( PDF ) Mind, Self and Society - from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist

Download PDF

ads:

MIND, SELF AND SOCIETY

from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist

George Herbert Mead

Table of Contents:

Part I: The Point of View of Social Behaviorism

1. Social Psychology and Behaviorism

2. The Behavioristic Significance of Attitudes

3. The Behavioristic Significance of Gestures

4. Rise of Parallelism in Psychology

5. Parallelism and the Ambiguity of "Consciousness"

6. The Program of Behaviorism

Part II: Mind

7. Wundt and the Concept of the Gesture

8. Imitation and the Origin of Language

9. The Vocal Gesture and the Significant Symbol

10. Thought, Communication and the Significant Symbol

11. Meaning

12. Universality

13. The Nature of Reflective Intelligence

14. Behaviorism, Watsonism, and Reflection

15. Behaviorism and Psychological Parallelism

16. Mind and the Symbol

17. The Relation of Mind to Response and Environment

Part III: The Self

18. The Self and the Organism

19. The Background of the Genesis of the Self

20. Play, the Game, and the Generalized Other

ads:

Livros Grátis

http://www.livrosgratis.com.br

Milhares de livros grátis para download.

21. The Self and the Subjective

22. The "I" and the "Me"

23. Social Attitudes and the Physical World

24. Mind as the Individual Importation of the Social Process

25. The "I" and the "Me" as Phases of the Self

26. The Realization of the Self in the Social Situation

27. The Contribution of the "Me" and the "I"

28. The Social Creativity of the Emergent Self

29. A Contrast of Individualistic and Social Theories of the Self

Part IV: Society

30. The Basis of Human Society: Man and the Insects

31. The Basis of Human Society: Man and the Vertebrates

32. Organism, Community, and Environment

33. The Social Foundations and Functions of Thought and Communication

34. The Community and the Institution

35. The Fusion of the "I" and the "Me" in Social Activities

36. Democracy and Universality in Society

37. Further Consideration of Religious and Economic Attitudes

38. The Nature of Sympathy

39. Conflict and Integration

40. The Functions of Personality and Reason in Social Organization

41. Obstacles and Promises in Social Organization

42. Summary and Conclusion

Supplementary Essays

1. The Function of Imagery in Conduct

2. The Biologic Individual

3. The Self and the Process of Reflection

4. Fragments on Ethics

ads:

I. SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY AND BEHAVIORISM

SOCIAL psychology has, as a rule, dealt with various phases of social experience from the

psychological standpoint of individual experience. The point of approach which I wish to suggest is

that of dealing with experience from the standpoint of society, at least from the standpoint of

communication as essential to the social order. Social psychology, on this view, presupposes an

approach to experience from the standpoint of the individual, but undertakes to determine in

particular that which belongs to this experience because the individual himself belongs to a social

structure, a social order.

No very sharp line can be drawn between social psychology and individual psychology. Social

psychology is especially interested in the effect which the social group has in the determination of

the experience and conduct of the individual member. If we abandon the conception of a

substantive soul endowed with the self of the individual at birth, then we may regard the

development of the individual's self, and of his self-consciousness within the field of his experience,

as the social psychologist's special interest. There are, then, certain phases of psychology which

are interested in studying the relation of the individual organism to the social group to which it

belongs, and these phases constitute social psychology as a branch of general psychology. Thus, in

the study of the experience and behavior of the individual organism or self in its dependence upon

the social group to which it belongs, we find a definition of the field of social psychology.

While minds and selves are essentially social products, products or phenomena of the social side of

human experience, the physiological mechanism underlying experience is far from irrelevant --

indeed is indispensable-- to their genesis and existence; for individual experience and behavior is,

of course, physiologically basic to social experience and behavior: the processes and mechanisms

of the latter (including those which are essential to the origin and existence of minds and selves) are

dependent physiologically upon the processes and mechanisms of the former, and upon the social

functioning of these. Individual psychology, nevertheless, definitely abstracts certain factors from the

situation with which social psychology deals more nearly in its concrete totality. We shall approach

this latter field from a behavioristic point of view.

The common psychological standpoint which is represented by behaviorism is found in John B.

Watson. The behaviorism which we shall make use of is more adequate than that of which Watson

makes use. Behaviorism in this wider sense is simply an approach to the study of the experience of

the individual from the point of view of his conduct, particularly, but not exclusively, the conduct as it

is observable by others. Historically, behaviorism entered psychology through the door of animal

psychology. There it was found to be impossible to use what is termed introspection. One cannot

appeal to the animal's introspection, but must study the animal in terms of external conduct. Earlier

animal psychology added an inferential reference to consciousness, and even undertook to find the

point in conduct at which consciousness appears. This inference had perhaps, varying degrees of

probability, but it was one which could not be tested experimentally. It could be then simply dropped

as far as science was concerned. It was not necessary for the study of the conduct of the individual

animal. Having taken that behavioristic standpoint for the lower animals, it was possible to carry it

over to the human animal.

There remained, however, the field of introspection, of experiences which are private and belong to

the individual himself - experiences commonly called subjective. What was to be done with these?

John B. Watson's attitude was that of the Queen in Alice in Wonderland - "Off with their heads!"-

there were no such things. There was no imagery, and no consciousness. The field of so-called

introspection Watson explained by the use of language symbols.[1] These symbols were not

necessarily uttered loudly enough to be heard by others, and often only involved the muscles of the

throat without leading to audible speech. That was all there was to thought. One thinks, but one

thinks in terms of language. In this way Watson explained the whole field of inner experience in

terms of external behavior. Instead of calling such behavior subjective it was regarded as the field of

behavior that was accessible only to the individual himself. One could observe his own movements,

his own organs of articulation, where other persons could not normally observe them. Certain fields

were accessible to the individual alone, but the observation was not different in kind; the difference

lay only in the degree of accessibility of others to certain observations. One could be set up in a

room by himself and observe something that no one else could observe. What a man observed in

the room would be his own experience. Now, in this way something goes on in the throat or the

body of the individual which no one else can observe. There are, of course, scientific instruments

that can be attached to the throat or the body to reveal the tendency toward movement. There are

some movements that are easily observable and others which can be detected only by the individual

himself, but there is no qualitative difference in the two cases. It is simply recognized that the

apparatus of observation is one that has various degrees of success. That, in brief, is the point of

view of Watson's behavioristic psychology. It aims to observe conduct as it takes place, and to

utilize that conduct to explain the experience of the individual without bringing in the observation of

an inner experience, a consciousness as such.

There was another attack on consciousness, that of William James in his 1904 article entitled,

"Does 'Consciousness' Exist?"[2] James pointed out that if a person is in a room the objects of the

interior can be looked at from two standpoints. The furniture, for instance, may be considered from

the standpoint of the person who bought it and used it, from the point of view of its color values

which attach to it in the minds of the persons who observe them, its aesthetic value, its economic

value, its traditional value. All of these we can speak of in terms of psychology; they will be put into

relationship with the experience of the individual. One man puts one value upon it and another gives

it another value. But the same objects can be regarded as physical parts of a physical room. What

James insisted upon was that the two cases differ only in an arrangement of certain contents in

different series. The furniture, the walls, the house itself, belong to one historical series. We speak

of the house as having been built, of the furniture as having been made. We put the house and

furniture into another series when one comes in and assesses these objects from the point of view

of his own experience. He is talking about the same chair, but the chair is for him now a matter of

certain contours, certain colors, taken from his own experience. It involves the experience of the

individual. Now one can take a cross-section of both of these two orders so that at a certain point

there is a meeting of the two series. The statement in terms of consciousness simply means the

recognition that the room lies not only in the historical series but also in the experience of the

individual. There has been of late in philosophy a growing recognition of the importance of James's

insistence that a great deal has been placed in consciousness that must be returned to the so-called

objective world.[3]

Psychology itself cannot very well be made a study of the field of consciousness alone; it is

necessarily a study of a more extensive field. It is, however, that science which does make use of

introspection, in the sense that it looks within the experience of the individual for phenomena not

dealt with in any other sciences —phenomena to which only the individual himself has experiential

access. That which belongs (experientially) to the individual qua individual, and is accessible to him

alone, is certainly included within the field of psychology, whatever else is or is not thus included.

This is our best clue in attempting to isolate the field of psychology. The psychological datum is best

defined, therefore, in terms of accessibility. That which is accessible, in the experience of the

individual, only to the individual himself, is peculiarly psychological.

I want to point out, however, that even when we come to the discussion of such "inner" experience,

we can approach it from the point of view of the behaviorist, provided that we do not too narrowly

conceive this point of view. What one must insist upon is that objectively observable behavior finds

expression within the individual, not in the sense of being in another world, a subjective world, but in

the sense of being within his organism. Something of this behavior appears in what we may term

"attitudes," the beginnings of acts. Now, if we come back to such attitudes we find them giving rise

to all sorts of responses. The telescope in the hands of a novice is not a telescope in the sense that

it is to those on top of Mount Wilson. If we want to trace the responses of the astronomer, we have

to go back into his central nervous system, back to a whole series of neurons; and we find

something there that answers to the exact way in which the astronomer approaches the instrument

under certain conditions. That is the beginning of the act; it is a part of the act. The external act

which we do observe is a part of the process which has started within; the values[4] which we say

the instrument has are values through the relationship of the object to the person who has that sort

of attitude. If a person did not have that particular nervous system, the instrument would be of no

value. It would not be a telescope.

In both versions of behaviorism certain characteristics which things have and certain experiences

which individuals have can be stated as occurrences inside of an act.[5] But part of the act lies

within the organism and only comes to expression later; it is that side of behavior which I think

Watson has passed over. There is a field within the act itself which is not external, but which

belongs to the act, and there are characteristics of that inner organic conduct which do reveal

themselves in our own attitudes, especially those connected with speech. Now, if our behavioristic

point of view takes these attitudes into account we find that it can very well cover the field of

psychology. In any case, this approach is one of particular importance because it is able to deal with

the field of communication in a way which neither Watson nor the introspectionist can do. We want

to approach language not from the standpoint of inner meanings to be expressed, but in its larger

context of cooperation in the group taking place by means of signals and gestures.[6] Meaning

appears within that process. Our behaviorism is a social behaviorism.

Social psychology studies the activity or behavior of the individual as it lies within the social process;

the behavior of an individual can be understood only in terms of the behavior of the whole social

group of which he is a member, since his individual acts are involved in larger, social acts which go

beyond himself and which implicate the other members of that group.

We are not, in social psychology, building up the behavior of the social group in terms of the

behavior of the separate individuals composing it; rather, we are starting out with a Oven social

whole of complex group activity, into which we analyze (as elements) the behavior of each of the

separate individuals composing it. We attempt, that is, to explain the conduct of the individual in

terms of the organized conduct of the social group, rather than to account for the organized conduct

of the social group in terms of the conduct of the separate individuals belonging to it. For social

psychology, the whole (society) is prior to the part (the individual), not the part to the whole; and the

part is explained in terms of the whole, not the whole in terms of the part or parts. The social act7 is

not explained by building it up out of stimulus plus response; it must be taken as a dynamic whole-

as something going on-no part of which can be considered or understood by itself-a complex

organic process implied by each individual stimulus and response involved in it.

In social psychology we get at the social process from the inside as well as from the outside. Social

psychology is behavioristic in the sense of starting off with an observable activity-the dynamic, on-

going social process, and the social acts which are its component elements-to be studied and

analyzed scientifically. But it is not behavioristic in the sense of ignoring the inner experience of the

individual-the inner phase of that process or activity. On the contrary, it is particularly concerned with

the rise of such experience within the process as a whole. It simply works from the outside to the

inside instead of from the inside to the outside, so to speak, in its endeavor to determine how such

experience does arise within the process. The act, then, and not the tract, is the fundamental datum

in both social and individual psychology when behavioristically conceived, and it has both an inner

and an outer phase, an internal and an external aspect.

These general remarks have had to do with our point of approach. It is behavioristic, but unlike

Watsonian behaviorism it recognizes the parts of the act which do not come to external observation,

and it emphasizes the act of the human individual in its natural social situation.

Endnotes

1. [Especially in Behavior, an Introduction to Comparative Psychology, chap. X; Psychology

from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist, chap. ix; Behaviorism, chaps. x, xi.]

2. [Published in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Method. Reprinted in

Essays in Radical Empiricism.]

3. Modern philosophical realism has helped to free psychology from a concern with a

philosophy of mental states (1924).

4. Value: the future character of the object in so far as it determines your action to it (1924).

5. An act is an impulse that maintains the life-process by the selection of certain sorts of stimuli

it needs. Thus, the organism creates its environment. The stimulus is the occasion for the

expression of the impulse.

Stimuli are means, tendency is the real thing. Intelligence is the selection of stimuli that will

set free and maintain life and aid in rebuilding it (1927).

The purpose need not be "in view," but the statement of the act includes the goal to which

the act moves. This is a natural teleology, in harmony with a mechanical statement (1925).

6. The study of the process of language or speech-its origins and development-is a branch of

social psychology, because it can be understood only in terms of the social processes of

behavior within a group of interacting organisms; because it is one of the activities of such a

group. The philologist, however, has often taken the view of the prisoner in a cell. The

prisoner knows that others are in a like position and he wants to get in communication with

them. So he sets about some method of communication, some arbitrary affair, perhaps,

such as tapping on the wall. Now, each of us, on this view, is shut up in his own cell of

consciousness, and knowing that there are other people so shut up, develops ways to set up

communication with them.

7. "A social act may be defined as one in which the occasion or stimulus which sets free an

impulse is found in the character or conduct of a living form that belongs to the proper

environment of the living form whose impulse it is. I wish, however, to restrict the social act

to the claw of acts which involve the cooperation of more than one individual, and whose

object as defined by the act, in the sense of Bergson, is a social object. I mean by a social

object one that answers to all the parts of the complex act, though these parts are found in

the conduct of different individuals. The objective of the acts is then found in the life-process

of the group, not in those of the separate individuals alone." [From "The Genesis of the Self

and Social Control," International Journal of Ethics, XXXV (1925), 263-64.

2. THE BEHAVIORISTIC SIGNIFICANCE OF ATTITUDES

The problem that presents itself as crucial for human psychology concerns the field that is opened

up by introspection; this field apparently could not be dealt with by a purely objective psychology

which only studied conduct as it takes place for the observer. In order that this field could be brought

within the range of objective psychology, the behaviorist, such as Watson, did what he could to cut

down the field itself, to deny certain phenomena supposed to lie only in that field, such as

"consciousness as distinct from conduct without consciousness. The animal psychologist studied

conduct without taking up the question as to whether it was conscious conduct or not.[1] But when

we reach the field of human conduct we are in fact able to distinguish reflexes which take place

without consciousness. There seems, then, to be a field which the behavioristic psychology cannot

reach. The Watsonian behaviorist simply did what he could to minimize this difference.

The field of investigation of the behaviorist has been quite largely that of the young infant, where the

methods employed are just the methods of animal psychology. He has endeavored to find out what

the processes of behavior are, and to see how the activities of the infant may be used to explain the

activities of the adult. It is here that the psychologist brings in the conditioned reflexes. He shows

that by a mere association of certain stimuli he can get results which would not follow from these

secondary stimuli alone. This conditioning of reflexes can be carried over into other fields, such as

those of terror on the part of an infant. He can be made to fear something by associating the object

with others producing terror. The same process can be used for explaining more elaborate conduct

in which we associate elements with certain events which are not directly connected with them, and

by elaborating this conditioning we can, it is believed, explain the more extended processes of

reasoning and inference. In this way a method which belongs to objective psychology is carried over

into the field which is dealt with ordinarily in terms of introspection. That is, instead of saying we

have certain ideas when we have certain experiences, and that these ideas imply something else,

we say that a certain experience has taken place at the same time that the first experience has

taken place, so that now this secondary experience arouses the response which belongs to the

primary experience.

There remain contents, such as those of imagery, which are more resistant to such analysis. What

shall we say of responses that do not answer to any given experience? We can say, of course, that

they are the results of past experiences. But take the contents themselves, the actual visual imagery

that one has: it has outline; it has color; it has values; and other characters which are isolated with

more difficulty. Such experience is one which plays a part, and a very large part, in our perception,

our conduct; and yet it is an experience which can be revealed only by introspection. The

behaviorist has to make a detour about this type of experience if he is going to stick to the

Watsonian type of behavioristic psychology.

Such a behaviorist desires to analyze the act, whether individual or social, without any specific

reference to consciousness whatever and without any attempt to locate it either within the field of

organic behavior or within the larger field of reality in general. He wishes, in short, to deny its

existence as such altogether. Watson insists that objectively observable behavior completely and

exclusively constitutes the field of scientific psychology, individual and social. He pushes aside as

erroneous the idea of "mind" or "consciousness," and attempts to reduce all "mental" phenomena to

conditioned reflexes and similar physiological mechanisms-in short, to purely behavioristic terms.

This attempt, of course, is misguided and unsuccessful, for the existence as such of mind or

consciousness, in some sense or other, must be admitted-the denial of it leads inevitably to obvious

absurdities. But though it is impossible to reduce mind or consciousness to purely behavioristic

terms-in the sense of thus explaining it away and denying its existence as such entirely-yet it is not

impossible to explain it in these terms, and to do so without explaining it away, or denying its

existence as such, in the least. Watson apparently assumes that to deny the existence of mind or

consciousness as a psychical stuff, substance, or entity is to deny its existence altogether, and that

a naturalistic or behavioristic account of it as such is out of the question. But, on the contrary, we

may deny its existence as a psychical entity without denying its existence in some other sense at all;

and if we then conceive it functionally, and as a natural rather than a transcendental phenomenon, it

becomes possible to deal with it in behavioristic terms. In short, it is not possible to deny the

existence of mind or consciousness or mental phenomena, nor is it desirable to do so; but it is

possible to account for them or deal with them in behavioristic terms which are precisely similar to

those which Watson employs in dealing with non-mental psychological phenomena (phenomena

which, according to his definition of the field of psychology, are all the psychological phenomena

there are). Mental behavior is not reducible to non-mental behavior. But mental behavior or

phenomena can be explained in terms of non-mental behavior or phenomena, as arising out of, and

as resulting from complications in, the latter.

If we are going to use behavioristic psychology to explain conscious behavior we have to be much

more thoroughgoing in our statement of the act than Watson was. We have to take into account not

merely the complete or social act, but what goes on in the central nervous system as the beginning

of the individual's act and as the organization of the act. Of course, that takes us beyond the field of

our direct observation. It takes us beyond that field because we cannot get at the process itself. It is

a field that is more or less shut off, seemingly because of the difficulty of the country itself that has

to be investigated. The central nervous system is only partly explored. Present results, however,

suggest the organization of the act in terms of attitudes. There is an organization of the various parts

of the nervous system that are going to be responsible for acts, an organization which represents

not only that which is immediately taking place, but also the later stages that are to take place. If one

approaches a distant object he approaches it with reference to what he is going to do when he

arrives there. If one is approaching a hammer he is muscularly all ready to seize the handle of the

hammer. The later stages of the act are present in the early stages-not simply in the sense that they

are all ready to go off, but in the sense that they serve to control the process itself. They determine

how we are going to approach the object, and the steps in our early manipulation of it. We can

recognize, then,, that the innervation of certain groups of cells in the central nervous system can

already initiate in advance the later stages of the act. The act as a whole can be there determining

the process.

