732 COMPARATIVE AND GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY 



that animals react to situations as wholes, that they seldom or 

 never analyze, that they consequently lack relational experience, 

 which, of course, means that they reason if at all from concrete 

 to concrete. 



The second fundamental disagreement among students of de- 

 scriptive animal psychology concerns the question, do animals 

 learn by the second sort of learning-consciousness; do they, in 

 other words, possess the social consciousness involved in reflective 

 imitation and opposition? The main reason urged by those who 

 contend that animals do not imitate, in the social sense, is that 

 imitation and its converse, opposition, involve the consciousness 

 of one's self in relation to other selves, 1 and that animals are incap- 

 able of self-consciousness. In the opinion of the writer, this posi- 

 tion is entirely untenable. Animals, if they are conscious at all, 

 must be self-conscious, for consciousness of any other sort is in- 

 conceivable. To be conscious simply means to be conscious of 

 one's self, in this or that or the other situation. The only ground 

 for questioning this view is, in truth, the old tendency to confuse 

 the implicit self-consciousness of every experience with the definite, 

 discriminated, reflective, self-consciousness of the psychologist or 

 the philosopher. Self-consciousness, in the latter sense, is as im- 

 possible to the animal as to the child, and is properly opposed by 

 the ordinary argument: animals and babies, because incapable 

 of abstraction, are therefore incapable of. self-consciousness. But 

 self-consciousness, as a vague, undifferentiated sense of what 

 Hobhouse calls "self as a pervading identity and permanent 

 character," 2 every animal which is conscious at all must possess. 3 

 Indeed, all who admit, as most psychologists do, that animals 

 possess the primal emotions of affection and aversion not to 

 mention sympathy and jealousy thereby grant the self -conscious- 

 ness of animals. 



It does not, however, follow, that the self-consciousness of ani- 

 mals is either as explicit or as complex as that of adult human 

 beings. And, in particular, it does not follow that any animals 

 have attained the explicit self-consciousness involved in reflect- 

 ive imitation. The great majority of cases of alleged animal imi- 



1 There is not time to defend the position, here assumed, that imitation is pri- 

 marily personal, though, secondarily, it may come to have an impersonal " copy." 



2 Op. cit., p. 312. 



3 Cf . Hachet-Souplet, Examen psychologique des animaux, p. 81 : " Un chien 

 est assis sur un bane, je crie: Ici! il vient imm^diatement. Six chiens se trouv- 

 ent assis sur un bane, et, parmi eux, a pris place le premier . . . Je crie: Ici! 

 sur le meme ton que pr^cedemment; aucun ne bouge. Chacun attend done que je 

 dise: Dick! Tom! ou Pompon! . . . ils savent qu'il existe d'autres chiens qu'eux. 

 Cela prouve clairement que le chien a la notion de sa personnalite." Cf. also C. L. 

 Herrick, The Beginnings of Social Reaction in Man and the Lower Animals, 

 Jour, of Comp. Neur. and Psychol., April, 1904. And cf. Verworn, Protisten 

 Studien, esp. p. 210. 



