The Story of the Mind

by James Mark Baldwin

[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 his own private pleasures and pains, with the personal actions which were before observed, it is true, in other persons but not understood. The act of the father has now become his own. So one by one the various attributes which he has found to be characteristic of the persons of his social circle, become his, in his own thought. He is now for himself an agent who has the marks of a Person or a Self. He now understands from the inside all the various personal suggestions. What he saw persons do is now no longer "projective"—simply there, outside, in the environment; it has become what we call "subjective." The details are grouped and held together by the sense of agency working itself out in his imitative struggles.

This is what we mean by Self-consciousness. It is not an inborn thing with the child. He gradually acquires it. And it is not a sense of a distinct and separate self, first known and then compared with other persons. On the contrary, it is gradually built up in the child's mind from the same material exactly as that of which he makes up his thought of other persons. The deeds he can do he first sees others doing; only then can he imitate them and find out that he also is a being who can perform them.

So it goes all through our lives. Our sense of Self is constantly changing, constantly being enriched. We have not the same thought of self two days in succession. To-day I think of myself as something to be proud of, to-morrow as something to be ashamed of. To-day I learn something from you, and the thought that it is common to you and to me is the basis of my sympathy with you. To-morrow I learn to commit the unworthy act which Mr. A. commits, and the thought that he and I are so far the same is the basis of the common disapproval which I feel of him and me.

2. The second result of this imitative learning about personality is of equal importance. When the child has taken up an action by imitation and made it subjective, finding out that personality has an inside, something more than the mere physical body, then he reads this fact back into the other persons also. He says to himself: "He too, my little brother, must have in him a sense of agency similar to this of mine. He acts imitatively, too; he has pleasures and pains; he shows sympathy for me, just as I do for him. So do all the persons with whom I have become so far acquainted. They are, then, 'subjects' as I am—something richer than the mere 'projects' which I had supposed." So other persons become essentially like himself; and not only like himself, but identical with himself so far as the particular marks are concerned which he has learned from them. For it will be remembered that all these marks were at first actually taken up by imitation from these very persons. The child is now giving back to his parents, teachers, etc., only the material which he himself took from them. He has enriched it, to be sure; with it he now reads into the other persons the great fact of subjective agency; but still whatever he thinks of them has come by way of his thought of himself, and that in turn was made up from them.

This view of the other person as being the same in the main as the self who thinks of the other person, is what psychologists mean when they speak of the "ejective" self. It is the self of some one else as I think of it; in other words, it is myself "ejected" out by me and lodged in him.

The Social and Ethical Sense.—From this we see what the Social Sense is. It is the feeling which arises in the child or man of the real identity, through its imitative origin, of all possible thoughts of self, whether yourself, myself, or some one else's self. The bond between you and me is not an artificial one; it is as natural as is the recognition of personal individuality. And it is doing violence to this fundamental fact to say, as social science so often assumes, that the individual naturally separates himself or his interests from the self or the interests of others. He is, on the contrary, bound up with others from the start by the very laws of his growth. His social action and feeling are natural to him. The child can not be selfish only nor generous only; he may seem to be this or that, in this circumstance or that, but he is really social all the time.