We can also recognize in such a general attitude toward an object an attitude that represents

alternative responses, such as are involved when we talk about our ideas of an object. A person

who is familiar with a horse approaches it as one who is going to ride it. He moves toward the

proper side and is ready to swing himself into the saddle. His approach determines the success of

the whole process. But the horse is not simply something that must be ridden. It is an animal that

must eat, that belongs to somebody. It has certain economic values. The individual is ready to do a

whole series of things with reference to the horse, and that readiness is involved in any one of the

many phases of the various acts. It is a horse that he is going to mount; it is a biological animal; it is

an economic animal. Those characters are involved in the ideas of a horse. If we seek this ideal

character of a horse in the central nervous system we would have to find it in all those different parts

of the initiated acts. One would have to think of each as associated with the other processes in

which he uses the horse, so that no matter what the specific act is, there is a readiness to act in

these different ways with reference to the horse. We can find in that sense in the beginning of the

act just those characters which we assign to "horse" as an idea, or if you like, as a concept.

If we are going to look for this idea in a central nervous system we have to look for it in the neurons,

particularly in the connection between the neurons. There are whole sets of connections there which

are of such a character that we are able to act in a number of ways, and these possible actions have

their effect on the way in which we do act. For example, if the horse belongs to the rider, the rider

acts in a different way than if it belongs to someone else. These other processes involved determine

the immediate action itself and particularly the later stages of the act, so that the temporal

organization of the act may be present in the immediate process. We do not know how that

temporal organization takes place in the central nervous system. In some sense these later

processes which are going to take place, and are in some sense started, are worked into the

immediate process. A behavioristic treatment, if it is made broad enough, if it makes use of the

almost indefinite complexities existing in the nervous system, can adjust itself to many fields which

were supposed to be confined to an introspective attack. Of course, a great deal of this must be

hypothetical. We learn more day by day of what the connections are, but they are largely

hypothetical. However, they can at least be stated in a behavioristic form. We can, therefore, in

principle, state behavioristically what we mean by an idea.

Endnotes

1. Comparative psychology freed psychology in general from being confined solely to the field

of the central nervous system, which, through the physiological psychologists, had taken the

place of consciousness as such, as the field of psychological investigation. It thus enabled

psychology in general to consider the act as a whole, and as including or taking place within

the entire social process of behavior. In other words, comparative psychology - and

behaviorism as its outgrowth - has extended the field of general psychology beyond the

central nervous system of the individual organism alone, and has caused psychologists to

consider the individual act as a part of the larger social whole to which it in fact belongs, and

from which, in a definite sense, it gets its meaning-, though they do not, of course, lose

interest thereby in the central nervous system and the physiological processes going on in it.

3. THE BEHAVIORISTIC SIGNIFICANCE OF GESTURES

The behaviorist of the Watsonian type has been prone to carry his principle of conditioning over into

the field of language. By a conditioning of reflexes the horse has become associated with the word

"horse." and this in turn releases the set of responses. We use the word, and the response may be

that of mounting, buying, selling or trading. We are ready to do all these different things. This

statement, however, lacks the recognition that these different processes which the behaviorist says

are identified with the word "horse" must be worked into the act itself, or the group of acts, which

gather about the horse. They go to make up that object in our experience, and the function of the

word is a function which has its place in that organization; but it is not, however, the whole process.

We find that same sort of organization seemingly extended in the conduct of animals lower than

man; those processes which go to make up our objects must be present in the animals themselves

who have not the use of language. It is, of course, the great value, or one of the great values, of

language that it does give us control over this organization of the act. That is a point we will have to

consider in detail later, but it is important to recognize that that to which the word refers is something

that can lie in the experience of the individual without the use of language itself. Language does pick

out and organize the content in experience. It is implemented for that purpose.

Language is part of social behavior. [1] There is an indefinite number of signs or symbols which

may serve the purpose of what we term "language." We are reading the meaning of the conduct of

other people when, perhaps, they are not aware of it. There is something that reveals to us what the

purpose is-just the glance of an eye, the attitude of the body which leads to the response. The

communication set up in this way between individuals may be very perfect. Conversation in gestures

may be carried on which cannot be translated into articulate speech. This is also true of the lower

animals. Dogs approaching each other in hostile attitude carry on such a language of gestures.

They walk around each other, growling and snapping, and waiting for the opportunity to attack. Here

is a process out of which language might arise, that is, a certain attitude of one individual that calls

out a response in the other, which in turn calls out a different approach and a different response,

and so on indefinitely. In fact, as we shall see, language does arise in just such a process as that.

We are too prone, however, to approach language as the philologist does, from the standpoint of

the symbol that is used.[2] We analyze that symbol and find out what is the intent in the mind of the

individual in using that symbol, and then attempt to discover whether this symbol calls out this intent

in the mind of the other. We assume that there are sets of ideas in persons' minds and that these

individuals make use of certain arbitrary symbols which answer to the intent which the individuals

had. But if we are going to broaden the concept of language in the sense I have spoken of, so that it

takes in the underlying attitudes, we can see that the so-called intent, the idea we are talking about,

is one that is involved in the gesture or attitudes which we are using. The offering of a chair to a

person who comes into the room is in itself a courteous act. We do not have to assume that a

person says to himself that this person wants a chair. The offering of a chair by a person of good

manners is something which is almost instinctive. This is the very attitude of the individual. From the

point of view of the observer it is a gesture. Such early stages of social acts precede the symbol

proper, and deliberate communication.

One of the important documents in the history of modern psychology, particularly for the psychology

of language, is Darwin's Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Here Darwin carried over

his theory of evolution into the field of what we call "conscious experience." What Darwin did was to

show that there was a whole series of acts or beginnings of acts which called out certain responses

that do express emotions. If one animal attacks another, or is on the point of attacking, or of taking

the bone of another dog, that action calls out violent responses which express the anger of the

second dog. There we have a set of attitudes which express the emotional attitude of dogs; and we

can carry this analysis into the human expression of emotion.

The part of our organism that most vividly and readily expresses the emotions is the face, and

Darwin studied the face from this point of view. He took, naturally, the actor, the man whose

business it is to express the emotions by the movements of the countenance, and studied the

muscles themselves; and in studying them he undertook to show what the value of these changes of

the face might be in the actual act. We speak of such expressions as those of anger, and note the

way in which the blood may suffuse the face at one stage and then leave it at another. Darwin

studied the blood flow in fear and in terror. In these emotions one can find changes taking place in

the blood flow itself. These changes have their value. They represent, of course, changes in the

circulation of blood in the acts. These actions are generally actions which are rapid and can only

take place if the blood is flowing rapidly. There must be a change in the rhythm of circulation and

this generally registers itself in the countenance.

Many of our acts of hostility exhibit themselves in attitudes of the face similar to animals which

attack with their teeth. The attitude, or in a more generalized term, the gesture, has been preserved

after the value of the act has disappeared. The title of Darwin's work indicates his point of approach.

He was dealing with these gestures, these attitudes, as expressive of emotions and assuming at the

time that the gesture has this function of expressing the emotions. That attitude has been preserved,

on this view, after the value of the act has disappeared. This gesture seems to remain for the

purpose of expressing emotions. One naturally assumed there an attitude in the experience of

animals which answers in some sense to those of the human animal. One could apply the doctrine

of the survival of the fittest here also. The implication in this particular case was that these gestures

or attitudes had lost the value which they had in the original acts, and yet had survived. The

indication was that they had survived because they served certain valuable functions, and the

suggestion was that this was the expression of the emotions. That attitude on Darwin's part is

reflected in the work of other psychologists, men who were interested, as Darwin was, in the study

of the act, in the information that is conveyed by one individual to another by his attitude. They

assume that these acts had a reason for existence because they expressed something in the mind

of the individual. It is an approach like that of the philologist. They assume that language existed for

the purpose of conveying certain ideas, certain feelings.

If one considers, he realizes that this is a false approach. It is quite impossible to assume that

animals do undertake to express their emotions. They certainly do not undertake to express them

for the benefit of other animals. The most that can be said is that the "expressions" did set free a

certain emotion in the individual, an escape valve, so to speak, an emotional attitude which the

animal needed, in some sense, to get rid of. They certainly could not exist in these lower animals as

means of expressing emotions; we cannot approach them from the point of view of expressing a

content in the mind of the individual. We can, of course, see how, for the actor, they may become

definitely a language. An actor, for example, may undertake to express his rage, and he may do it

by an expression of the countenance, and so convey to the audience the emotion he intended.

However, he is not expressing his own emotion but simply conveying to the audience the evidence

of anger, and if he is successful he may do it more effectively, as far as the audience is concerned,

than a person who is in reality angered. There we have these gestures serving the purpose of

expression of the emotions, but we cannot conceive that they arose as such a language in order to

express emotion. Language, then, has to be studied from the point of view of the gestural type of

conduct within which it existed without being as such a definite language. And we have to see how

the communicative function could have arisen out of that prior sort of conduct.

The psychology of Darwin assumed that emotion was a psychological state, a state of

consciousness, and that this state could not itself be formulated in terms of the attitude or the

behavior of the form. It was assumed that the emotion is there and that certain movements might

give evidence of it. The evidence would be received and acted upon by other forms that were

fashioned like itself. That is, it presupposed the conscious state over against the biological

organism. The conscious state was that which was to be expressed in the gesture or the attitude. It

was to be expressed in behavior and to be recognized in some fashion as existent in the

consciousness of the other form through this medium of expression. Such was the general

psychological attitude which Darwin accepted.

Contrary to Darwin, however, we find no evidence for the prior existence of consciousness as

something which brings about behavior on the part of one organism that is of such a sort as to call

forth an adjustive response on the part of another organism, without itself being dependent on such

behavior. We are rather forced to conclude that consciousness is an emergent from such behavior;

that so far from being a precondition of the social act, the social act is the precondition of it. The

mechanism of the social act can be traced out without introducing into it the conception of

consciousness as a separable element within that act; hence the social act, in its more elementary

stages or forms, is possible without, or apart from, some form of consciousness.

Endnotes

1. What is the basic mechanism whereby the social process goes on? It is the mechanism of

gesture, which makes possible the appropriate responses to one another's behavior of the

different individual organisms involved in the social process. Within any given social act, an

adjustment is effected, by means of gestures, of the actions of one organism involved to the

actions of another; the gestures are movements of the first organism which act as specific

stimuli calling forth the (socially) appropriate responses of the second organism. The field of

the operation of gestures is the field within which the rise and development of human

intelligence has taken place through the process of the symbolization of experience which

gesture--especially vocal gestures-have made possible. The specialization of the human

animal within this field of the gesture has been responsible, ultimately, for the origin and

growth of present human society and knowledge, with all the control over nature and over

the human environment which science makes possible.

2. ["The Relations Of Psychology and Philology," Psychological Bulletin, I (1904), 375 ff.]

4. RISE OF PARALLELISM IN PSYCHOLOGY

The psychology which stresses parallelism has to be distinguished from the psychology which

regards certain states of consciousness as existing in the mind of the individual, and succeeding

each other in accordance with their own laws of association. The whole doctrine of the psychology

which follows Hume was predominantly associationistic. Given certain states of consciousness they

were supposed to be held together by other similar elements. Among these elements were those of

pleasure and pain. Connected with this atomism of associated conscious states was a psychology

of action grounded on the association of pleasure and pain with certain other sensations and

experiences. The doctrine of association was the dominant psychological doctrine; it dealt with static

rather than dynamic experience.

The pushing of the psychological side further and further into the central nervous system revealed

that there were whole series of experiences which might be called sensations and yet were very

different from those which could be regarded as static, such as sound, odor, taste, and color.

Association belonged to this static world. It was increasingly recognized that there was a large part

of our experience which was dynamic.[1] The form of actual doing was present in some of the

sensations which answered to the innervation of sensory nerves. There was also the study of those

tracts which went down to the viscera, and these certainly were aligned with the emotional

experiences. The whole process of the circulation of the blood had been opened up, and the action

which involved the sudden change of the circulation of the blood. Fear, hostility, anger, which called

for sudden movement, or terror, which deprived the individual of the ability to move, reflected

themselves in the visceral conditions; and also had their sensory aspects connected with the central

nervous system. There was, then, a type of experience which did not fall into place in a static world.

Wilhelm Wundt approached his problem from the standpoint of this sort of physiology which offered

a clew by means of which one could follow out these various dynamic experiences into the

mechanism of the organism itself.

The treatment which had been given to the central nervous system and its motor and sensory

nerves had been that of bringing a nerve current to a central nervous system which was then in turn

responsible for a sensation that happened in "consciousness." To get a complete statement of what

we call the act one had to follow up the sensory side and then follow out the motor results that took

place because of what happened in Consciousness. The physiology to which I have referred in a

certain sense separated itself from the field of consciousness. It was difficult to carry over such a

mechanism as this into the lower animals. That, at least, took the psychologist out of the field of

animal experience. Darwin regarded the animal as that out of which human conduct evolves, as well

as the human form, and if this is true then it must be that in some sense consciousness evolves.

The resulting approach is from the point of view of conduct itself, and here the principle of

parallelism is brought in. What takes place in consciousness runs parallel with what takes place in

the central nervous system. It is necessary to study the content of the form as physiological and also

as psychological. The center of consciousness, within which is registered that which affects the

sensory nerves and out of which springs the conduct due to sensation and memory images, is to be

taken out of the physiological mechanism; and yet one must find a parallel in what takes place in the

nervous system for what the physiologist had placed in consciousness as such. What I have

referred to in the matter of the emotions seemed to present a physiological counterpart for what

takes place in consciousness, a field that seemed to belong peculiarly to the mental side of life.

Hate, love, anger-these are seemingly states of mind. How could they be stated in physiological

terms? The study of the acts themselves from an evolutionary standpoint, and also the study of the

changes that take place in the organism itself when it is under the influence of what we call an

emotion, present analogues to these emotional states. One could find something there that

definitely answered to the emotions.

The further development of this lead occurred in James's theory of the emotions. Because we run

away when we are afraid, and strike when we are angry, we can find something in the physiological

organism that answers to fear and to anger. It is an attitude in the organism which answers to these

emotional states, especially these visceral conditions to which I have referred, and the sudden

changes in the circulation which are found associated with emotions. It becomes possible to relate

the psychical conditions with physiological ones. The result was that one could make a much more

complete statement of the conduct of the individual in physiological terms, could find a parallel for

that which is stated in terms of consciousness in the mechanism of the body and in the operation of

that mechanism. Such a psychology was called, naturally enough, a physiological psychology. It

was a statement in terms of what went on in the organism of the content with which the psychologist

had been dealing. What is there in the act of the animal which answers to these different so-called

psychological categories? What is there that answers to the sensations, to the motor responses?

When these questions were answered physiologically, they, of course, involved mechanisms

located inside of the act, for all that takes place in the body is action. It may be delayed action, but

there is nothing there that is itself simply a state, a physiological state that could be compared with a

static state. We come then to the sensations and undertake to state them in terms of complete

reflex action. We deal with the sensation from the standpoint of the stimulus, and when we come to

deal with the various emotional states we deal with them in terms of the preparation for action and

the act itself as it is going on.[2] That is, it becomes now essential to relate a set of psychical states

with the different phases of the act. Parallelism, then, is an attempt to find analogues between

action and experienced contents.

The inevitable result of this analysis was to carry psychology from a static to a dynamic form. It was

not simply a question of relating what was found in introspection with what is found in the organism;

it became a question of relating together those things which were found in introspection in the

dynamic way in which the physiological elements were related to the life of the organism.

Psychology became in turn associational, motor, functional, and finally behavioristic.

The historical transformation of psychology was a process which took place gradually.

Consciousness was something which could not be simply dispensed with. In early psychology there

was a crude attempt to account for consciousness as a certain secretion in the brain, but this was

only a ridiculous phase of the transformation. Consciousness was something that was there, but it

was something that could be brought into closer and closer relationship with what went on in the

body. What went on there had a certain definite order. Everything that took place in the body was

part of an act. The earlier conception of the central nervous system assumed that one could locate

certain faculties of the mind in certain parts of the brain, but a study of the central nervous system

did not reveal any such correlation. It became evident that there were nothing but paths in the

central nervous system.[3] The cells of the brain were seen to be parts of the nervous paths

provided with material for carrying on the system, but nothing was found there to carry on the

preservation of an idea as such. There was nothing in the central nervous system which would

enable one to locate a tract given over to abstractions. There was a time when the frontal lobe was

regarded as the locus of thought-processes -but the frontal lobe also represents nothing but paths.

The paths make very complicated conduct possible, they complicate the act enormously through the

mechanism of the brain; but they do not set up any structure which functionally answers to ideas. So

the study of consciousness from the standpoint of the organism inevitably led men to look at

consciousness itself from the point of view of action.

What, for example, is our experience that answers to clenching of the fist? Physiological psychology

followed the action out through the nerves that came from the muscles of the arm and hand. The

experience of the act would then be the sensation of what was going on; in consciousness as such

there is an awareness of what the organ was doing; there is a parallelism between what goes on in

the organ and what takes place in consciousness. This parallelism is, of course, not a complete

parallelism. There seems to be consciousness corresponding only to the sensory nerves.[4] We are

conscious of some things and not conscious of others, and attention seems to play a very great part

in determining which is the case. The parallelism which we carry over does not seem to be

complete, but one which occurs only at various points. The thing that is interesting here is that it is

the organism that now provides the clew for the analysis. Only portions of the response appear in

consciousness as such. The organism has assumed the primary place. Experimental psychology

started off from what it could get hold of in the physiological system, and then undertook to find out

what in consciousness seemed to answer to it. The scientist felt that he had the same assurance

that the physiologist had in identifying these facts in the nervous system, and given those facts he

could look into consciousness. It was simpler to start off with the neurosis and then register what

was found in the psychosis. Thus, the acceptance of some sort of a parallelism between the

contents of consciousness and the physiological processes of the central nervous system led to a

conception of those contents dynamically, in terms of acts, instead of statically, in terms of states. In

this way the contents of consciousness were approached from below (that is, naturalistically) rather

than from above (that is, transcendentally), by a study of the physiological processes of the central

nervous system to determine what in the mind answers to the activities of the physiological

organism.

There was a question as to the directive centers for unified action. We are apt to think of the central

nervous system from the point of view of the telephone board, with calls coming in and responses

going out. Certain centers come to be conceived as principal centers. If you go back to the base of

the brain, to that portion which is the essence of the central nervous system of lower forms, you do

find an organization there which controls in its activity other activities; but when you come to conduct

in the human form, you fail to find any such system in which there is a single directive center or

group of centers. One can see that the various processes which are involved in running away from

danger can be processes which are so interrelated with other activities that the control comes in the

organization. One sees the tree as a possible place of escape if a bull is after him; and in general,

one sees things which will enable the ongoing activity to be carried out. A varying group of centers

may be the determining factor in the whole activity of the individual. That is the concept which has

also been carried over into the field of growth. Certain parts of the embryo start growing, and control

the action of growth until some other process comes into control. In the cortex, that organ which in

some sense answers to human intelligence, we fail to find any exclusive and unvarying control, that

is, any evidence of it in the structure of the form itself. In some way we can assume that the cortex

acts as a whole, but we cannot come back to certain centers and say that this is where the mind is

lodged in thinking and in action. There are an indefinite number of cells connected with each other,

and their innervation in some sense leads to a unitary action, but what that unity is in terms of the

central nervous system it is almost impossible to state. All the different parts of the cortex seem to

be involved in everything that happens. All the stimuli that reach the brain are reflected into all parts

of the brain, and yet we do get a unitary action. There remains, then, a problem which is by no

means definitely solved: the unity of the action of the central nervous system. Wundt undertook to

find certain centers which would be responsible for this sort of unity, but there is nothing in the

structure of the brain itself which isolated any parts of the brain as those which direct conduct as a

whole. The unity is a unity of integration, though just how this integration takes place in detail we

cannot say.

