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 consciousness 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 direct experience,’ but an abstraction from our own life referred to that of another.
I fancy that these feelings of others’ feelings may be connected pretty closely with imitation, and for that reason may begin to appear in the monkeys. There we have some fair evidence for their presence in the tricks which monkeys play on each other. Such feelings seem the natural explanation of the apparently useless tail-pullings and such like which make up the attractions of the monkey cage. These may, however, be instinctive forms of play-activity or merely examples of the general tendency of the monkeys to fool with everything.