I have given one illustration, and others 
may be easily imagined. 
Do we become more, or less, sympathetic as we get 
more civilised? Two people who think and feel 
alike are said to be in sympathy, and the more primi- 
tive and uniform the conditions of life are, the more 
must those who live together under them think and 
feel alike. The process of advance may be a process 
of the more complete separation and realisation of 
one’s own distinctive personality, and though reason 
and self-interest produce a higher power and degree 
of combination amongst civilised men than the state 
of animals, or the savage state of man, permits of, yet 