What I wanted to bring out is that the approach to psychological theory from the standpoint of the

organism must inevitably be through an emphasis upon conduct, upon the dynamic rather than the

static. It is, of course, possible to work in the other direction, that is, to look at experience from the

point of view of the psychologist and to draw conclusions as to what must go on in the central

nervous system. It is possible to recognize, for example, that we are not simply at the mercy of the

different stimuli that play in the central nervous system-the natural view of the physiologist. We can

see these organs adjust themselves to different types of stimuli. When air waves come in they affect

the particular organs of the ear; when tastes and odors come in the stimuli get to tracts in the proper

organs that respond. There may seem to be merely a response of the organism to the stimuli. This

position is taken over into the psychology of Spencer, who accepted the Darwinian principle of

evolution. The influence of environment is exercised over the form, and the adaptation of the form

results from the influences of the environment on it. Spencer conceived of the central nervous

system as being continually played upon by stimuli which set up certain paths, so that it was the

environment which was fashioning the form.

The phenomena of attention, however, give a different picture of conduct. The human animal is an

attentive animal, and his attention may be given to stimuli that are relatively faint. One can pick out

sounds at a distance. Our whole intelligent process seems to lie in the attention which is selective of

certain types of stimuli.[5] Other stimuli which are bombarding the system are in some fashion

shunted off. We give our attention to one particular thing. Not only do we open the door to certain

stimuli and close it to others, but our attention is an organizing process as well as a selective

process. When giving attention to what we are going to do we are picking out the whole group of

stimuli which represent successive activity. Our attention enables us to organize the field in which

we are going to act. Here we have the organism as acting and determining its environment. It is not

simply a set of passive senses played upon by the stimuli that come from without. The organism

goes out and determines what it is going to respond to, and organizes that world. One organism

picks out one thing and another picks out a different one, since it is going to act in a different way.

Such is an approach to what goes on in the central nervous system which comes to the physiologist

from the psychologist.

The physiology of attention is a field which is still. a dark continent. The organism itself fits itself to

certain types of conduct, and this is of considerable importance in determining what the animal will

do. There also lie back in the organism responses, such as those of escape from danger, that

represent a peculiar sensitivity. A sound in some other direction would not have the same effect.

The eye is very sensitive to motions that lie outside of the field of central vision, even though this

area of the retina of the eye is not so sensitive to form and distinctions of color. You look for a book

in a library and you carry a sort of mental image of the back of the book; you render yourself

sensitive to a certain image of a friend you are going to meet. We can sensitize ourselves to certain

types of stimuli and we can build up the sort of action we are going to take. In a chain set of

responses the form carries out one instinctive response and then finds itself in the presence of

another stimulus, and so forth; but as intelligent beings we build up such organized reactions

ourselves. The field of attention is one in which there must be a mechanism in which we can

organize the different stimuli with reference to others so that certain responses can take place. The

description of this is something we can reach through a study of our own conduct, and at present

that is the most that we can say.

Parallelism in psychology was very largely under the control of the study of the central nervous

system, and that led on inevitably to functional, motor, voluntaristic, and finally behavioristic

psychology. The more one could state of the processes of the individual in terms of the central

nervous system, the more one would use the pattern which one found in the central nervous system

to interpret conduct. What I am insisting upon is that the patterns which one finds in the central

nervous system are patterns of action-not of contemplation, not of appreciation as such, but patterns

of action. On the other hand I want to point out that one is able to approach the central nervous

system from the psychologist's point of view and set certain problems to the physiologist. How is the

physiologist to explain attention? When the physiologist attempts that he is bound to do so in terms

of the various paths. If he is going to explain why one path is selected rather than another he must

go back to these terms of paths and actions. You cannot set up in the central nervous system a

selective principle which can be generally applied throughout; you cannot say there is a specific

something in the central nervous system that is related to attention; you cannot say that there is a

general power of attention. You have to state it specifically, so that even when you are directing your

study of the central nervous system from the point of view of psychology, the type of explanation

that you are going to get will have to be in terms of paths which represent action.

Such, in brief, is the history of the appearance of physiological psychology in its parallelistic form, a

psychology which had moved to the next stage beyond that of associationalism. Attention is

ordinarily stressed in tracing this transition, but the emphasis on attention is one which is derived

largely from the study of the organism as such, and it accordingly should be seen in the larger

context we have presented.

Endnotes

1. The lines of association follow the lines of the act (1924).

2. Thus John Dewey added to James's doctrine the necessity of conflict in action in order for

emotions to arise.

3. [Among philosophers, Henri Bergson especially stressed this point. See his Matiere et

Memoire.]

4. We are conscious always of what we have done, never of doing it. We are always conscious

directly only of sensory processes, never of motor processes; hence we are conscious of

motor processes only through sensory processes, which are their resultants. The contents of

consciousness have, therefore, to be correlated with or fitted into a physiological system in

dynamic terms, as processes going on.

5. [See Sections 13 and 14.]

5. PARALLELISM AND THE AMBIGUITY OF "CONSCIOUSNESS"

"Consciousness" is a very ambiguous term. One often identifies consciousness with a certain

something that is there under certain conditions and is not there under other conditions. One

approaches this most naturally by assuming that it is something that happens under certain

conditions of the organism, something, then, that can be conceived of as running parallel with

certain phenomena in the nervous system, but not parallel with others. There seems to be no

consciousness that answers to the motor processes as such; the consciousness we have of our

action is that which is sensory in type and which answers to the current which comes from the

sensory nerves which are affected by the contraction of the muscles. We are not conscious of the

actual motor processes, but we have a sensory process that runs parallel to it. This is the situation

out of which parallelistic psychology arises. It implies on the one side an organism which is a going

concern, that seemingly can run without consciousness. A person continues to live when he is under

a general anesthetic. Consciousness leaves and consciousness returns, but the organism itself runs

on. And the more completely one is able to state the psychological processes in terms of the central

nervous system the less important does this consciousness become.

The extreme statement of that sort was given by Hugo Munsterberg.[1] He assumed the organism

itself simply ran on, but that answering to certain nervous changes there were conscious states. If

one said that he did something, what that amounted to was a consciousness of the movement of the

muscles of his body in doing it; the consciousness of the beginning of the act is that which he

interpreted as his own volition to act. There is only a consciousness of certain processes that are

going on. Parallelism in this extreme form, however, left out of account just such processes as those

of attention and the selective character of consciousness. If the physiologist had been able to point

out the mechanism of the central nervous system by which we organize our action, there might be

still dominant such a statement in terms of this extreme parallelism which would regard the

individual as simply conscious of the selection which the organism made. But the process of

selection itself is so complex that it becomes almost impossible to state it, especially in such terms.

Consciousness as such is peculiarly selective, and the processes of selection, of sensitizing the

organ to stimuli, are something very difficult to isolate in the central nervous system. William James

points out that the amount of difference which you have to give to a certain stimulus to make it

dominant is very slight, and he could conceive of an act of volition which holds on to a certain

stimulus, and just gives it a little more emphasis than it otherwise would have. Wundt tried to make

parallelism possible by assuming the possibility of certain centers which could perform this selective

function. But there was no satisfactory statement of the way in which one could get this interaction

between an organism and a consciousness'. of the way in which consciousness could act upon a

central nervous system. So that we get at this stage of the development of psychology parallelism

rather than interactionism.

The parallelistic phase of psychology reveals itself not simply as one of the passing forms which has

appeared in psychological investigation, but as one which has served a very evident purpose and

met a very evident need.

We do distinguish, in some sense, the experiences that we call conscious from those going on in

the world around us. We see a color and give it a certain name. We find that we are mistaken, due

to a defect in our vision, and we go back to the spectral colors and analyze it. We say there is

something that is independent of our immediate sensory process. We are trying to get hold of that

part of experience that can be taken as independent of one's own immediate response. We want to

get hold of that so that we can deal with the problem of error. Where no error is involved we do not

draw the line. If we discover that a tree seen at a distance is not there when we reach the spot, we

have mistaken something else for a tree. Thus, we have to have a field to which we can refer our

own experience; and also we require objects which are recognized to be independent of our own

vision. We want the mechanism which will make that distinction at any time, and we generalize it in

this way. We work out the theory of sense perception in terms of the external stimulus, so that we

can get hold of that which can be depended upon in order to distinguish it from that which cannot be

depended upon in the same way. Even an object that is actually there can still be so resolved. In the

laboratory we can distinguish between the stimulus and the sense experience. The experimenter

turns on a certain light and he knows just what that fight is. He can tell what takes place in the retina

and in the central nervous system, and then he asks what the experiences aft. He puts all sorts of

elements in the process so that the subject will mistake what it is. He gets on the one side

conscious data, and on the other side the physical processes that are going on. He carries this

analysis only into a field which is of importance for his investigation; and he himself has objects out

there which could be analyzed in the same fashion.

We want to be able to distinguish what belongs to our own experience from that which can be

stated, as we say, in scientific terms. We are sure of some processes, but we are not sure as to the

reaction of people to these processes. We recognize that there are all sorts of differences among

individuals. We have to make this distinction, so we have to set up a certain parallelism between

things which are there and have a uniform value for everybody, and things which vary with certain

individuals. We seem to get a field of consciousness and a field of physical things which are not

conscious.

I want to distinguish the differences in the use of the term consciousness to stand for accessibility to

certain contents, and as synonymous with certain contents themselves. When you shut your eyes

you shut yourself off from certain stimuli. If one takes an anesthetic the world is inaccessible to him.

Similarly, sleep renders one inaccessible to the world. Now I want to distinguish this use of

consciousness, that of rendering one accessible and inaccessible to certain fields, from these

contents themselves which are determined by the experience of the individual. We want to be able

to deal with an experience which varies with the different individuals, to deal with the different

contents which in some sense represent the same object. We want to be able to separate those

contents which vary from contents which are in some sense common to all of us. Our psychologists

undertake definitely to deal with experience as it varies with individuals. Some of these experiences

are dependent upon the perspective of the individual and some are peculiar to a particular organ. If

one is color-blind he has a different experience from a person with a normal eye.

When we use "consciousness," then, with reference to those conditions which are variable with the

experience of the individual, this usage is a quite different one from that of rendering ourselves

inaccessible to the world.[2] In one case we are dealing with the situation of a person going to

sleep, distracting his attention or centering his attention-a partial or complete exclusion of certain

parts of a field. The other use is in application to the experience of the individual that is different

from the experience of anybody else, and not only different in that way but different from his own

experience at different times. Our experience varies not simply with our own organism but from

moment to moment, and yet it is an experience which is of something which has not varied as our

experiences vary, and we want to be able to study that experience in this variable form, so that

some sort of parallelism has to be set up. One might attempt to set up the parallelism outside of the

body, but the study of the stimuli inevitably takes us over into the study of the body itself.

Different positions will lead to different experiences in regard to such an object as a penny placed

on a certain spot. There are other phenomena that are dependent upon the character of the eye, or

the effect of past experiences. What the penny would be experienced as depends upon the past

experiences that may have occurred to the different individuals. It is a different penny to one person

from what it is to another; yet the penny is there as an entity by itself. We want to be able to deal

with these spatially perspectival differences in individuals. Still more important from a psychological

standpoint is the perspective of memory, by means of which one person sees one penny and

another sees another penny. These are characters which we want to separate, and it is here that the

legitimacy of our parallelism lies, namely, in that distinction between the object as it can be

determined, physically and physiologically, as common to all, and the experience which is peculiar

to a particular organism, a particular person.

Setting this distinction up as a psychological doctrine gives the sort of psychology that Wundt has

most effectively and exhaustively presented. He has tried to present the organism and its

environment as identical physical objects for any experience, although the reflection of them in the

different experiences are all different. Two persons studying the same central nervous system at the

dissecting table will see it a little differently; yet they see the same central nervous system. Each of

them has a different experience in that process. Now, put on one side the organism and its

environment as a common object and then take what is left, so to speak, and put that into the

experience of the separate individuals, and the result is a parallelism: on the one side the physical

world, and on the other side consciousness.

The basis for this distinction is, as we have seen, a familiar and a justifiable one, but when put into

the form of a psychology, as Wundt did, it reaches its limits; and if carried beyond leads into

difficulty. The legitimate distinction is that which enables a person to identify that phase of an

experience which is peculiar to himself, which has to be studied in terms of a moment in his

biography. There are facts which are important only in so far as they lie in the biography of the

individual. The technique of that sort of a separation comes back to the physiological environment

on one side and to the experience on the other. In this way an experience of the object itself is

contrasted with the individual's experience, consciousness on one side with the unconscious world

on the other.

If we follow this distinction down to its limits we reach a physiological organism that is the same for

all people, played upon by a set of stimuli which is the same to all. We want to follow the effects of

such stimuli in the central nervous system up to the point where a particular individual has a specific

experience. When we have done that for a particular case, we use this analysis as a basis for

generalizing that distinction. We can say that there are physical things on one side and mental

events on the other. We assume that the experienced world of each person is looked upon as a

result of a causal series that lies inside of his brain. We follow stimuli into the brain, and there we

say consciousness flashes out. In this way we have ultimately to locate all experience in the brain,

and then old epistemological ghosts arise. Whose brain is it? How is the brain known? Where does

that brain lie? The whole world comes to lie inside of the observer's brain; and his brain lies in

everybody else's brain, and so on without end. All sorts of difficulties arise if one undertakes to erect

this parallelistic division into a metaphysical one. The essentially practical nature of this division

must now be pointed out.

Endnotes

1. [See Die Willenshandlung.]

2. [And, incidentally, from a third use in which "consciousness" is restricted to the level of the

operation of symbols. On consciousness see "The Definition of the Psychical, " University of

Chicago Decennial Publications, III (1903), 77 ff.; "What Social Objects Must Psychology

Presuppose?" Journal of Philosophy, VII (1910), 174 ff.]

6. THE PROGRAM OF BEHAVIORISM

We have seen that a certain sort of parallelism is involved in the attempt to state the experience of

the individual in so far as it is peculiar to him as an individual. What is accessible only to that

individual, what takes place only in the field of his own inner life, must be stated in its relationship to

the situation within which it takes place. One individual has one experience and another has another

experience, and both are stated in terms of their biographies; but there is in addition that which is

common to the experience of all. And our scientific statement correlates that which the individual

himself experiences, and which can ultimately be stated only in terms of his experience, with the

experience which belongs to everyone. This is essential in order that we may interpret what is

peculiar to the individual. We are always separating that which is peculiar to our own reaction, that

which we can see that other persons cannot see, from that which is common to all. We are referring

what belongs to the experience just of the individual to a common language, to a common world.

And when we carry out this relationship, this correlation, into what takes place physically and

physiologically, we get a parallelistic psychology.

The particular color or odor that any one of us experiences is a private affair. It differs from the

experience of other individuals, and yet there is the common object to which it refers. It is the same

light, the same rose, that is involved in these experiences. What we try to do is to follow these

common stimuli in through the nervous system of each of these individuals. We aim to get the

statement in universal terms which will answer to those particular conditions. We want to control

them as far as we can, and it is that determination of the conditions under which the particular

experience takes place that enables us to carry out that control.[1]

If one says that his experience of an object is made up of different sensations and then undertakes

to state the conditions under which those sensations take place, he may say that he is stating those

conditions in terms of his own experience. But they are conditions which are common to all. He

measures, he determines just what is taking place, but this apparatus with which he measures Is,

after all, made up of his sensuous experience. Things that are hot or cold, rough or smooth, the

objects themselves, are stated in terms of sensations; but they are stated in terms of sensations

which we can make universal, and we take these common characters of experience and find in

terms of them those experiences which are peculiar to the different individuals.

Psychology is interested in this correlation, in finding out what the relationship is between what goes

on in the physical world and what goes on in the organism when a person has a sensory

experience. That program was carried out by Hermann Helmholtz.[2] The world was there in terms

which could be stated in the laws of science, i.e., the stimuli were stated in physical terms. What

goes on in the nervous system could be stated more and more exactly, and this could be correlated

with certain definite experiences which the individual found in his own life. And the psychologist is

interested in getting the correlation between the conditions under which the experience takes place

and that which is peculiar to the individual. He wishes to make these Statements as universal as

possible, and is scientific in that respect. He wants to state the experience of an individual just as

closely as he can in terms of the field which he can control, those conditions under which it appears.

He naturally tries to state the conduct of the individual in terms of his reflexes, and he carries back

as far as he can the more complex reflexes of the individual to the simpler forms of action. He uses,

as far as he is able to use, a behavioristic statement, because that can be formulated in terms of this

same field over which he has control.

The motive back of modern psychology gets an expression in the field of mental testing, where one

is getting correlations between certain situations and certain responses. It is characteristic of this

psychology that not only is it as behavioristic as it can be (in that it states the experience of the

individual as completely as it can in objective terms), but it also is interested in getting such

statements and correlations so that it can control conduct as far as possible. We find modern

psychology interested in practical problems, especially those of education. We have to lead the

intelligences of infants and children into certain definite uses of media, and certain definite types of

responses. How can we take the individual with his peculiarities and bring him over into a more

nearly uniform type of response? He has to have the same language as others, and the same units

of measurement; and he has to take over a certain definite culture as a background for his own

experience. He has to fit himself into certain social structures and make them a part of himself. How

is that to be accomplished? We are dealing with separate individuals and yet these individuals have

to become a part of a common whole. We want to get the correlation between this world which is

common and that which is peculiar to the individual. So we have psychology attacking the questions

of learning, and the problems of the school, and trying to analyze different intelligences so that we

can state them in terms which are as far as possible common; we want something which can

correlate with the task which the child has to carry out. There are certain definite processes involved

in speech. What is there that is uniform by means of which we are able to identify what the

individual can do and what particular training he may have to take? Psychology also goes over into

the field of business questions, of salesmanship, personnel questions; it goes over into the field of

that which is abnormal and tries to get hold of that which is peculiar in the abnormal individual and

to bring it into relation with the normal, and with the structures which get their expression in these

abnormalities. It is interesting to see that psychology starts off with this problem of getting

correlations between the experience of individuals and conditions under which it takes place, and

undertakes to state this experience in terms of behavior; and that it at once endeavors to make a

practical use of this correlation it finds for the purposes of training and control. It is becoming

essentially a practical science, and has pushed to one side the psychological and philosophical

problems which have been tied up with earlier dogma under associational psychology. Such are the

influences which work in the behavioristic psychology.

This psychology is not, and should not be regarded as, a theory which is to be put over against an

associational doctrine. What it is trying to do is to find out what the conditions are under which the

experience of the individual arises. That experience is of the sort that takes us back to conduct in

order that we may follow it. It is that which gives a distinctive mark to a psychological investigation.

History and all the social sciences deal with human beings, but they are not primarily psychological.

