278 THE FEELINGS AND EMOTIONS 
from his sister, who at first attributed a sense of shame to the 
capuchin she so carefully studied, but subsequently was led 
to adopt a simpler interpretation. ‘He bit me in several 
places to-day,” she says, in her admirable diary,* “but he 
seemed ashamed of himself afterwards, hiding his face in his 
arms, and sitting quiet for a time.” She adds, however, in a 
footnote : “On subsequent observation, I find this quietness 
was not duc to shame at having bit me; for whether he 
succeeds in biting any person or not, he always sits quiet 
and dull-looking after a fit of passion, being, I think, 
fatigued.” 
Shame is an ethical feeling. And as we have briefly dis- 
cussed the germs of esthetics in animals, so we may now as 
briefly consider the germs of ethics. In its developed form 
ethics is one of the “ normative sciences” involving standards 
of right and wrong. It is,as Professor Mackenzie says,t “the 
science of the ideal in conduct.” It involves a standard of 
“ought,” the product of reflection and generalization. Conduct 
is compared with the ideal, and perceived to be either below, 
up to, or perhaps beyond, the normal standard accepted by 
civilized mankind. This involves a judgment; and so far 
as conduct is shaped in accordance with the ideal we attribute 
the guidance to ethical motives. Such ideals, such judgments, 
and the control of conduct through the play of such motives, 
are probably beyond the mental capacities of animals. They 
belong to the ideational stage of mental development, when 
the conative tendency becomes volitional; not to the per- 
ceptual stage, when it is impulsive. They do not enter into 
the conscious situation as it takes form in the animal mind. 
Behaviour has not in them acquired ethical meaning, since 
in developed ethics, as normative, such meaning always has 
reference to the norm, or standard. A real sense of shame 
implies that our acts have fallen below our ideal. 
It may be said that we cannot prove that animals do not 
frame such ideals. But, if we accept the canon of interpretation 
* Appendix to “ Animal Intelligence,’’ p. 486. 
tT “ Manual of Ethics,” p. 1. 
