IMITATION 187 
important thing, is the thing which gets associated, while the 
act as done, as viewed from outside, is a secondary affair.” 
I take it that by “impulse” is here meant what Dr. Stout 
would term the direct experience involved in conation.* If 
it have a place in experience distinguishable from that of 
stimulation and response it is included in what I have on a 
former page spoken of as the consciousness of behaviour as 
such, which was said to be essential. And I am surprised 
that Mr. Thorndike should have supposed that I believe that 
this could by any animal be “supplied at will.’ In any case 
it seems probable, as the result of observation, that unless the 
consciousness of behaving in a specific manner has entered 
into the situation as developed in experience it cannot in 
animals enter into any subsequent representative complex. 
And it is the absence of such consciousness of behaving in a 
specific manner which the sight of the escaping cat fails to 
supply in Mr. Thorndike’s experiments. 
Interesting and valuable as these experiments are, they are 
open to the criticism to which, as we have seen, his other 
experiments are also open—that the conditions are abnormal 
and cramped. Apart from reflective imitation, which they 
tend to disprove, they do not conduce to the kind of conscious 
situation which appears to be most favourable for the develop- 
ment of intelligent imitation founded on hereditary tenden- 
cies and propensities. It is through such imitation that, as 
Herr Groos says,t “animals learn perfectly those things for 
which they have imperfect hereditary dispositions.” The 
kind of situation which conduces to such intelligent imitation 
is that which involves the attitude of attention and interest 
rising, when these are sufficiently varied in their direction, into 
what is spoken of as curiosity. These, in their natural occur- 
rence in animals, are parts of, or in any case accompaniments 
of the conative attitude—they are connected with activities 
and impulsive tendencies to behaviour. If attention and 
interest are directed to the behaviour of another animal, the 
* Cf. infra, p. 235. 
+ “The Play of Animals,” Eng. trans., p. 79. 