Psychology may be of great importance in dealing with, say, economics, the problem of value, of

desire, the problems of political science, the relation of the individual to the state, personal relations

which have to be considered in terms of individuals. All of the social sciences can be found to have

a psychological phase. History is nothing but biography, a whole series of biographies; and yet all of

these social sciences deal with individuals in their common characters; and where the individual

stands out as different he is looked at from the point of view of that which he accomplishes in the

whole society, or in terms of the destructive effect which he may have. But we are not primarily

occupied as social scientists in studying his experience as such. Psychology does undertake to

work out the technique which will enable it to deal with these experiences which any individual may

have at any moment in his life, and which are peculiar to that individual. And the method of dealing

with such an experience is in getting the conditions under which that experience of the individual

takes place. We should undertake to state the experience of the individual just as far as we can in

terms of the conditions under which it arises. It is essentially a control problem to which the

psychologist is turning. It has, of course, its aspect of research for knowledge. We want to increase

our knowledge, but there is back of that an attempt to get control through the knowledge which we

obtain; and it is very interesting to see that our modern psychology is going farther and farther into

those fields within which control can be so realized. It is successful in so far as it can work out

correlations which can be tested. We want to get hold of those factors in the nature of the individual

which can be recognized in the nature of all members of society but which can be identified in the

particular individual. Those are problems which are forcing themselves more and more to the front.

There is another phase of recent psychology which I should refer to, namely, configuration or gestalt

psychology, which has been of interest in recent years. There we have the recognition of elements

or phases of experience which are common to the experience of the individual and to those

conditions under which this experience arises.[3] There are certain general forms in the field of

perception in the experience of the individual as well as in the objects themselves. They can be

identified. One cannot take such a thing as a color and build it up out of certain sets of sensations.

Experience, even that of the individual, must start with some whole. It must involve some whole in

order that we may get the elements we are after. What is of peculiar importance to us is this

recognition of an element which is common in the perception of the individual and that which is

regarded as a condition under which that perception arises-a Position iii opposition to an analysis of

experience which proceeds on the assumption that the whole we have in our perception is simply an

organization of these separate elements. Gestalt psychology gives us another element which is

common to the experience of the individual and the world which determines the conditions under

which that experience arises. Where before one had to do with the stimuli and what could be traced

out in the central nervous system, and then correlated with the experience of the individual, now we

have a certain structure that has to be recognized both in the experience of the individual and tile

conditioning world.

A behavioristic psychology represents a definite tendency rather than a system, a tendency to state

as far as possible the conditions under which the experience of the individual arises. Correlation

gets its expression in parallelism. The term is unfortunate in that it carries with it the distinction

between mind and body, between the psychical and the physical. It is true that all the operations of

stimuli can be traced through to the central nervous system, so we seem to be able to take the

problem inside of our skins and get back to something in the organism, the central nervous system,

which is representative of everything that happens outside. If we speak of alight as influencing us, it

does not influence us until it strikes the retina of the eye. Sound does not exert influence until it

reaches the ear, and so on, so that we can say the whole world can be stated in terms of what goes

on inside of the organism itself. And we can say that what we are trying to correlate are the

happenings in the central nervous system on the one side and the experience of the individual on

the other.

But we have to recognize that we have made an arbitrary cut there. We cannot take the central

nervous system by itself, nor the physical objects by themselves. The whole process is one which

starts from a stimulus and involves everything that takes place. Thus, psychology correlates the

difference of perceptions with the physical intensity of the stimulus. We could state the intensity of a

weight we were lifting in terms of the central nervous system but that would be a difficult way of

stating it. That is not what psychology is trying to do. It is not trying to relate a set of psychoses to a

set of neuroses. What it is trying to do is to state the experiences of the individual in terms of the

conditions under which they arise, and such conditions can very seldom be stated in terms of the

neuroses. Occasionally we can follow the process right up into the central nervous system, but it is

quite impossible to state most of the conditions in those terms. We control experiences in the

intensity of the light which we have, in the noises that we produce, control them in terms of the

effects which are produced on us by heat and cold. That is where we get our control. We may be

able to change these by dealing with actual organisms, but in general we are trying to correlate the

experience of the individual with the situation under which it arises. In order that we may get that

sort of control we have to have a generalized statement. We want to know the conditions under

which experience may appear. We are interested in finding the most general laws of correlation we

can find. But the psychologist is interested in finding that sort of condition which can be correlated

with the experience of the individual. We are trying to state the experience of the individual and

situations in just as common terms as we can, and it is this which gives the importance to what we

call behavioristic psychology. It is not a new psychology that comes in and takes the place of an old

system.

An objective psychology is not trying to get rid of consciousness, but trying to state the intelligence

of the individual in terms which will enable us to see how that intelligence is exercised, and how it

may be improved. It is natural, then, that such a psychology as this should seek for a statement

which would bring these two phases of the experience as close to each other as possible, or

translate them into language which is common to both fields. We do not want two languages, one of

certain physical facts and one of certain conscious facts. if you push that analysis to the limit you get

such results as where you say that everything that takes place in consciousness in some way has to

be located in the head, because you are following up a certain sort of causal relation which affects

consciousness. The head you talk about is not stated in terms of the head you are observing.

Bertrand Russell says the real head he is but the physiologist's own head. Whether that is the case

or not, it is a matter of infinite indifference to psychologists. That is not a problem in the present

psychology, and behaviorism is not to be regarded as legitimate up to a certain point and as then

breaking down. Behavioristic psychology only undertakes to get a common statement that is

significant and makes our correlation successful. The history of psychology has been a history

which moved in this direction, and anyone who looks at what takes place in the psychological

Associations at the present time, and the ways in which psychology is being carried over into other

fields, sees that the interest, the impulse that lies behind it, is in getting just such a correlation which

will enable science to get a control over the conditions of experience.

The term "parallelism" has an unfortunate implication: it is historically and philosophically bound up

with the contrast of the physical over against the psychical, with consciousness over against the

unconscious world. Actually, we simply state what an experience is over against those conditions

under which it arises. That fact lies behind "parallelism," and to carry out the correlation one has to

state both fields in as common a language as possible, and behaviorism is simply a movement in

that direction. Psychology is not something that deals with consciousness; psychology deals with

the experience of the individual in its relation to the conditions under which the experience goes on.

It is social psychology where the conditions are social ones. It is behavioristic where the approach to

experience is made through conduct.[4]

Endnotes

1. [The following methodological interpretation of parallelism is further discussed in Section

15.]

2. [Die Lehre von dem Tonempfindungen; Handbuch der physiologishen Optik.]

3. [W. Kohler, Die physischen Gestalten in Ruhe und im stationaren Zustand; Gestalt

Psychology.]

4. By way of further avoiding certain metaphysical implications I wish to say that it does not

follow that because we have on the one side experience which is individual, which may be

perhaps private in the sense to which I have referred to privacy, and have on the other a

common world, that we have two separate levels of existence or reality which are to be

distinguished metaphysically from each other. A great deal that appears simply as the

experience of an individual, as his own sensation or perception, becomes public later. Every

discovery as such begins with experiences which have to be stated in terms of the biography

of the discoverer. The man can note exceptions and implications which other people do not

see and can only record them in terms of his own other persons may get a like experience.

He puts them in that form in order that experience, and then he undertakes to find out what

the explanation of these strange acts is. He works out hypotheses and tests them and they

become common property thereafter. That is, there is a close relationship between these

two fields of the psychical and the physical, the private and the public. We make distinctions

between these, recognizing that the same factor may now be only private and yet later may

become public. It is the work of the discoverer through his observations and through his

hypotheses and experiments to be continually transforming what is his own private

experience into a universal form. The same may be said of other fields, as in the work of the

great artist who takes his own emotions and gives them a universal form so that others may

enter into them.

7. WUNDT AND THE CONCEPT OF THE GESTURE

The particular field of social science with which we are concerned is one which was opened up

through the work of Darwin and the more elaborate presentation of Wundt.

If we take Wundt's parallelistic statement we get a point of view from which we can approach the

problem of social experience. Wundt undertook to show the parallelism between what goes on in

the body as represented by processes of the central nervous system, and what goes on in those

experiences which the individual recognizes as his own. He had to find that which was common to

these two fields-what in the psychical experience could be referred to in physical terms.[1]

Wundt isolated a very valuable conception of the gesture as that which becomes later a symbol, but

which is to be found in its earlier stages as a part of a social act.[2] It is that part of the social act

which serves as a stimulus to other forms involved in the same social act. I have given the

illustration of the dog-fight as a method of presenting the gesture. The act of each dog becomes the

stimulus to the other dog for his response. There is then a relationship between these two; and as

the act is responded to by the other dog, it, in turn, undergoes change. The very fact that the dog is

ready to attack another becomes a stimulus to the other dog to change his own position or his own

attitude. He has no sooner done this than the change of attitude in the second dog in turn causes

the first dog to change his attitude. We have here a conversation of gestures. They are not,

however, gestures in the sense that they are significant. We do not assume that the dog says to

himself, "If the animal comes from this direction he is going to spring at my throat and I will turn in

such a way." What does take place is an actual change in his own position due to the direction of

the approach of the other dog.

We find a similar situation in boxing and in fencing, as in the feint and the parry that is initiated on

the part of the other. And then the first one of the two in turn changes his attack; there may be

considerable play back and forth before actually a stroke results. This is the same situation as in the

dog-fight. If the individual is successful a great deal of his attack and defense must be not

considered, it must take place immediately. He must adjust himself "instinctively" to the attitude of

the other individual. He may, of course, think it out. He may deliberately feint in order to open up a

place of attack. But a great deal has to be without deliberation.

In this case we have a situation in which certain parts of the act become a stimulus to the other form

to adjust itself to those responses; and that adjustment in turn becomes a stimulus to the first form

to change his own act and start on a different one. There are a series of attitudes, movements, on

the part of these forms which belong to the beginnings of acts that are the stimuli for the responses

that take place. The beginning of a response becomes the stimulus to the first form to change his

attitude, to adopt a different act. The term "gesture" may be identified with these beginnings of social

acts which are stimuli for the response of other forms. Darwin was interested in such gestures

because they expressed emotions, and he dealt with them very largely as if this were their sole

function. He looked at them as serving the function with reference to the other forms which they

served with reference to his own observation. The gestures expressed emotions of the animal to

Darwin; he saw in the attitude of the dog the joy with which he accompanied his master in taking a

walk. And he left his treatment of the gestures largely in these terms.

It was easy for Wundt to show that this was not a legitimate point of attack on the problem of these

gestures. They did not at bottom serve the function of expression of the emotions: that was not the

reason why they were stimuli, but rather because they were parts of complex acts in which different

forms were involved. They became the tools through which the other forms responded. When they

did give rise to a certain response, they were themselves changed in response to the change which

took place in the other form. They are part of the organization of the social act, and highly important

elements in that organization. To the human observer they are expressions of emotion, and that

function of expressing emotion can legitimately become the field of the work of the artist and of the

actor. The actor is in the same position as the poet: he is expressing emotions through his own

attitude, his tones of voice, through his gestures, just as the poet through his poetry is expressing

his emotions and arousing that emotion in others. We get in this way a function which is not found in

the social act of these animals, or in a great deal of our own conduct, such as that of the boxer and

the fencer. We have this interplay going on with the gestures serving their functions, calling out the

responses of the others, these responses becoming themselves stimuli for readjustment, until the

final social act itself can be carried out. Another illustration of this is in the relation of parent-form to

the infant-the stimulating cry, the answering tone on the part of the parent-form, and the consequent

change in the cry of the infant-form. Here we have a set of adjustments of the two forms carrying out

a common social act involved in the care of the child. Thus we have, in all these instances, a social

process in which one can isolate the gesture which has its function in the social process, and which

can become an expression of emotions, or later can become the expression of a meaning, an idea.

The primitive situation is that of the social act which involves the interaction of different forms, which

involves, therefore, the adjustment of the conduct of these different forms to each other, in carrying

out the social process. Within that process one can find what we term the gestures, those phases of

the act which bring about the adjustment of the response of the other form. These phases of the act

carry with them the attitude as the observer recognizes it, and also what we call the inner attitude.

The animal may be angry or afraid. There are such emotional attitudes which lie back of these acts,

but these are only part of the whole process that is going on. Anger expresses itself in attack; fear

expresses itself in flight. We can see, then that the gestures mean these attitudes on the part of the

form, that is, they have that meaning for us. We see that an animal is angry and that he is going to

attack. We know that that is in the action of the animal, and is revealed by the attitude of the animal.

We cannot say the animal means it in the sense that he has a reflective determination to attack. A

man may strike another before he means it; a man may jump and run away from a loud sound

behind his back before he know what he is doing. If he has the idea in his mind, then the gesture not

only means this to the observer but it also means the idea which the individual has. In one case the

observer sees that the attitude of the dog means attack, but he does not say that it means a

conscious determination to attack on the part of the dog. However, if somebody shakes his fist in

your face you assume that he has not only a hostile attitude but that he has some idea behind it.

You assume that it means not only a possible attack, but that the individual has an idea in his

experience.

When, no, that gesture means this idea behind it and it arouses that idea in the other individual,

then we have a significant symbol. In the case of the dog-fight we have a gesture which calls out

appropriate response; in the present case we have a symbol which answers to a meaning in the

experience of the first individual and which also calls out that meaning in the second individual.

Where the gesture reaches that situation it has become what we call "language." It is now a

significant symbol and it signifies a certain meaning.[3]

The gesture is that phase of the individual act to which adjustment takes place on the part of other

individuals in the social process of behavior. The vocal gesture becomes a significant symbol

(unimportant, as such, on the merely affective side of experience) when it has the same effect on

the individual making it that it has on the individual to whom it is addressed or who explicitly

responds to it, and thus involves a reference to the self of the individual making it. The gesture in

general, and the vocal gesture in particular, indicates some object or other within the field of social

behavior, an object of common interest to all the individuals involved in the given social act thus

directed toward or upon that object. The function of the gesture is to make adjustment possible

among the individuals implicated in any given social act with reference to the object or objects with

which that act is concerned; and the significant gesture or significant symbol affords far greater

facilities for such adjustment and readjustment than does the non-significant gesture, because it

calls out in the individual making it the same attitude toward it (or toward its meaning) that it calls out

in the other individuals participating with him in the given social act, and thus makes him conscious

of their attitude toward it (as a component of his behavior) and enables him to adjust his subsequent

behavior to theirs in the light of that attitude. In short, the conscious or significant conversation of

gestures is a much more adequate and effective mechanism of mutual adjustment within the social

act-involving, as it does, the taking, by etch of the individuals carrying it on, of the attitudes of the

others toward himself-than is the unconscious or non-significant conversation of gestures.

When, in any given social act or situation, one individual indicates by a gesture to another individual

what this other individual is to do, the first individual is conscious of the meaning of his own gesture-

or the meaning of his gesture appears in his own experience-in so far as he takes the attitude of the

second individual toward that gesture, and tends to respond to it implicitly in the same way that the

second individual responds to it explicitly. Gestures become significant symbols when they implicitly

arouse in an individual making them the same responses which they explicitly arouse, or are

supposed to arouse, in other individuals, the individuals to whom they are addressed; and in all

conversations of gestures within the social process, whether external (between different individuals)

or internal (between a given individual and himself), the individual's consciousness of the content

and flow of meaning involved depends on his thus taking the attitude of the other toward his own

gestures. In this way every gesture comes within a given social group or community to stand for a

particular act or response, namely, the act or response which it calls forth explicitly in the individual

to whom it is addressed, and implicitly in the individual who makes it; and this particular act or

response for which it stands is its meaning as a significant symbol. Only in terms of gestures as

significant symbols is the existence of mind or intelligence possible; for only in terms of gestures

which are significant symbols can thinking-which is simply an internalized or implicit conversation of

the individual with himself by means of such gestures-take place. The internalization in our

experience of the external conversations of gestures which we carry on with other individuals in the

social process is the essence of thinking; and the gestures thus internalized are significant symbols

because they have the same meanings for all individual members of the given society or social

group, i.e., they respectively arouse the same attitudes in the individuals making them that they

arouse in the individuals responding to them: Otherwise the individual could not internalize them or

be conscious of them and their meanings. As we shall see, the same procedure which is

responsible for the genesis and existence of mind or consciousness--namely, the taking of the

attitude of the other toward one's self, or toward one's own behavior--also necessarily involves the

genesis and existence at the same time of significant symbols, or significant gestures.

In Wundt's doctrine, the parallelism between the gesture and the emotion or the intellectual attitude

of the individual, makes it possible to set up a like parallelism in the other individual. The gesture

calls out a gesture in the other form which will arouse or call out the same emotional attitude and the

same idea. Where this has taken place the individuals have begun to talk to each other. What I

referred to before was a conversation of gestures which did not involve significant symbols or

gestures. The dogs are not talking to each other; there are no ideas in the minds of the dogs; nor do

we assume that the dog is trying to convey an idea to the other dog. But if the gesture, in the case of

the human individual, has parallel with it a certain psychical state which is the idea of what the

person is going to do, and if this gesture calls out a like gesture in the other individual and calls out

a similar idea, then it becomes a significant gesture. It stands for the ideas in the minds of both of

them.

There is some difficulty in carrying out this analysis if we accept Wundt's parallelism. When a

person shakes his fist in your face, that is a gesture in the sense in which we use the term, the

beginning of an act that calls out a response on your part. Your response may vary: it may depend

on the size of the man, it may mean shaking your fist, or it may mean flight. A whole series of

different responses are possible. In order that Wundt's theory of the origin of language may be

carried out, the gesture which the first individual makes use of must in some sense be reproduced in

the experience of the individual in order that it may arouse the same idea in his mind. We must not

confuse the beginning of language with its later stages. It is quite true that as soon as we see the

attitude of the dog we say that it means an attack, or that when we see a person looking around for

a chair that it means he would like to sit down. The gesture is one which means these processes,

and that meaning is aroused by what we see. But we are supposed to be at the beginning of these

developments of language. If we assume that there is a certain psychical state answering to a

physical state how are we going to get to the point where the gesture will arouse the same gesture

in the attitude of the other individual? In the very beginning the other person's gesture means what

you are going to do about it. It does not mean what he is thinking about or even his emotion.

Supposing his angry attack aroused fear in you, then you are not going to have anger in your mind,

but fear. His gesture means fear as far as you are concerned. That is the primitive situation. Where

the big dog attacks the little dog, the little dog puts his tail between his legs and runs away, but the

gesture does not call out in the second individual what it did in the first. The response is generally of

a different kind from the stimulus in the social act, a different action is aroused. If you assume that

there is a certain idea answering to that act, then you want at a later stage to get the idea of the first

form, but originally your idea will be your own idea which answers to a certain end. If we say that

gesture "A" has idea "a" as answering to it, gesture "A" in the first form calls out gesture "B" and its

related idea "b" in the second form. Here the idea that answers to gesture "A" is not idea "a" but idea

"b." Such a process can never arouse in one mind just the idea which the other person has in his.

How, in terms of Wundt's psychological analysis of communication, does a responding organism get

or experience the same idea or psychical correlate of any given gesture that the organism making

this gesture has? The difficulty is that Wundt presupposes selves as antecedent to the social

process in order to explain communication within that process, whereas, on the contrary, selves

must be accounted for in terms of the social process, and in terms of communication; and

individuals must be brought into essential relation within that process before communication, or the

contact between the minds of different individuals, becomes possible. The body is not a self, as

such; it becomes a self only when it has developed a mind within the context of social experience. It

does not occur to Wundt to account for the existence and development of selves and minds within,

or in terms of, the social process of experience; and his presupposition of them as making possible

that process, and communication within it, invalidates his analysis of that process. For if, as Wundt

does, you presuppose the existence of mind at the start, as explaining or making possible the social

process of experience, then the origin of minds and the interaction among minds become mysteries.

