Now, in endeavouring to realize how the situation feels to an animal in this projective stage, the first difficulty we encounter is that of divesting ourselves of those products of reflection which characterize our own mental situation; and to avoid what Dr. Stout, in the passage above quoted,[162] terms the psychologist’s besetting snare. The second difficulty is to grasp that, in experience, subject and object are inseparable, however clearly we may learn to perceive that they are distinguishable aspects of that experience. If the subject is eventually regarded as that which experiences, and the object as that which is experienced, it is surely obvious that each is necessary to the other. But, before these different aspects are clearly distinguished, there is, in the perceptual stage of mental development, what we may term a distribution of the items of experience among the centres of interest.
In illustration of the kind of distribution which we may suppose to come naturally to an animal, in what Professor Baldwin terms the projective epoch, let us take three animal situations: first, a chick pecks at a soldier-beetle, and finds it nauseous; secondly, a hen-bird hears the joyous song of her mate; thirdly, a puppy in play bites its companion, and receives a painful nip in return. Each of these constitutes an experience-situation; assuming that the results of the experience are distributed, how may we suppose them to be allocated?
In the first case, the soldier-beetle is the centre of interest in the situation. As the situation develops, the element of nauseousness is introduced. As Dr. Stout puts it, this is what gives the soldier-beetle meaning. Can it be doubted that, if there be any distribution, the nauseousness, though it is altogether what we have learnt to call a subjective affection, attaches itself to the soldier-beetle? The plain man, unsophisticated by Berkeleyan discussion, says simply, in such cases, “The thing is nauseous.” And this probably indicates the naïve and primitive distribution. Turning now to our second example, when the hen hears the courtship song the mate is the centre of a situation suffused with pleasurable feeling. How is the joyousness, again essentially subjective for our later thought, distributed? Surely, if at all, on the mate who forms the centre of interest. This it is which gives him meaning. The joy of the bearer is projected on to the singer. Not entirely, perhaps; the hen literally, on Professor James’s theory of the emotions, feels her heart-beat quickened by his presence, and the delightful ruffling of her feathers. But our aim is not to deny that the germs of the subjective arise in the midst of such situations, but to contend that some at least of the joyous character of the situation attaches to the song of the singer, that some of the feeling is projected, and that this is what gives the mate meaning. In our third case, the playful puppy bites his companion, and is sharply bitten in return. Pain enters into the coalescent situation as a whole. How is it distributed? In the phraseology of association, the nip he gives is closely linked with the pain he receives. By coalescence the pain and the nip form parts of the developed situation. But the companion is the centre of interest. And part of the pain is probably projected on this centre. That such projection actually occurs is rendered probable by such cases as the following, which was told me some years ago. A child, whose exact age I have forgotten if I then ascertained, was pricked by a pin, and he said, “Pin ’urted; poor pin.” It is, indeed, not unlikely that with animals the outward projection of feeling is widely distributed over inanimate, as well as animate, objects, and that its due restriction comes far later in development, of which the so-called personification of lifeless things by savages may be a relic. In any case, the give-and-take of play in young animals, and the after-earnest of courtship and fighting, would seem to afford ample opportunity for the external and internal distribution of feeling which sows the seed in perceptual life of that which blossoms into self and alter in the reflective life of ideational thought.