IMPULSE, INTEREST, AND EMOTION ~ 245 
centred in the companion. Or take the case of a herd of 
cattle, which attacks a common enemy. The enemy is the 
primary nucleus of the situation, but it is profoundly modified 
by the presence of companions by which the behaviour of attack 
is determined. The situation is social, and not merely indi- 
vidual, and a social interest suffuses it, and gives it a distinctive 
character. 
In this social interest probably arise the germs—but only the 
germs—of the sense of personality. Some, indeed, go so far as 
to urge that we learn to know ourselves only through knowing 
others. The genetic order, so far as there is an order, is, they 
say, not first the ego and then the alter, but first the mother 
and companions and then through them the self. Or, to put 
this point of view in a less questionable form, it is only 
through the reaction of one on the other that the two are 
differentiated. Be this as it may, it is only through the action 
of environment on the organism, and the reaction of the organ- 
ism on the environment in behaviour, that experience becomes 
polarized into subject and object. Let it be clearly understood 
that for the animal, in all probability, subject and object are 
not clearly distinguished, and set over against each other in the 
antithesis of thought. Only late in mental development are 
the self and the world distinguished in subtle analysis as 
different aspects of the common experience in which both 
have their inseparable being. Animals, and perhaps the 
majority of mankind, never trouble themselves about object 
and subject as clearly realized products of conception and 
reflective thought. For these concepts are exceedingly subtle. 
And here, too, the external aspect of experience has the pre- 
cedence, so far as there is precedence. A healthy lad from 
the moment he gets up in the morning till the moment he 
goes to bed, lives chiefly in the objective aspect of experience, 
an aspect which is in us chiefly associated with the products in 
consciousness of the leading senses of sight and hearing. 
But the subjective aspect creeps in when he is hurt, when he 
is hungry, when he is fatigued. He does not argue about the 
matter, or formulate it in definite terms. He just dimly 