But if, on the other hand, you regard the social process of experience as prior (in a rudimentary

form) to the existence of mind and explain the origin of minds in terms of the interaction among

individuals within that process, then not only the origin of minds, but also the interaction among

minds (which is thus seen to be internal to their very nature and presupposed by their existence or

development at all) cease to seem mysterious or miraculous. Mind arises through communication by

a conversation of gestures in a social process or context of experience-not communication through

mind.

Wundt thus overlooks the important fact that communication is fundamental to the nature of what we

term "mind"; and it is precisely in the recognition of this fact that the value and advantage of a

behavioristic account of mind is chiefly to be found. Thus, Wundt's analysis of communication

presupposes the existence of minds which are able to communicate, and this existence remains an

inexplicable mystery on his psychological basis; whereas the behavioristic analysis of

communication makes no such presupposition, but instead explains or accounts for the existence of

minds in terms of communication and social experience; and by regarding minds as phenomena

which have arisen and developed out of the process of communication and of social experience

generally--phenomena which therefore presuppose that process, rather than being presupposed by

it--this analysis is able to throw real light on their nature. Wundt preserves a dualism or separation

between gesture (or symbol) and idea, between sensory process and psychic content, because his

psychophysical parallelism commits him to this dualism; and although he recognizes the need for

establishing a functional relationship between them in terms of the process of communication within

the social act, yet the only relationship of this sort which can be established on his psychological

basis is one which entirely fails to illuminate the bearing that the context of social experience has

upon the existence and development of mind. Such illumination is provided only by the behavioristic

analysis of communication, and by the statement of the nature of mind in terms of communication to

which that analysis leads.

Endnotes

1. [Cf. Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie.]

The fundamental defect of Wundt's psychophysical parallelism is the fundamental defect of

all psychophysical parallelism: the required parallelism is not in fact complete on the

psychical side, since only the sensory and not the motor phase of the physiological process

of experience has a psychic correlate; hence the psychical aspect of the required parallelism

can be completed only physiologically, thus breaking it down. And this fundamental defect of

his psychophysical parallelism vitiates the analysis of social experiences- -and especially of

communication--which he bases upon the assumption of that parallelism.

2. [Volkerpychologie, Vol. 1. For Mead's treatment of Wundt compare "The Relations of

Psychology and Philology," Psychological Bulletin, I (1904), 375 ff., with the more critical

"The Imagination in Wundt's Treatment of Myth and Religion," ibid., III (1906), 393 ff.)

3. [See "A Behavioristic Account of the Significant Symbol," Journal of Philosophy, XIX (I922),

157 ff]

8. IMITATION AND THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE

Wundt's difficulty has been resolved in the past through the concept of imitation. Of course, if it were

true that when a person shakes his fist in your face you just imitate him, you would be doing what he

is doing and have the same idea as he has. There are, in fact, certain cases where the responses

are like the stimuli in the social act, but as a rule they are different. And yet it has been generally

assumed that certain forms imitate each other. There has been a good deal of study on this problem

of imitation and the part it is supposed to play in conduct, especially in lower forms; but the result of

this study has been to minimize imitation, even in the conduct of the higher animals. The monkey

has been traditionally the most imitative animal, but under scientific study this was found to be a

myth. The monkey learns very quickly but he does not imitate. Dogs and cats have been studied

from this standpoint, and the conduct of one form has not been found to serve the purpose of

arousing the same act in the other form.

In the human form there seems to be imitation in the case of a vocal gesture, the important gesture

as far as language is concerned. So the philologist in particular, before the psychologist reached a

more accurate analysis, went on the assumption that - we imitate the sounds that we hear. There

seemed to be a good deal of evidence for this also in certain animal forms, particularly those forms

that utilize a richer phonetic articulation, such as birds. The sparrow can be taught to imitate the

canary by close association with the canary. The parrot learns to "speak." It is not, we shall see,

genuine speech, for he is not conveying ideas, but we commonly say the parrot imitates the sounds

that appear about it.

Imitation as a general instinct is now discredited in human psychology. There was a time when

people assumed that there was a definite impulse on the part of the human animal just to do what it

saw other people do. There is a great deal of seeming imitation on the part of children. Also there is

among undeveloped forms a speech that appears to be nothing but imitation. There are persons

whom we consider unintelligent who say things over without having any idea of what is meant, a

bare repetition of sounds they hear. But the question still remains why the form should so imitate. Is

there any reason for imitation? We assume that all conduct has back of it some function. What is

the function of imitation? Seemingly we get an answer in the development of young forms. The

young fox goes about with the parents, hunts with them, learns to seize and avoid the right animals;

it has no original objection to the odor of a man, but after it has been with the old fox the scent of

man will cause it to run away. There is, in this case, a series of responses which become definitely

associated with a particular stimulus; if the young form goes about with the parent, those responses

which are all there in its nature become associated with certain definite stimuli. We can, in a very

generalized sense, speak of the fox as imitating its parents and avoiding man. But that usage would

not imply running away as an automatic act of imitation. The young fox has been put in a situation in

which it does run away, and when the odor of man is present it becomes definitely associated with

this flight response. No young forms in the lower animals ever merely imitate the acts of the adult

form, but they do acquire during their period of infancy the association of a set of more or less

instinctive responses to a certain set of stimuli.

The above observations and reservations do not, as we shall see, justify the questionable sense in

which the notion of imitation has often been used. The term "imitation" became of great importance,

for a time, in social psychology and in sociology. It was used as a basis for a whole theory of

sociology by the French sociologist, Gabriel Tarde.[1] The psychologist at first, without adequate

analysis, assumed on the part of the person a tendency to do what other persons do. One can see

how difficult it would be to work out any mechanism of that sort. Why should a person wink because

another person winks? What stimulus would cause another person to act in that way? The sight of

another person acting in another way? This is an impossible assumption.

In the parallelism of Wundt we have the basis for his account of language. Wundt assumed a

physical situation which has a certain import for the conduct of the form, and on the other hand he

assumed a psychical complex of ideas which are in a certain sense the expression of physiological

or biological values. His problem is to get out of this situation language as significant

communication.

There are such situations as that represented by the conversation of gestures to which I have

referred, situations in which certain phases of the act become stimuli to the forms involved in it to

carry out their part in the act. Now these parts of the act which are stimuli for the other forms in their

social activity are gestures. Gestures are then that part of the act which is responsible for its

influence upon other forms. The gesture in some sense stands for the act as far as it affects the

other form. The threat of violence, such as a clenched fist, is the stimulus to the other form for

defense or flight. It carries with it the import of the act itself. I am not referring to import in terms of

reflective consciousness, but in terms of behavior. For the observer the gesture means the danger

and the response of the individual to that danger. It calls out a certain sort of an act. If we assume a

consciousness in which there is not only present the stimulus in the form of sensation but also an

idea, then there is in the mind the sensation in which this stimulus appears, a vision of the clenched

fist, and besides that the idea of the attack. The clenched fist in so far as it calls out that idea may

be said to mean the danger.

Now the problem is to get this relationship between the idea and the symbol itself into the

conversation of gestures. As I pointed out before, this relationship is not given in the immediate

response of fighting or running. It may be present there, but as far as the conversation of gestures is

concerned an act of one sort calls out an act of a different sort in the other form. That is, the threat

which is involved leads, we will say, to flight. The idea of flight is not the idea of attack. In the

conversation of gestures there is the preparation for the full social process involving the actions in

different forms, and the gestures, which are the parts of the act, serve to stimulate the other forms.

They call out acts different from themselves. While they may call out acts which are alike, as a rule

the response is different from the stimulus itself. The cry of a child calls out the response of the care

of the mother; the one is fear and the other protection, solicitude. The response is not in any sense

identical with the other act. If there is an idea, in the Wundtian sense, the psychical content that

answers to a certain particular stimulus, that will not get its reflection in the response.

What language seems to carry is a set of symbols answering to certain content which is measurably

identical in the experience of the different individuals. If there is to be communication as such the

symbol has to mean the same thing to all individuals involved. If a number of individuals respond in

different ways to the stimulus, the stimulus means different things to them. If a number of persons

are lifting a weight, one person takes one position and another a different position. If it is a

cooperative process requiring different sorts of responses, then the call on the part of one individual

to act calls out different responses in the others. The conversation of gestures does not carry with it

a symbol which has a universal significance to all the different individuals. It may be quite effective

without that, since the stimulus which one individual gives may be the proper stimulus to ca I out

different responses in the individuals in the group. It is not essential that the individuals should give

an identical meaning to the particular stimulus in order that each may properly respond. People get

into a crowd and move this way, and that way; they adjust themselves to the people coming toward

them, as we say, unconsciously. They move in an intelligent fashion with reference to each other,

and perhaps all of them think of something entirely different, but they do find in the gestures of

others, their attitudes and movements, adequate stimuli for different responses. This illustrates a

conversation of gestures in which there is cooperative activity without any symbol that means the

same thing to all. Of course, it is possible for intelligent individuals under such conditions to translate

these gestures into significant symbols, but one need not stop to translate into terms of that sort.

Such a universal discourse is not at all essential to the conversation of gestures in cooperative

conduct.

Such cooperative conduct is presumably the only type of conduct which one finds among the ants

and bees. In these very complex societies there is an interrelationship of different forms that

seemingly is as complex as human conduct in many respects. There are societies of a million

individuals in some of the large ant nests, and divided up into different groups with different

functions. What is a stimulus to action for one leads to a different response in another. There is

cooperative activity, but no evidence of any significant language in the conduct of these insects. It is,

of course, a field in which a great deal of work has to be done, but still there has been no evidence

found of any significant symbols.

I want to make clear the difference between those two situations. There can be a high degree of

intelligence, as we use that term, in the conduct of animals without any significant symbols, without

any presentation of meanings as such. What is essential is cooperative activity, so that the gesture

of one form calls out the proper response to others. But the gesture of one may call out very

different responses on the part of other forms, and yet there may be no common meaning which all

the different forms give to any particular gesture. There is no common symbol that for the ants

means food. Food means a great many things, things that have to be gathered, that have to be

stored, that have to be carried by the workers and placed in the mouths of the fighters. There is no

evidence that there is any symbol that means food as such. The sight, the odor of food, and its

position lead to a certain response. An ant picks a food object up and staggers back to the nest with

it. Later it means something to be eaten, it means a whole series of activities. The odor along the

path is a stimulus to other insects following along the path, but there is no symbol that means "path"

to such a group. The odor of a strange form in the nest means attack from other forms, but if a

strange ant is dipped in liquid formed by crushing ants from the nest and then placed in the nest

there is no attack, even though his form is very much larger. The odor does not mean an enemy as

such. Contrast these two situations: in one there is a highly complex social activity in which the

gestures are simply stimuli to the appropriate response of the whole group; in the human situation

there is a different response which is mediated by means of particular symbols or particular

gestures which have the same meaning for all members of a group. Here the cry of an enemy is not

simply a stimulus to attack. It means that a person of a different race, of a different community, is

present, and that there is warfare going on. It has the same meaning to all individuals and that

meaning may mediate a whole series of different responses.

As I have said, the problem from Wundt's standpoint is to get this second character over into the

more primitive conversation of gestures, or conduct which is mediated by a conversation of

gestures. A mere intelligent response on the part of the different members of a group to a single

stimulus (to what to the observer is a single stimulus) does not carry with it any communication. Now

how is one to reach genuine language? Wundt starts off with the assumption that there are

psychical conditions that answer to certain stimuli, and an association between them. Certain sights,

odors, and especially sounds are associated with certain ideas. If, when a person uses a certain

sound, he has that idea in his own mind, and the gesture that he uses, say a vocal gesture, calls out

the same gesture in the other, then that gesture in the other person will call out the same idea in

him. Say the word "enemy" calls out a hostile response. Now, when I say "enemy" it calls out the

same response in your mind that it calls out in mine. There we would have a particular symbol that

has a common meaning. If all members of the group were so constituted that it has this meaning,

then there would be a basis for communication by means of significant symbols.

The difficulty in this analysis to which I have been referring is to account for a particular gesture

calling out the same gesture in another individual, even if we assume that this same idea is

associated with the same vocal gesture in another individual. Assuming that the word "enemy"

means hostility, how can the situation arise in which one person says "enemy," and the other person

says "enemy" too? Where one person says is enemy" one individual will fight and another will run

away. There we have two different significations answering to the sound. What we want to get is the

one stimulus which has a certain psychical content calling out the same stimulus in another form,

and so the same content. We seem to have the beginnings of that process among the talking birds.

One stimulus seems to call out the same stimulus in the conduct of the other form. What the

psychical accompaniment is in the birds, of course, we cannot tell, but we can record that they seem

to have no such signification as they have in our experience. The parrot does not mean what the

sentences mean to us. We have noted, however, that the canary's melody can be taken over by the

sparrow, and this seemingly imitative process we must soon discuss in detail.

We argued that there is no evidence of any general tendency on the part of forms to imitate each

other. If one attempts to state such a tendency it breaks down mechanically. It would mean that we

have a tendency to do the same thing that other people are doing, and also that these tendencies

are not only in our nature, but also that they are attached to certain specific stimuli which mean what

the other people are doing. The sight of one person doing something would be a stimulus to another

person to do the same thing. We should have to assume that what the person is doing is already a

reaction that is in the nature of the imitating individual. It would mean that we have in our nature

already all of these various activities, and that they are called out by the sight of other people doing

the same thing. It is a perfectly impossible assumption.

When the psychologist came to analyze imitation he restricted it to the field in which people

happened to be doing the same thing. If one person is running he may be said to arouse the

stimulus for other people to run at the same time. We do assume that the sight of one animal

actually running is the stimulus to other animals to run. That is very important for the preservation of

animals that go in droves. Cattle grazing in a pasture all drift along together. One animal left by

himself will be nervous and will not graze, but if put with other animals it is again normal. It does

more readily what it is doing provided it is in a group. The tendency to drift together is not an

impossible sort of an instinct, since we can conceive that the movement of animals in a certain

direction should be a stimulus to other animals. That is about all that there is in the "herding"

instinct, if reduced down to something concrete in the action of the form itself The animal acts more

nominally when with others in the same group. He will feed better than otherwise. But when you

come to some specific act about all you can find is that the animals do tend to move in the same

direction. This may lead to a stampede in the herd. Something of that sort is involved in the so-

called "sentinel." One animal, a little more sensitive than the others, lifts his head and starts to run

away, and the other animals do tend to move with the sentinel form. It is not, of course, imitation in

the sense of copying; for one animal is not copying the other animal. The one animal simply tends to

run when the other does. If a cat is put in a puzzle box and the cat does get to the point where it

opens the door by a lever action and does that often enough, it will strike that lever the first thing.

Now, if another cat is put in, and where it can see the first cat, it will not imitate it. There is no

evidence that what one animal does becomes a stimulus to the other animal to do the same thing.

There is no direct imitative activity.

There does however, seem to be a tendency to imitate among men, and in particular to reproduce

vocal gestures. We find the latter tendency among birds as well as among men. If you go into a

locality where there is a peculiar dialect and remain there for a length of time you find yourself

speaking the same dialect, and it may be something which you did not want to do. The simplest way

of stating it is to say that you unconsciously imitate. The same thing is also true of various other

mannerisms. If you think of a certain person you are very apt to find yourself speaking as the other

person spoke. Any mannerism which the individual has is one which you find yourself tending to

carry out when the person comes to your mind. That is what we call "imitation," and what is curious

is that there is practically no indication of such behavior on the part of lower forms. You can teach

the sparrow to sing as a canary but you have to keep that sparrow constantly listening to a canary. It

does not take place readily. The mocking bird does seem to take up the calls of other birds. It

seems to be peculiarly endowed in this particular way. But in general the taking over of the

processes of others is not natural to lower forms. Imitation seems to belong to the human form,

where it has reached some sort of independent conscious existence.

But "Imitation" gives no solution for the origin of language. We have to come back to some situation

out of which we can reach some symbol that will have an identical meaning, and we cannot get it

out of a mere instinct of imitation, as such. There is no evidence that the gesture generally tends to

call out the same gesture in the other organism.

Imitation as the mere tendency on the part of an organism to reproduce what it sees or hears other

organisms doing is mechanically impossible; one cannot conceive an organism as so constructed

that all the sights and sounds which reach it would arouse in the organism tendencies to reproduce

what it sees and hears in those fields of experience. Such an assumption is possible only in terms of

an older psychology. If one assumed that the mind is made up out of ideas, that the character of our

conscious experience is nothing but a set of impressions of objects, and if one adjusts to these

impressions, so to speak, a motor tendency, one might conceive of that as being one which would

seek to reproduce what was seen and heard. But as soon as you recognize in the organism a set of

acts which carry out the processes which are essential to the life of the form, and undertake to put

the sensitive or sensory experience into that scheme, the sensitive experience, as stimulus we will

say to the response, cannot be a stimulus simply to reproduce what is seen and heard; it is rather a

stimulus for the carrying out of the organic process. The animal sees or smells the food and hears

the enemy, the parent form sees and hears the infant form-these are all stimuli to the forms to carry

through the processes which are essential to the species to which they belong. They are acts which

go beyond the organism taken by itself, but they belong to cooperative processes in which groups of

animals act together, and they are the fulfillment of the processes which are essential to the life of

the forms. One cannot fit into any such scheme as that a-particular impulse of imitation, and if one

undertakes to present the mechanism which would make intelligible that process, even the

intricacies of the central nervous system would be inadequate. An individual would be in such a

situation as one of Gulliver's figures who undertook to save his breath by not talking, and so carried

a bagful of all the objects about which he would want to talk. One would have to carry about an

enormous bagful, so to speak, of such possible actions if they were to be represented in the central

nervous system. Imitation, however, cannot be taken as a primitive response.

Endnotes

1. [Les lois de I'imitation.]

9. THE VOCAL GESTURE AND THE SIGNIFICANT SYMBOL

The concept of imitation has been used very widely in the field of the vocal gesture. There we do

seem to have a tendency on the part of certain organisms to reproduce sounds which are heard.

Human beings and the talking birds provide illustrations. But even here "imitation" is hardly an

immediate tendency, since it takes quite a while to get one bird to reproduce the song, or for the

child to take over the phonetic gesture of the human form. The vocal gesture is a stimulus to some

sort of response; it is not simply a stimulus to the calling out of the sound which the animal hears. Of

course, the bird can be put into a situation where it may reach the mere repetition of that which it

hears. If we assume that one sound that the bird makes calls out another sound, when the bird

hears this first sound it responds by the second. If one asked why one note answers to another, one

would have to go to some process where the vocal gesture would have a different physiological

significance. An illustration is the cooing process of pigeons. There one note calls out another note

in the other form. It is a conversation of gestures, where a certain attitude expressing itself in a

certain note calls out another attitude with its corresponding note. If the form is to call out in itself the

same note that it calls out in the other, it must act as the other acts, and use the note that the other

makes use of in order to reproduce the particular note in question. So you find, if you put the

sparrow and the canary together in neighboring cages, where the call of one calls out a series of

notes in the other, that if the sparrow finds itself uttering a note such as a canary does, the vocal

gesture here must be more or less of the same type. Where that situation exists, the sparrow in its

own process of vocalization makes use of such notes as those which the canary makes use of. The

sparrow is influencing not only the canary, but also in hearing itself it is influencing itself. The note

that it is making use of, if it is identical with the note of the canary, calls out a response in itself that

the canary's note would call out in itself. Those are the situations that have become emphasized

and maintained where one has what we term "imitation." Were the sparrow is actually making use of

a phonetic vocal gesture of the canary through a common note in the repertoire of both of them,

then the sparrow would be tending to bring out in itself the same response that would be brought out

by the note of the canary. That, then would give an added weight in the experience of the sparrow to

that particular response.

