It may not be amiss to sum up what has been said about Personality-Suggestion. It is a general term for the information which the child gets about persons. It develops through three or four roughly distinguished stages, all of which illustrate what is called the "projective" sense of personality.[2] There is, 1. A bare distinction _of persons from things_ on the ground of peculiar pain-movement-pleasure experiences. 2. A sense of the irregularity or capriciousness of the behaviour of these persons, which suggests _personal agency_. 3. A distinction, vaguely felt perhaps, but wonderfully reflected in the child's actions, between the modes of behaviour or _personal characters_ of different persons. 4. After his sense of his own agency arises by the process of imitation, 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.