Page:BirdWatcherShetlands.djvu/322

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THE BIRD WATCHER

animal. Indeed, when we think of what all children can pretend, and what many grown-up people believe, we should not expect too much of birds. The guillemot, we will say, upon seeing a young bird which, by calling up memories, takes the place of its own, becomes, in imagination, its parent—so that the sympathy it shows for it is not wider than that between parent and child. In other cases the feelings aroused in an animal when it sees, let us say, one of its fellows subjected to suffering or danger which it has been accustomed, itself, to fear and shun, may relate to itself only, so that any apparently sympathetic actions arising out of them would be due to that failure to distinguish between what is in the mind and what is outside of it (subjective and objective) that has often been remarked in savages—or, if not remarked, is at least attributed to them. Of this hypothesis I have given one illustration, and others may be easily imagined.

Do we become more, or less, sympathetic as we get more civilised? Two people who think and feel alike are said to be in sympathy, and the more primitive and uniform the conditions of life are, the more must those who live together under them think and feel alike. The process of advance may be a process of the more complete separation and realisation of one's own distinctive personality, and though reason and self-interest produce a higher power and degree of combination amongst civilised men than the state of animals, or the savage state of man, permits of, yet