If the vocal gesture which the sparrow makes is identical with that which it hears when the canary

makes use of the same note, then it is seen that its own response will be in that case identical with

the response to the canary's note. It is this which gives such peculiar importance to the vocal

gesture: it is one of those social stimuli which affect the form that makes it in the same fashion that it

affects the form which made by another. That is, we can hear ourselves talking, and the import of

what we say is the same to ourselves that it is to others. If the sparrow makes use of a canary's note

it is calling out in itself the response that the canary's note calls out. In so far, then , ad the sparrow

does make use of the same note that the canary makes use of, it will emphasize the vocal

responses to this note because they will be present not only when the canary makes use of it but

also when the sparrow makes use of it. In such a case it is presupposed that the particular stimulus

is present in the form itself, that is, that the vocal stimulus which calls out the particular note which is

learned is present in the repertoire of the sparrow as well as in that of the canary. If one recognizes

that, then one can see that those particular notes answering to this stimulus will be, so to speak,

written in, underlined. They will become habitual. We are supporting that one note calls out another,

a stimulus calls out a response. If this note which calls out this response is used not only by the

canary but also by the sparrow, then whenever the sparrow hears the canary it makes use of that

particular note, and if it has the same note in its own repertoire then there is a double tendency to

bring about this particular response, so that it becomes more frequently made use of and becomes

more definitely a part of the singing of the sparrow than otherwise. Such are the situations in which

the sparrow does take the role of the canary in so far as there are certain notes to which it tends to

react just as the canary does. There is a double weight, so to speak, upon this particular note or

series of notes. It is in such a fashion that we can understand the learning by the sparrow of the

canary's song. One has to assume a like tendency in the two forms if one is going to get any

mechanism for imitation at all.

To illustrate this further let us go back to the conversation of gestures in the dog-fight. There the

stimulus which one dog gets from the other is to a response which is different from the response of

the stimulating form. One dog is attacking the other, and is ready to spring at the other dog's throat;

the reply on the part of the second dog is to change its position, perhaps to spring at the throat of

the first dog. There is a conversation of gestures, a reciprocal shifting of the dogs' positions and

attitudes. In such a process there would be no mechanism for imitation. One dog does not imitate

the other. The second dog assumes a different attitude to avoid the spring of the first dog. The

stimulus in the attitude of one dog is not to call out the response in itself that it calls out in the other.

The first dog is influenced by its own attitude, but it is simply carrying out the process of a prepared

spring, so that the influence on the dog is simply in reinforcing the process which is going on. It is

not a stimulus to the dog to take the attitude of the other dog.

When, however, one is making use of the vocal gesture, if we assume that one vocal clement is a

stimulus to a certain reply, then when the animal that makes use of that vocal gesture hears the

resulting sound he will have aroused in himself at least a tendency to respond in the same way as

the other animal responds. It may be a very slight tendency-the lion does not appreciably frighten

itself by its roar. The roar has an effect of frightening the animal he is attacking, and it has also the

character of a challenge under certain conditions. But when we come to such elaborate processes

of vocalization as those of the song of birds, there one vocal gesture calls out another vocal gesture.

These, of course, have their function in the intercourse of the birds, but the gestures themselves

become of peculiar importance. The vocalization plays a very large part in such a process as

wooing, and one call tends to call out another note. In the case of the lion's roar the response is not

so much a vocal sound as it is a flight, or, if you like, a fight. The response is not primarily a vocal

response. It is rather the action of the form itself. But in the song of birds, where vocalization is

carried out in an elaborate fashion, the stimulus does definitely call out a certain response so that

the bird when singing is influenced by its own stimulus to a response which will be like that which is

produced in another form. That response which is produced in itself, since it is also produced by the

influence of others, gets twice the emphasis that it would have if it were just called out by the note of

others. It is called out more frequently than the response to other sounds. It is this that gives the

seeming evidence of imitation in the case of sounds or vocal gestures.[1] The stimulus that calls out

a particular sound may be found not only in the other forms of the group but also in the repertoire of

the particular bird which uses the vocal gesture. This stimulus A calls out the response B. Now if this

stimulus A is not like B, and if we assume that A calls out B, then if A is used by other forms these

forms will respond in the fashion B. If this form also uses the vocal gesture A, it will be calling out in

itself the response B, so that the response B will be emphasized over against other responses

because it is called out not only by the vocal gestures of other forms but also by the form itself. This

would never take place unless there were an identity represented by A, in this case an identity of

stimuli.

In the case of the vocal gesture the form hears its own stimulus just as when this is used by other

forms, so it tends to respond also to its own stimulus as it responds to the stimulus of other forms.

That is, birds tend to sing to themselves, babies to talk to themselves. The sounds they make are

stimuli to make other sounds. Where there is a specific sound that calls out a specific response,

then if this sound is made by other forms it calls out this response in the form in question. If the

sparrow makes use of this particular sound then the response to that sound will be one which will be

heard more frequently than another response. In that way there will be selected out of the sparrow's

repertoire those elements which are found in the song of the canary, and gradually such selection

would build up in the song of the sparrow those elements which are common to both, without

assuming a particular tendency of imitation. There is here a selective process by which is picked out

what is common. "Imitation" depends upon the individual influencing himself as others influence

him, so that he is under the influence not only of the other but also of himself in so far as he uses

the same vocal gesture.

The vocal gesture, then, has an importance which no other gesture has. We cannot see ourselves

when our face assumes a certain expression. If we hear ourselves speak we are more apt to pay

attention. One hears himself when he is irritated using a tone that is of an irritable quality, and so

catches himself. But in the facial expression of irritation the stimulus is not one that calls out an

expression in the individual which it calls out in the other. One is more apt to catch himself up and

control himself in the vocal gesture than in the expression of the countenance.

It is only the actor who uses bodily expressions as a means of looking as he wants others to feel. He

gets a response which reveals to him how he looks by continually using a mirror. He registers anger,

he registers love, he registers this, that, or the

other attitude, and he examines himself in a glass to see how he does so. When he later makes use

of the gesture it is present as a mental image. He realizes that that particular expression does call

out fright. If we exclude vocal gestures, it is only by the use of the mirror that one could reach the

position where he responds to his own gestures as other people respond. But the vocal gesture is

one which does give one this capacity for answering to one's own stimulus as another would

answer.

If there is any truth in the old axiom that the bully is always the coward, it will be found to rest on the

fact that one arouses in himself that attitude of fear which his bullying attitude arouses in another, so

that when put into a particular situation which calls his bluff, his own attitude is found to be that of

the others. If one's own attitude of giving way to the bullying attitude of others is one that arouses

the bullying attitude, he has in that degree aroused the attitude of bullying in himself. There is a

certain amount of truth in this when we come back to the effect upon one's self of the gesture of

which he makes use. In so far as one calls out the attitude in himself that one calls out in others, the

response is picked out and strengthened. That is the only basis for what we call imitation. It is not

imitation in the sense of simply doing what one sees another person doing. The mechanism is that

of an individual calling out in himself the response which he calls out in another, consequently giving

greater weight to those responses than to the other responses, and gradually building up those sets

of responses into a dominant whole. That may be done, as we say, unconsciously. The sparrow

does not know it is imitating the canary. It is just a gradual picking up of the notes which are

common to both of them. And that is true wherever there is imitation.

So far as exclamatory sounds are concerned (and they would answer in our own vocal gestures to

what is found in those of animals), the response to these does not enter into immediate

conversation, and the influence of these responses on the individual are comparatively slight. It

seems to be difficult to bring them into relationship with significant speech. We are not consciously

frightened when we speak angrily to someone else, but the meaning of what we say is always

present to us when we speak. The response in the individual to an exclamatory cry which is of the

same sort as that in the other does not play any important part in the conduct of the form. The

response of the lion to its roar is of very little importance in the response of the form itself, but our

response to the meaning of what we say is constantly attached to our conversation. We must be

constantly responding to the gesture we make if we are to carry on successful vocal conversation.

The meaning of what we are saying is the tendency to respond to it. You ask somebody to bring a

visitor a chair. You arouse the tendency to get the chair in the other, but if he is slow to act you get

the chair yourself. The response to the vocal gesture is the doing of a certain thing, and you arouse

that same tendency in yourself. You are always replying to yourself, just as other people reply. You

assume that in some degree there must be identity in the reply. It is action on a common basis.

I have contrasted two situations to show what a tong road speech or communication has to travel

from the situation where there is nothing but vocal cries over to the situation in which significant

symbols are utilized. What is peculiar to the latter is that the individual responds to his own stimulus

in the same way as other people respond. Then the stimulus becomes significant; then one is

saying something. As far as a parrot is concerned, its "speech" means nothing, but where one

significantly says something with his own vocal process he is saying it to himself as well as to

everybody else within reach of his voice. It is only the vocal gesture that is fitted for this sort of

communication, because it is only the vocal gesture to which one responds or tends to respond as

another person tends to respond to it. It is true that the language of the hands is of the same

character. One sees one's self using the gestures which those who are deaf make use of. They

influence one the same way as they influence others. Of course, the same is true of any form of

script. But such symbols have all been developed out of the specific vocal gesture, for that is the

basic gesture which does influence the individual as it influences others. Where it does not become

significant is in the vocalization of the two birds.2 Nevertheless, the same type of process is present,

the stimulus of the one bird tending to call out the response in another bird which it tends to call out,

however slightly, in the bird itself.

Endnotes

1. An attempt was made by Baldwin to carry back imitation to a fundamental biological process

- a tendency on the part of the organism to reinstate a pleasurable sensation..... In the

process of mastication the very process of chewing reinstates the stimulus, brings back the

flavor. Baldwin would call this self imitation. This process, if it takes place at all, does not by

any means meet the situation with which we are dealing (1912).

2. [See Supplementary Essay III for discussion.]

10. THOUGHT, COMMUNICATION, AND THE SIGNIFICANT SYMBOL

We have contended that there is no particular faculty of imitation in the sense that the sound or the

sight of another's response is itself a stimulus to carry out the same reaction, but rather that if there

is already present in the individual an action like the action of another, then there is a situation which

makes imitation possible. What is necessary now to carry through that imitation is that the conduct

and the gesture of the individual which calls out a response in the other should also tend to call out

the same response in himself. In the dog-fight this is not present: the attitude in the one dog does

not tend to call out the same attitude in the other. In some respects that actually may occur in the

case of two boxers. The man who makes a feint is calling out a certain blow from his opponent, and

that act of his own does have that meaning to him, that is, he has in some sense initiated the same

act in himself. It does not go clear through, but he has stirred up the centers in his central nervous

system which would lead to his making the same blow that his opponent is led to make, so that he

calls out in himself, or tends to call out, the same response which he calls out in the other. There

you have the basis for so-called imitation. Such is the process which is so widely recognized at

present in manners of speech, of dress, and of attitudes.

We are more or less unconsciously seeing ourselves as others see us. We are unconsciously

addressing ourselves as others address us; in the same way as the sparrow takes up the note of the

canary we pick up the dialects about us. Of course, there must be these particular responses in our

own mechanism. We are calling out in the other person something we are calling out in ourselves,

so that unconsciously we take over these attitudes. We are unconsciously putting ourselves in the

place of others and acting as others act. I want simply to isolate the general mechanism here,

because it is of very fundamental importance in the development of what we call self-consciousness

and the appearance of the self. We are, especially through the use of the vocal gestures, continually

arousing in ourselves those responses which we call out in other persons, so that we are taking the

attitudes of the other persons into our own conduct. The critical importance of language in the

development of human experience lies in this fact that the stimulus is one that can react upon the

speaking individual as it reacts upon the other.

A behaviorist, such as Watson, holds that all of our thinking is vocalization. In thinking we are simply

starting to use certain words. That is in a sense true. However, Watson does not take into account

all that is involved here, namely, that these stimuli are the essential elements in elaborate social

processes and carry with them the value of those social processes. The vocal process as such has

this great importance, and it is fair to assume that the vocal process, together with the intelligence

and thought that go with it, is not simply a playing of particular vocal elements against each other.

Such a view neglects the social context of language.[1]

The importance, then, of the vocal stimulus lies in this fact that the individual can hear what he says

and in hearing what he says is tending to respond as the other person responds. When we speak

now of this response on the part of the individual to the others we come back to the situation of

asking some person to do something. We ordinarily express that by saying that one knows what he

is asking you to do. Take the illustration of asking someone to do something, and then doing it one's

self. Perhaps the person addressed does not hear you or acts slowly, and then you carry the action

out yourself. You find in yourself, in this way, the same tendency which you are asking you that

same response which you stirred up in the other individual. How difficult it is to show someone else

how to do something which you know how to do yourself! The slowness of the response makes it

hard to restrain yourself from doing what you are teaching. You have aroused the same response in

yourself as you arouse in the other individual.

In seeking for an explanation of this, we ordinarily assume a certain group of centers in the nervous

system which are connected with each other, and which express themselves in the action. If we try

to find in a central nervous system something that answers to our word "chair," what we should find

would be presumably simply an organization of a whole group of possible reactions so connected

that if one starts in one direction one will carry out one process, if in another direction one will carry

out another process. The chair is primarily what one sits down in. It is a physical object at a

distance. One may move toward an object at a distance and then enter upon the process of sitting

down when one reaches it. There is a stimulus which excites certain paths which cause the

individual to go toward that object and to sit down. Those centers are in some degree physical.

There is, it is to be noted, an influence of the later act on the earlier act. The later process which is

to go on has already been initiated and that later process has its influence on the earlier process

(the one that takes place before this process, already initiated, can be completed). Now, such an

organization of a great group of nervous elements as will lead to conduct with reference to the

objects about us is what one would find in the central nervous system answering to what we call an

object. The complications are very great, but the central nervous system has an almost infinite

number of elements in it, and they can be organized not only in spatial connection with each other,

but also from a temporal standpoint. In virtue of this last fact, our conduct is made up of a series of

steps which follow each other, and the later steps may be already started and influence the earlier

ones.[2] The thing we are going to do is playing back on what we are doing now. That organization

in the neural elements in reference to what we call a physical object would be what we call a

conceptual object stated in terms of the central nervous system.

In rough fashion it is the initiation of such a set of organized sets of responses that answers to what

we call the idea or concept of a thing. If one asked what the idea of a dog is, and tried to find that

idea in the central nervous system, one would find a whole group of responses which are more or

less connected together by definite paths so that when one uses the term "dog" he does tend to call

out this group of responses. A dog is a possible playmate, a possible enemy, one's own property or

somebody else 's. There is a whole series of possible responses. There are certain types of these

responses which are in all of us, and there are others which vary with the individuals, but there is

always an organization of the responses which can be called out by the term "dog." So if one is

speaking of a dog to another person he is arousing in himself this set of responses which he is

arousing in the other individual.

It is, of course, the relationship of this symbol, this vocal gesture, to such a set of responses in the

individual himself as well as in the other that makes of that vocal gesture what I call a significant

symbol. A symbol does tend to call out in the individual a group of reactions such as it calls out in

the other, but there is something further that is involved in its being a significant symbol: this

response within one's self to such a word as " chair," or "dog," is one which is a stimulus to the

individual as well as a response. This is what, of course, is involved in what we term the meaning of

a thing, or its significance.[3] We often act with reference to objects in what we call an intelligent

fashion, although we can act without the meaning of the object being present in our experience.

One can start to dress for dinner, as they tell of the absent-minded college professor, and find

himself in his pajamas in bed. A certain process of undressing was started and carried out

mechanically; he did not recognize the meaning of what he was doing. He intended to go to dinner

and found he had gone to bed. The meaning involved in his action was not present. The steps in

this case were all intelligent steps which controlled his conduct with reference to later action, but he

did not think about what he was doing. The later action was not a stimulus to his response, but just

carried itself out when it was once started.

When we speak of the meaning of what we are doing we are making the response itself that we are

on the point of carrying out a stimulus to our action. It becomes a stimulus to a later stage of action

which is to take place from the point of view of this particular response. In the case of the boxer the

blow that he is starting to direct toward his opponent is to call out a certain response which will open

up the guard of his opponent so that he can strike. The meaning is a stimulus for the preparation of

the real blow he expects to deliver. The response which he calls out in himself (the guarding

reaction) is the stimulus to him to strike where an opening is given. This action which he has

initiated already in himself thus becomes a stimulus for his later response. He knows what his

opponent is going to do, since the guarding movement is one which is already aroused, and

becomes a stimulus to strike where the opening is given. The meaning would not have been present

in his conduct unless it became a stimulus to strike where the favorable opening appears.

Such is the difference between intelligent conduct on the part of animals and what we call a

reflective individual.[4] We say the animal does not think. He does not put himself in a position for

which he is responsible; he does not put himself in the place of the other person and say, in effect,

"He will act in such a way and I will act in this way." If the individual can act in this way, and the

attitude which he calls out in himself can become a stimulus to him for another act, we have

meaningful conduct. Where the response of the other person is called out and becomes a stimulus

to control his action, then he has the meaning of the other person's act in his own experience. That

is the general mechanism of what we term "thought," for in order that thought may exist there must

be symbols, vocal gestures generally, which arouse in the individual himself the response which he

is calling out in the other, and such that from the point of view of that response he is able to direct

his later conduct. It involves not only communication in the sense in which birds and animals

communicate with each other, but also an arousal in the individual himself of the response which he

is calling out in the other individual, a taking of the role of the other, a tendency to act as the other

person acts. One participates in the same process the other person is carrying out and controls his

action with reference to that participation. It is that which constitutes the meaning of an object,

namely, the common response in one's self as well as in the other person, which becomes, in turn,

a stimulus to one's self.

If you conceive of the mind as just a sort of conscious substance in which there are certain

impressions and states, and hold that one of those states is a universal, then a word becomes

purely arbitrary-it is just a symbol.[5] You can then take words and pronounce them backwards, as

children do; there seems to be absolute freedom of arrangement and language seems to be an

entirely mechanical thing that lies outside of the process of intelligence. If you recognize that

language is, however, just a part of a cooperative process, that part which does lead to an

adjustment to the response of the other so that the whole activity can go on, then language has only

a limited range of arbitrariness. If you are talking to another person you are, perhaps, able to scent

the change in his attitude by something that would not strike a third person at all. You may know his

mannerism, and that becomes a gesture to you, a part of the response of the individual. There is a

certain range possible within the gesture as to what is to serve as the symbol. We may say that a

whole set of separate symbols with one meaning are acceptable; but they always are gestures, that

is, they are always parts of the act of the individual which reveal what he is going to do to the other

person so that when the person utilizes the clue he calls out in himself the attitude of the other.

Language is not ever arbitrary in the sense of simply denoting a bare state of consciousness by a

word. What particular part of one's act will serve to direct cooperative activity is more or less

arbitrary. Different phases of the act may do it. What seems unimportant in itself may be highly

important in revealing what the attitude is. In that sense one can speak of the gesture itself as

unimportant, but it is of great importance as to what the gesture is going to reveal. This is seen in

the difference between the purely intellectual character of the symbol and its emotional character. A

poet depends upon the latter; for him language is rich and full of values which we, perhaps, utterly

ignore. In trying to express a message in something less than ten words, we merely want to convey

a certain meaning, while the poet is dealing with what is really living tissue, the emotional throb in

the expression itself. There is, then, a great range in our use of language; but whatever phase of

this range is used is a part of a social process, and it is always that part by means of which we affect

ourselves as we affect others and mediate the social situation through this understanding of what

we are saying. That is fundamental for any language; if it is going to be language one has to

understand what he is saying, has to affect himself as he affects others.

