102 E. L. THORNDIKE. 



it. The one sort of attention leads you to think about a thing, 

 the other to act with reference to it. We must be careful to 

 remember that when we say that the cat attended to what was 

 said, we do not mean that he thereby established an idea of it. 

 Animals are not proved to form separate ideas of sense-impres- 

 sions because they attend to them, for the kind of attention they 

 give is the kind which when given by men results in practical 

 associations, not in establishing ideas 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 consciousnes 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 isolated ideas, much less any abstracted, 

 inferred or transferred ideas. These ideas of others' feelings 

 imply a power to transfer 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 transferred association, to imitate. If the animal realizes 

 the mental 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 object of any 

 sort, but rather a ' meaning,' a feeling ' of the fact that.'' It can 

 exist only as something thought about. It is never ' a bit of 



