But, though it is exceedingly doubtful whether any animal can regard its companion as an “eject,” may there not be a perceptual anticipation of the ideational process that comes with later-developed reflection? A decade ago I gave the following answer to this question: “For myself, I cannot doubt that animals project into each other the shadows of the feelings of which they are themselves conscious.”[160] Professor Mark Baldwin speaks of the stage at which this takes place, as the “projective stage” of development. “Now, in the fact,” he says,[161] “of herding, common life and arrangements for the protection of the herd, animal societies of various kinds, animal division of labour, etc.,--whatever be the origin of it,--we have what seems to be such an epoch in animal life. These creatures show a real recognition of one individual by another, and a real community of life and reaction, which is quite different from the individualism of purely sensational and unsocial consciousness. And yet it is just as different from the reflective organization of human society, in which the self-consciousness and personal volition of the individual play the most important _rôle_. I see no way of accounting for the gregarious instinct anywhere, except on the assumption of such a projective epoch of animal consciousness.” 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?