Endnotes

1. Gestures, if carried back to the matrix from which they spring, are always found to inhere in

or involve a larger social act of which they are phases. In dealing with communication we

have first to recognize its earliest origins in the unconscious conversation of gestures.

Conscious communication-conscious conversation of gestures-arises when gestures

become signs, that is, when they come to carry for the individuals making them and the

individuals responding to them, definite rneanings or significations in terms of the

subsequent behavior of the individuals making them; so that, by serving as prior indications,

to the individuals responding to them, of the subsequent behavior of the individuals making

them, they make possible the mutual adjustment of the various individual components of the

social act to one another, and also, by calling forth in the individuals making them the same

responses implicitly that they call forth explicitly in the individuals to whom they are made,

they render possible the rise of selfconsciousness in connection with this mutual adjustment.

2. [See Sections 13, 16.]

3. The inclusion of the matrix or complex of attitudes and responses constituting any given

social situation or act, within the experience of any one of the individuals implicated in that

situation or act (the inclusion within his experience of his attitudes toward other individuals,

of their responses to his attitudes toward them, of their attitudes toward him, and of his

responses to these attitudes) is all that an idea amounts to; or at any rate is the only basis

for its occurrence or existence "in the mind" of the given individual.

In the case of the unconscious conversation of gestures, or in the case of the process of

communication carried on by means of it, none of the individuals participating in it is

conscious or the meaning of the conversation-that meaning does not appear in the

experience of any one of the separate individuals involved in the conversation or carrying it

on; whereas, in the case of the conscious conversation of gestures, or in the case of the

process of communication carried on by means of it, each of the individuals participating in it

is conscious of the meaning of the conversation, precisely because that meaning does

appear in his experience, and because such appearance is what consciousness of that

meaning implies.

4. [For the nature of animal conduct see "Concerning Animal Perception," Psychological

Review, XIV (I 907), 383 ff.]

5. Muller attempts to put the values of thought into language; but this attempt is fallacious,

because language has those values only as the most effective mechanism of thought merely

because it carries the conscious or significant conversation of gestures to its highest and

most perfect development. There must be some sort of an implicit attitude (that is, a

response which is initiated without being fully carried out) in the organism making the

gesture-an attitude which answers to the overt response to the gesture on the part of

another individual, and which corresponds to the attitude called forth or aroused in this other

organism by the gesture-if thought is to develop in the organism making the gesture. And it

is the central nervous system which provides the mechanism for such implicit attitudes or

responses.

The identification of language with reason is in one sense an absurdity, but in another sense

it is valid. It is valid, namely, in the sense that the process of language brings the total social

act into the experience of the given individual as himself involved in the act, and thus makes

the process of reason possible. But though the process of reason is and must be carried on

in terms of the process of language-in terms, that is, of words -it is not simply constituted by

the latter.

11. MEANING [1]

We are particularly concerned with intelligence on the human level, that is, with the adjustment to

one another of the acts of different human individuals within the human social process; an

adjustment which takes place through communication: by gestures on the lower planes of human

evolution, and by significant symbols (gestures which possess meanings and are hence more than

mere substitute stimuli) on the higher planes of human evolution.

The central factor in such adjustment is "meaning." Meaning arises and lies within the field of the

relation between the gesture of a given human organism and the subsequent behavior of this

organism as indicated to another human organism by that gesture. If that gesture does so indicate

to another organism the subsequent (or resultant) behavior of the given organism, then it has

meaning. In other words, the relationship between a given stimulus-as a gesture-and the later

phases of the social act of which it is an early (if not the initial) phase constitutes the field within

which meaning originates and exists. Meaning is thus a development of something objectively there

as a relation between certain phases of the social act; it is not a psychical addition to that act and it

is not an "idea" as traditionally conceived. A gesture by one organism, the resultant of the social act

in which the gesture is an early phase, and the response of another organism to the gesture, are the

relata in a triple or threefold relationship of gesture to first organism, of gesture to second organism,

and of gesture to subsequent phases of the given social act; and this threefold relationship

constitutes the matrix within which meaning arises, or which develops into the field of meaning. The

gesture stands for a certain resultant of the social act, a resultant to which there is a definite

response on the part of the individuals involved therein; so that meaning is given or stated in terms

of response. Meaning is implicit-if not always explicit-in the relationship among the various phases

of the social act to which it refers, and out of which it develops. And its development takes place in

terms of symbolization at the human evolutionary level.

We have been concerning ourselves, in general, with the social process of experience and behavior

as it appears in the calling out by the act of one organism of an adjustment to that act in the

responsive act of another organism. We have seen that the nature of meaning is intimately

associated with the social process as it thus appears, that meaning involves this three-fold relation

among phases of the social act as the context in which it arises and develops: this relation of the

gesture of one organism to the adjustive response of another organism (also implicated in the given

act), and to the completion of the given act-- a relation such that the second organism responds to

the gesture of the first as indicating or referring to the completion of the given act. For example, the

chick's response to the cluck of the mother hen is a response to the meaning of the cluck; the cluck

refers to danger or to food, as the case may be, and has this meaning or connotation for the chick.

The social process, as involving communication, is in a sense responsible for the appearance of

new objects in the field of experience of the individual organisms implicated in that process. Organic

processes or responses in a sense constitute the objects to which they are responses; that is to say,

any given biological organism is in a way responsible for the existence (in the sense of the

meanings they have for it) of the objects to which it physiologically and chemically responds. There

would, for example, be no food-no edible objects-if there were no organisms which could digest it.

And similarly, the social process in a sense constitutes the objects to which it responds, or to which

it is an adjustment. That is to say, objects are constituted in terms of meanings within the social

process of experience and behavior through the mutual adjustment to one another of the responses

or actions of the various individual organisms involved in that process, an adjustment made possible

by means of a communication which takes the form of a conversation of gestures in the earlier

evolutionary stages of that process, and of language in its later stages.

Awareness or consciousness is not necessary to the presence of meaning in the process of social

experience. A gesture on the part of one organism in any given social act calls out a response on

the part of another organism which is directly related to the action of the first organism and its

outcome; and a gesture is a symbol of the result of the given social act of one organism (the

organism making it) in so far as it is responded to by another organism (thereby also involved in that

act) as indicating that result. The mechanism of meaning is thus present in the social act before the

emergence of consciousness or awareness of meaning occurs. The act or adjustive response of the

second organism gives to the gesture of the first organism the meaning which it has.

Symbolization constitutes objects not constituted before, objects which would not exist except for

the context of social relationships wherein symbolization occurs. Language does not simply

symbolize a situation or object which is already there in advance; it makes possible the existence or

the appearance of that situation or object, for it is a part of the mechanism whereby that situation or

object is created. The social process relates the responses of one individual to the gestures of

another, as the meanings of the latter, and is thus responsible for the rise and existence of new

objects in the social situation, objects dependent upon or constituted by these meanings. Meaning is

thus not to be conceived, fundamentally, as a state of consciousness, or as a set of organized

relations existing or subsisting mentally outside the field of experience into which they enter; on the

contrary, it should be conceived objectively, as having its existence entirely within this field itself.[2]

The response of one organism to the gesture of another in any given social act is the meaning of

that gesture, and also is in a sense responsible for the appearance or coming into being of the new

object-or new content of an old object-to which that gesture refers through the outcome of the given

social act in which it is an early phase. For, to repeat, objects are in a genuine sense constituted

within the social process of experience, by the communication and mutual adjustment of behavior

among the individual organisms which are involved in that process and which carry it on. just as in

fencing the parry is an interpretation of the thrust, so, in the social act, the adjustive response of one

organism to the gesture of another is the interpretation of that gesture by that organism-it is the

meaning of that gesture.

At the level of self-consciousness such a gesture becomes a symbol, a significant symbol. But the

interpretation of gestures is not, basically, a process going on in a mind as such, or one necessarily

involving a mind; it is an external, overt, physical, or physiological process going on in the actual

field of social experience. Meaning can be described, accounted for, or stated in terms of symbols

or language at its highest and most complex stage of development (the stage it reaches in human

experience), but language simply lifts out of the social process a situation which is logically or

implicitly there already. The language symbol is simply a significant or conscious gesture.

Two main points are being made here: (1) that the social process, through the communication which

it makes possible among the individuals implicated in it, is responsible for the appearance of a

whole set of new objects in nature, which exist in relation to it (objects, namely, of "common sense");

and (2) that the gesture of one organism and the adjustive response of another organism to that

gesture within any given social act bring out the relationship that exists between the gesture as the

beginning of the given act and the completion or resultant of the given act, to which the gesture

refers. These are the two basic and complementary logical aspects of the social process.

The result of any given social act is definitely separated from the gesture indicating it by the

response of another organism to that gesture, a response which points to the result of that act as

indicated by that gesture. This situation is all there -- is completely given-on the non-mental, non-

conscious level . 1, before the analysis of it on the mental or conscious level. Dewey says that

meaning arises through communication.[3] It is to the content to which the social process gives rise

that this statement refers; not to bare ideas or printed words as such, but to the social process which

has been so largely responsible for the objects constituting the daily environment in which we live: a

process in which communication plays the main part. That process can give rise to these new

objects in nature only in so far as it makes possible communication among the individual organisms

involved in it. And the sense in which it is responsible for their existence-indeed for the existence of

the whole world of common-sense objects-is the sense in which it determines, conditions, and

makes possible their abstraction from the total structure of events, as identities which are relevant

for everyday social behavior; and in that sense, or as having that meaning, they are existent only

relative to that behavior. In the same way, at a later, more advanced stage of its development,

communication is responsible for the existence of the whole realm of scientific objects as well as

identities abstracted from the total structure of events by virtue of their relevance for scientific

purposes.

The logical structure of meaning, we have seen, is to be found in the threefold relationship of

gesture to adjustive response and to the resultant of the given social act. Response on the part of

the second organism to the gesture of the first is the interpretation-and brings out the meaning-of

that gesture, as indicating the resultant of the social act which it initiates, and in which both

organisms are thus involved. This threefold or triadic relation between gesture, adjustive response,

and resultant of the social act which the gesture initiates is the basis of meaning; for the existence of

meaning depends upon the fact that the adjustive response of the second organism is directed

toward the resultant of the given social act as initiated and indicated by the gesture of the first

organism. The basis of meaning is thus objectively there in social conduct, or in nature in its relation

to such conduct. Meaning is a content of an object which is dependent upon the relation of an

organism or group of organisms to it. It is not essentially or primarily a psychical content (a content

of mind or consciousness), for it need not be conscious at all, and is not in fact until significant

symbols are evolved in the process of human social experience. Only when it becomes identified

with such symbols does meaning become conscious. The meaning of a gesture on the part of one

organism is the adjustive response of another organism to it, as indicating the resultant of the social

act it initiates, the adjustive response of the second organism being itself directed toward or related

to the completion of that act. In other words, meaning involves a reference of the gesture of one

organism to the resultant of the social act it indicates or initiates, as adjustively responded to in this

reference by another organism; and the adjustive response of the other organism is the meaning of

the gesture.

Gestures may be either conscious (significant) or unconscious (non-significant). The conversation of

gestures is not significant below the human level, because it is not conscious, that is, not self-

conscious (though it is conscious in the sense of involving feelings or sensations). An animal as

opposed to a human form, in indicating something to, or bringing out a meaning for, another form, is

not at the same time indicating or bringing out the same thing or meaning to or for himself; for he

has no mind, no thought, and hence there is no meaning here in the significant or self-conscious

sense. A gesture is not significant when the response of another organism to it does not indicate to

the organism making it what the other organism is responding to.[4]

Much subtlety has been wasted on the problem of the meaning of meaning. It is not necessary, in

attempting to solve this problem, to have recourse to psychical states, for the nature of meaning, as

we have seen, is found to be implicit in the structure of the social act, implicit in the relations among

its three basic individual components: namely, in the triadic relation of a gesture of one individual, a

response to that gesture by a second individual, and completion of the given social act initiated by

the gesture of the first individual. And the fact that the nature of meaning is thus found to be implicit

in the structure of the social act provides additional emphasis upon the necessity, in social

psychology, of starting off with the initial assumption of an ongoing social process of experience and

behavior in which any given group of human individuals is involved, and upon which the existence

and development of their minds, selves, and self-consciousness depend.

Endnotes

1. [See also "Social Consciousness and the Consciousness of Meaning," Psychological

Bulletin, VII (1910), 397 ff.; "The Mechanism of Social Consciousness," Journal of

Philosophy, IX (1912), 401 ff.]

2. Nature has meaning and implication but not indication by symbols. The symbol is

distinguishable from the meaning it refers to. Meanings are in nature, but symbols are the

heritage of man (1924).

3. [See Experience and Nature, chap. v.]

4. There are two characters which belong to that which we term "meanings," one is

participation and the other is communicability. Meaning can arise only in so far as some

phase of the act which the individual is arousing in the other can be aroused in himself.

There is always to this extent participation. And the result of this participation is

communicability, i.e., the individual can indicate to himself what he indicates to others 'there

is communication without significance where the gesture of the individual calls out the

response in the other without calling out or tending to call out the same response in the

individual himself. Significance from the standpoint of the observer may be said to be

present in the gesture which calls out the appropriate response in the other or others within

a cooperative act, but it does not become significant to the individuals who are involved in

the act unless the tendency to the act is aroused within the individual who makes it, and

unless the individual who is directly affected by the gesture puts himself in the attitude of the

individual who makes the gesture (MS).

12. UNIVERSALITY

Our experience does recognize or find that which is typical, and this is as essential for an adequate

theory of meaning as is the element of particularity. There are not only facts of red, for example, but

there is in the experience a red which is identical so far as experience has been concerned with

some other red. One can isolate the red just as a sensation, and as such it is passing; but in

addition to that passing character there is something that we call universal, something that gives a

meaning to it. The event is a color, it is red, it is a certain kind of red-and that is something which

does not have a passing character in the statement of color itself. If we go over from particular

contents of this sort to other objects, such as a chair, a tree, a dog, we find there something that is

distinguishable from the particular object, plant, or animal that we have about us. What we

recognize in a dog is not the group of sensuous elements, but rather the character of being a dog,

and unless we have some reason for interest in this particular dog, some problem as to its

ownership or its likelihood to bite us, our relationship to the animal is to a universal-it is just a dog. If

a person asks you what you saw you reply that it was a dog. You would not know the color of the

dog; it was just a dog in general that you saw.

There is a meaning here that is given in the experience itself, and it is this meaning or universal

character with which a behavioristic psychology is supposed to have difficulty in dealing. When

there is a response to such an animal as a dog there is a response of recognition as well as a

response toward an object in the landscape; and this response of recognition is something that is

universal and not particular. Can this factor be stated in behavioristic terms? We are not, of course,

interested in philosophical implications; we are not interested in the metaphysics of the dog; but we

are interested in the recognition which would belong to any other animal of the same sort. Now, is

there a response of such a universal character in our nature that it can be said to answer to this

recognition of what we term the universal? It is the possibility of such a behavioristic statement that I

endeavor to sketch.

What the central nervous system presents is not simply a set of automatisms, that is, certain

inevitable reactions to certain specific stimuli, such as taking our hand away from a radiator that is

touched, or jumping when a loud sound occurs behind us. The nervous system provides not only the

mechanism for that sort of conduct but also for recognizing an object to which we are going to

respond; and that recognition can be stated in terms of a response that may answer to any one of a

certain group of stimuli. That is, one has a nail to drive, he reaches for the hammer and finds it

gone, and he doe's not stop to look for it, but reaches for something else he can use, a brick or a

stone, anything having the necessary weight to give momentum to the blow. Anything that he can

get hold of that will serve the purpose will be a hammer. That sort of response which involves the

grasping of a heavy object is a universal.[1] If the object does call out that response, no matter what

its particular character may be, one can say that it has a universal character. It is something that can

be recognized because of this character, notwithstanding the variations that are involved in the

individual instances.

Now, can there be in the central nervous system a mechanism which can be aroused so that it will

give rise to this response, however varied the conditions are otherwise? Can there be a mechanism

of a sufficiently complicated character to represent the objects with which we deal-objects that have

not only spatial dimensions, but also temporal dimensions? An object such as a melody, a tune, is a

unitary affair. We hear the first notes and we respond to it as a whole. There is such a unity in the

lives presented by biographies which follow a man from his birth to his death, showing all that

belongs to the growth of the individual and the changes that take place in his career. Now, is there

something in the central nervous system that can answer to such characters of the object, so that

we can give a behavioristic account of an object so complicated as a melody or a life? The mere

complication does not present serious difficulty, because the central nervous system has an almost

infinite number of elements and possible combinations, but can one find a structure there in the

central nervous system that would answer to a certain type of response which represents for us the

character of the object which we recognize, as distinct from the mere sensations?

Recognition always implies a something that can be discovered in an indefinite number of objects.

One can only sense a color once, in so far as "color" means an immediate relationship of the light

waves to the retina of a normal nervous system. That experience happens and is gone, and cannot

be repeated. But something is recognized, there is a universal character given in the experience

itself which is at least capable of an indefinite number of repetitions. It is this which has been

supposed to be beyond the behavioristic explanation or statement. What a behavioristic psychology

does is to state that character of the experience in terms of the response. It may be said that there

cannot be a universal response, but only a response to a particular object. On the contrary, in so far

as the response is one that can take place with reference to the brick, a stone, a hammer, there is a

universal in the form of the response that answers to a whole set of particulars, and the particulars

may be indefinite in number, provided only they have certain characters in relation to the response.

The relationship of this response to an indefinite number of stimuli is just the relationship that is

represented in what we call "recognition." When we use the term "recognition" we may mean no

more than that we pick up an object that serves this particular purpose; what we generally mean is

that the character of the object that is a stimulus to its recognition is present in our experience. We

can have, in this way, something that is universal as over against various particulars. I think we can

recognize in any habit that which answers to different stimuli; the response is universal and the

stimulus is particular. As long as this element serves as a stimulus, calls out this response, one can

say the particular comes under this universal. That is the statement of the behavioristic psychology

of the universal form as over against the particular instance.

The next point is rather a matter of degree, illustrated by the more complex objects such as a

symphony, or a life, with all their variations and harmonious contrasts. When a music critic

discusses such a complex object as a symphony can we say that there is something in the central

nervous system that answers to the object which the critic has before him? Or take the biography of

a great man, a Lincoln or a Gladstone, where the historian, say Morley, has before him that entire

life with all its indefinite number of elements. Can he be said to have in his central nervous system

an object that answers to that attitude of recognizing Gladstone in all his changes as the same

Gladstone? Could one, if he had the mechanism to do so, pick out in the historian's brain what

answers to Gladstone? What would it be, supposing that it could be done? It would certainly not be

just a single response to the name Gladstone. In some way it must represent all of the connections

which took place in his experience, all those connections which were involved in his conduct in so

far as their analogues took place in Gladstone's life. it must be some sort of a unity, such a unity that

if this whole is touched at any point it may bring out any other element in the historian's experience

of Gladstone. It may throw light on any phase of his character; it may bring out any of the situations

in which Gladstone figures. All of this must be potentially present in such a mapping of Gladstone in

Morley's central nervous system. It is indefinitely complex, but the central nervous system is also

indefinitely complex. It does not represent merely spatial dimensions but temporal dimensions also.

It can represent an action which is delayed, which is dependent upon an earlier reaction; and this

later reaction can, in its inception, but before it takes place overtly, influence the earlier reaction.

