, he gets
what is really _self-consciousness_ and _social feeling_.

[Footnote 2: It is very remarkable that in the child's bashfulness we
find a native nervous response to the presence of persons. And it is
curious to note that, besides the general gregariousness which many
animals have, they show in many instances special responses of the
presence of creatures of their own kind or of other kinds. Dogs seem
to recognise dogs by _smell_. So with cats, which also respond
instinctively with strong repulsion to the smell of dogs. Horses seem
to be guided by _sight_. Fowls are notoriously blind to shapes of
fowls, but depend on hearing the cries of their kind or their young.]

_Self-consciousness._--So far as we have now gone the child has only a
very dim distinction between himself as a person and the other persons
who move about him. The persons are "projective" to him, mere bodies
or external objects of a peculiar sort classed together because they
show common marks. Yet in the sense of agency, he has already begun,
as we saw, to find in himself a mental nucleus, or centre. This comes
about from his tendency to fall into the imitation of the acts of
others.

Now as he proceeds with these imitations of others, he finds himself
gradually understanding the others, by coming, through doing the same
actions with them, to discover what they are feeling, what their
motives are, what the laws of their behaviour. For example, he sees
his father handle a pin, then suddenly make a face as he pricks
himself, and throws the pin away. All this is simply a puzzle to the
child; his father's conduct is capricious, "projective." But the
child's curiosity in the matter takes the form of imitation; he takes
up the pin himself and goes through the same manipulation of it that
his father did. Thus he gets himself pricked, and with it has the
impulse to throw the pin away. By imitating his father he has now
discovered what was inside the father's mind, the pain and the motive
of the action.

This way of proceeding in reference to the actions of others, of which
many examples might be given, has a twofold significance in the
development of the child; and because of this twofold significance it
is one of the most important facts of psychology. Upon it rest, in the
opinion of the present writer, correct views of ethics and social
philosophy.

1. By such imitation the child learns to associate his own sense of
physical power, together with