We can conceive, then, in the structure of the central nervous system such a temporal dimension as

that of the melody, or recognition of the notes and their distance from each other in the scale, and

our appreciation of these as actually affected by the beginning of our response to the later notes, as

when we are expecting a certain sort of an ending. If we ask how that expectation shows itself in our

experience we should have difficulty in detailing it in terms of behavior, but we realize that this

experience is determined by our readiness to respond to later notes and that such readiness can be

there without the notes being themselves present. The way in which we are going to respond to a

major or minor ending does determine the way in which we appreciate the notes that are occurring.

It is that attitude that gives the character of our appreciation of all extended musical compositions.

What is given at the outset is determined by the attitude to what is to come later. That is a phase of

our experience which James has illustrated by his discussion of the sensory character of such

conjunctions as "and," "but," "though." If you assert a proposition and add, "but," you determine the

attitude of the hearer toward it. He does not know what you are going to introduce, but he does

know there is some sort of an exception to it. His knowledge is not stated in reflective form, but is

rather an attitude. There is a "but" attitude, an "if" attitude, a "though" attitude. It is such attitudes

which we assume toward the beginning of a melody, toward the rhythm involved in poetry; it is these

attitudes that give the import to the structure of what we are dealing with.

There are certain attitudes which we assume toward a rising column or toward its supports, and we

only have to have suggestions of the object to call out those attitudes. The artist and the sculptor

play upon these attitudes just as the musician does. Through the indication of the stimuli each is

able to bring in the reflection of the complexities of a response. Now, if one can bring in a number of

these and get a multiform reflection of all of these attitudes into harmony, he calls out an aesthetic

response which we consider beautiful. It is the harmonizing of these complexities of response that

constitutes the beauty of the object. There are different stimuli calling out an indefinite number of

responses and the natures of these are reflected back into our immediate experience, and brought

into harmonious relationship with each other. The later stages of the experience itself can be

present in the immediate experience which influences them. Given a sufficiently complicated central

nervous system, we can then find an indefinite number of responses, and these responses can be

not only immediate but delayed, and as delayed can be already influencing present conduct.

We can thus find, in some sense, in the central nervous system what would answer to complex

objects, with their somewhat vague and indefinite meaning, as they lie in our actual experience --

objects complex not only spatially but also temporally. When we respond to any phase of these

objects all the other values are there ready to play into it, and give it its intellectual and emotional

content. I see no reason why one should not find, then, in the organization of the attitude as

presented in the central nervous system, what it is we refer to as the meaning of the object, that

which is universal. The answering of the response to an indefinite number of stimuli which vary from

each other is something that gives us the relation of the universal to the particular, and the

complexity of the object may be as indefinitely great as are the elements in the central nervous

system that represent possible temporal and spatial combinations of our own conduct. We can

speak, then, legitimately of a certain sort of response which a Morley has to a Gladstone, a

response that can find its expression in the central nervous system, taking into account all of its

complexities.

[So far we have stressed the universality or generality of the response as standing over against the

particularity of the stimulus which evokes it. I now wish to call attention to the social dimension of

universality.]

Thinking takes place in terms of universals, and a universal is an entity that is distinguishable from

the object by means of which we think it. When we think of a spade we are not confined in our

thought to any particular spade. Now if we think of the universal spade there must be something that

we think about, and that is confessedly not given in the particular occurrence which is the occasion

of the thought. The thought transcends all the occurrences. Must we assume a realm of such

entities, essences or subsistents, to account for our thinking? That is generally assumed by modern

realists. Dewey's answer seems to be that we have isolated by our abstracting attention certain

features of spades which are irrelevant to the particular different spades, though they have their

existence or being in these particular spades. These characters which will occur in any spade that is

a spade are therefore irrelevant to any one of them. We may go farther and say that these

characters are irrelevant to the occurrence of the spades that arise and are worn out. In other words,

they are irrelevant to time, and may be called eternal objects or entities. But, says Dewey, this

irrelevancy of these characters to time in our thought does not abstract their being from the

particular spades. . . . . Dewey quite agrees with the realists aforesaid that the meaning is not

lodged in the word itself, that is, he is not a nominalist. He insists, however, that the meaning

resides in the spade as a character which has arisen through the social nature of thinking. I suppose

we can say in current terminology that meanings have emerged in social experience, just as colors

emerged in the experience of organisms with the apparatus of vision.[2]

Meaning as such, i.e., the object of thought, arises in experience through the individual stimulating

himself to take the attitude of the other in his reaction toward the object. Meaning is that which can

be indicated to others while it is by the same process indicated to the indicating individual. In so far

as the individual indicates it to himself in the role of the other, he is occupying his perspective, and

as he is indicating it to the other from his own perspective, and as that which is so indicated is

identical, it must be that which can be in different perspectives. It must therefore be a universal, at

least in the identity which belongs to the different perspectives which are organized in the single

perspective, and in so far as the principle of organization is one which admits of other perspectives

than those actually present, the universality may be logically indefinitely extended. Its universality in

conduct, however, amounts only to the irrelevance of the differences of the different perspectives to

the characters which are indicated by the significant symbols in use, i.e., the gestures which

indicate to the individual who uses them what they indicate to the others, for whom they serve as

appropriate stimuli in the cooperative process.[3]

The significant gesture or symbol always presupposes for its significance the social process of

experience and behavior in which it arises; or, as the logicians say, a universe of discourse is

always implied as the context in terms of which, or as the field within which, significant gestures or

symbols do in fact have significance. This universe of discourse is constituted by a group of

individuals carrying on and participating in a common social process of experience[4] and behavior,

within which these gestures or symbols have the same or common meanings for all members of that

group, whether they make them or address them to other individuals, or whether they overtly

respond to them as made or addressed to them by other individuals. A universe of discourse is

simply a system of common or social meanings.[5]

The very universality and impersonality of thought and reason is from the behavioristic standpoint

the result of the given individual taking the attitudes of others toward himself, and of his finally

crystallizing all these particular attitudes into a single attitude or standpoint which may be called that

of the "generalized other."

Alternative ways of acting under an indefinite number of different particular conditions or in an

indefinite number of different possible situations - ways which are more or less identical for an

indefinite number of normal individuals- are all that universals (however treated in logic or

metaphysics) really amount to; they are meaningless apart from the social acts in which they are

implicated and from which they derive their significance.[6]

Endnotes

1. Abstraction and universals are due to conflict and inhibition: a wall is something to be

avoided and something to be jumped, and while both it is mental, a concept. Language

makes it possible to hold on to these mental objects. Abstractions exist for lower animals but

they cannot hold them (1924).

2. [This paragraph is selected from a manuscript, "The Philosophy of John Dewey,." To be

published in the 1936 International Journal of Ethics.]

3. [Paragraph selected from MS.]

4. A common world exists .... only in so far as there is a common (group) experience (MS.)

5. Our socalled laws of thought are the abstractions of social intercourse. Our whole process of

abstract thought, technique and method is essentially social (1912).

The organization of the social act answers to what we call the universal. Functionally it is the

universal (1930).

6. All the enduring relations have been subject to revision. There remain the logical constants,

and the deductions from logical implications. To the same category belong the so-called

universals or concepts. They are the elements and structure of a universe of discourse. In so

far as in social conduct with others and with ourselves we indicate the characters that

endure in the perspective of the group to which we belong and out of which we arise, we are

indicating that which relative to our conduct is unchanged, to which, in other words, passage

is irrelevant. A metaphysics which lifts these logical elements out of their experiential habitat

and endows them with a subsistential being overlooks the fact that the irrelevance to

passage is strictly relative to the situation in conduct within which the reflection arises, that

while we can find in different situations a method of conversation and so of thought which

proves irrelevant to the differences in the situations, and so provides a method of translation

from one perspective to another, this irrelevance belongs only to the wider character which

the problem in reflection assumes, and never transcends the social conduct within which the

method arises (MS.).

13. THE NATURE OF REFLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE

In the type of temporary inhibition of action which signifies thinking, or in which reflection arises, we

have presented in the experience of the individual, tentatively and in advance and for his selection

among them, the different possibilities or alternatives of future action open to him within the given

social situation -- the different or alternative ways of completing the given social act wherein he is

implicated, or which he has already initiated. Reflection or reflective behavior arises only under the

conditions of self-consciousness, and makes possible the purposive control and organization by the

individual organism of its conduct with reference to its social and physical environment, i.e., with

reference to the various social and physical situations in which it becomes involved and to which it

reacts. The organization of the self is simply the organization, by the individual organism, of the set

of attitudes toward its social environment-and toward itself from the standpoint of that environment,

or as a functioning element in the process of social experience and behavior constituting that

environment-which it is able to take. It is essential that such reflective intelligence be dealt with from

the point of view of social behaviorism.

I said a moment ago that there is something involved in our statement of the meaning of an object

which is more than the mere response, however complex that may be. We may respond to a

musical phrase and there may be nothing in the experience beyond the response; we may not be

able to say why we respond or what it is we respond to. Our attitude may simply be that we like

some music and do not like other music. Most of our recognitions are of this sort. We pick out the

book we want but could not say what the character of the book is. We probably could give a more

detailed account of the countenance of a man we meet for the first time than of our most intimate

friends. With our friends we are ready to start our conversation the moment they are there; we do

not have to make sure who they are. But if we try to pick out a man who has been described to us

we narrowly examine the person to make sure he answers to the account that is given to us. With a

person with whom we are familiar we carry on our conversation without thinking of these things.

Most of our processes of recognition do not involve this identification of the characters which enable

us to identify the objects. We may have to describe a person and we find we cannot do it-we know

him too well. We may have to pick those details out, and then if we are taking a critical attitude we

have to find out what it is in the object that calls out this complex response. When we are doing that

we are getting a statement of what the nature of the object is, or if you like, its meaning. We have to

indicate to ourselves what it is that calls out this particular response. We recognize a person, say,

because of the character of his physique. If one should come into the room greatly changed by a

long attack of sickness, or by exposure to the tropical sun, one's friends would not be able to

recognize him immediately. There are certain elements which enable us to recognize a friend. We

may have to pick out the characters which make recognition successful, to indicate those characters

to somebody or to ourselves. We may have to determine what the stimuli are that call out a

response of this complex character. That is often a very difficult thing to do, as is evidenced by

musical criticism. A whole audience may be swept away by a composition and perhaps not a person

there will be able to state what it is in the production that calls out this particular response, or to tell

what the various reactions are in these individuals. It is an unusual gift which can analyze that sort

of an object and pick out what the stimulus is for so complex an action.

What I want to call attention to is the process by which there is an indication of those characters

which do call out the response. Animals of a type lower than man respond to certain characters with

a nicety that is beyond human capacity, such as odor in the case of a dog. But it would be beyond

the capacity of a dog to indicate to another dog what the odor was. Another dog could not be sent

out by the first dog to pick out this odor. A man may tell how to identify another man. He can indicate

what the characters are that will bring about a certain response. That ability absolutely distinguishes

the intelligence of such a reflective being as man from that of the lower animals, however intelligent

they may be. We generally say that man is a rational animal and lower animals are not. What I

wanted to show, at least in terms of behavioristic psychology, is that what we have in mind in this

distinction is the indication of those characters which lead to the sort of response which we give to

an object. Pointing out the characters which lead to the response is precisely that which

distinguishes a detective office that sends out a man, from a bloodhound which runs down a man.

Here are two types of intelligence, each one specialized; the detective could not do what the

bloodhound does and the bloodhound could not do what the detective does. Now, the intelligence of

the detective over against the intelligence of the bloodhound lies in this capacity to indicate what the

particular characters are which will call out his response of taking the man.[1]

Such would be a behaviorist's account of what is involved in reason. When you are reasoning you

are indicating to yourself the characters that call out certain responses-and that is all you are doing.

If you have the angle and a side you can determine the area of a triangle; given certain characters

there are certain responses indicated. There are other processes, not exactly rational, out of which

you can build up new responses from old ones. You may pick out responses which are there in

other reactions and put them together. A book of directions may provide a set of stimuli which lead

to a certain set of responses, and you pick them out of your other complex responses, perhaps as

they have not been picked out before. When you write on a typewriter you may be instructed as to

the way in which to use it. You can build up a fairly good technique to start with, but even that is a

process which still involves the indication of the stimuli to call out the various responses. You unite

stimuli which have not been united in the past, and then these stimuli take with them the compound

responses. It may be a crude response at first, and must be freed from the responses had in the

past. The way in which you react toward the doubling of letters when you write is different from the

way you react in writing the letters on a typewriter. You make mistakes because the responses you

utilize have been different, have been connected with a whole set of other responses. A drawing

teacher will sometimes have pupils draw with the left hand rather than the right, because the habits

of the right hand are very difficult to get rid of. This is what you are doing when you act in a rational

fashion: you are indicating to yourself what the stimuli are that will call out a complex response, and

by the order of the stimuli you are determining what the whole of the response will be. Now, to be

able to indicate those stimuli to other persons or to yourself is what we call rational conduct as

distinct from the unreasoning intelligence of the lower animals, and from a good deal of our own

conduct.

Man is distinguished by that power of analysis of the field of stimulation which enables him to pick

out one stimulus rather than another and so to hold on to the response that belongs to that stimulus,

picking it out from others, and recombining it with others. You cannot get a lock to work. You notice

certain elements, each of which brings out a certain sort of response; and what you are doing is

holding on to these processes of response by giving attention to the stimuli. Man can combine not

only the responses already there, which is the thing an animal lower than man can do, but the

human individual can get into his activities and break them up, giving attention to specific elements,

holding the responses that answer to these particular stimuli, and then combining them to build up

another act. That is what we mean by learning or by teaching a person to do a thing. You indicate to

him certain specific phases or characters of the object which call out certain sorts of responses. We

state that generally by saying consciousness accompanies only the sensory process and not the

motor process. We can directly control the sensory but not the motor processes; we can give our

attention to a particular element in the field and by giving such attention and so holding on to the

stimulus we can get control of the response. That is the way we get control of our action; we do not

directly control our response through the motor paths themselves.

There is no capacity in the lower forms to give attention to some analyzed element in the field of

stimulation which would enable them to control the response. But one can say to a person "Look at

this, just see this thing" and he can fasten his attention on the specific object. He can direct attention

and so isolate the particular response that answers to it. That is the way in which we break up our

complex activities and thereby make learning possible. What takes place is an analysis of the

process by giving attention to the specific stimuli that call out a particular act, and this analysis

makes possible a reconstruction of the act. An animal makes combinations, as we say, only by trial

and error, and the combination that is successful simply maintains itself.

The gesture as worked out in the conduct of the human group serves definitely to indicate just these

elements and thus to bring them within the field of voluntary attention. There is, of course, a

fundamental likeness between voluntary attention and involuntary attention. A bright light, a peculiar

odor, may be something which takes complete control of the organism and in so far inhibits other

activity. A voluntary action, however, is dependent upon the indication of a certain character,

pointing it out, holding on to it, and so holding on to the response that belongs to it. That sort of an

analysis is essential to what we call human intelligence, and it is made possible by language.

The psychology of attention ousted the psychology of association. An indefinite number of

associations were found which lie in our experience with reference to anything that comes before

us, but associational psychology never explained why one association rather than another was the

dominant one. It laid down rules that if a certain association had been intense, recent, and frequent

it would be dominant, but often there are in fact situations in which what seems to be the weakest

element in the situation occupies the mind. It was not until the psychologist took up the analysis of

attention that he was able to deal with such situations, and to realize that voluntary attention is

dependent upon indication of some character in the field of stimulation. Such indication makes

possible the isolation and recombination of responses.

In the case of the vocal gesture there is a tendency to call out the response in one form that is called

out in the other, so that the child plays the part of parent, of teacher, or preacher. The gesture under

those conditions calls out certain responses in the individual which it calls out in the other person,

and carrying it out in the individual isolates that particular character of the stimulus. The response of

the other is there in the individual isolating the stimulus. If one calls out quickly to a person in

danger, he himself is in the attitude of jumping away, though the act is not performed. He is not in

danger, but he has those particular elements of the response in himself, and we speak of them as

meanings. Stated in terms of the central nervous system, this means that he has stirred up its upper

tracts which would lead to the actual jumping away. A person picks out the different responses

involved in escape when he enters the theater and notices the signs on the program cautioning him

to choose the nearest exit in case of fire. He has all the different responses, so to speak, listed

before him, and he prepares what he is going to do by picking out the different elements and putting

them together in the way required. The efficiency engineer comes in to pick out this, that, or the

other thing, and chooses the order in which they should be carried out. One is doing the same

himself in so far as he is self-conscious. Where we have to determine what will be the order of a set

of responses, we are putting them together in a certain fashion, and we can do this because we can

indicate the order of the stimuli which are going to act upon us. That is what is involved in the

human intelligence as distinguished from the intelligence type of the lower forms. We cannot tell an

elephant that he is to take hold of the other elephant's tail; the stimulus will not indicate the same

thing to the elephant as to ourselves. We can create a situation which is a stimulus to the elephant

but we cannot get the elephant to indicate to itself what this stimulus is so that he has the response

to it in his own system.

The gesture provides a process by means of which one does arouse in himself the reaction that

might be aroused in another, and this is not a part of his immediate reaction in so far as his

immediate physical environment is concerned. When we tell a person to do something the response

we have is not the doing of the actual thing, but the beginning of it. Communication gives to us those

elements of response which can be held in the mental field. We do not carry them out, but they are

there constituting the meanings of these objects which we indicate. Language is a process of

indicating certain stimuli and changing the response to them in the system of behavior. Language as

a social process has made it possible for us to pick out responses and hold them in the organism of

the individual, so that they are there in relation to that which we indicate. The actual gesture is,

within limits, arbitrary. Whether one points with his finger, or points with the glance of the eye, or

motion of the head, or the attitude of the body, or by means of a vocal gesture in one language or

another, is indifferent, provided it does call out the response that belongs to that thing which is

indicated. That is the essential part of language. The gesture must be one that calls out the

response in the individual, or tends to call out the response in the individual, which its utilization will

bring out in another's response. Such is the material with which the mind works. However slight,

there must be some sort of gesture. To have the response isolated without an indication of a

stimulus is almost a contradiction in terms. I have been trying to point out what this process of

communication does in the way of providing us with the material that exists in our mind. It does this

by furnishing those gestures which in affecting us as they affect others call out the attitude which the

other takes, and that we take in so far as we assume his rôle. We get the attitude, the meaning,

within the field of our own control, and that control consists in combining all these various possible

responses to furnish the newly constructed act demanded by the problem. In such a way we can

state rational conduct in terms of a behavioristic psychology.

I wish to add one further factor to our account: the relation of the temporal character of the nervous

system to foresight and choice .[2]

The central nervous system makes possible the implicit initiation of a number of possible alternative

responses with reference to any given object or objects for the completion of any already initiated

act, in advance of the actual completion of that act; and thus makes possible the exercise of

intelligent or reflective choice in the acceptance of that one among these possible alternative

responses which is to be carried into overt effect.[3]

Human intelligence, by means of the physiological mechanism of the human central nervous

system, deliberately selects one from among the several alternative responses which are possible in

the given problematic environmental situation; and if the given response which it selects is complex-

i.e., is a set or chain or group or succession of simple responses-it can organize this set or chain of

simple responses in such a way as to make possible the most adequate and harmonious solution by

the individual of the given environmental problem.

It is the entrance of the alternative possibilities of future response into the determination of present

conduct in any given environmental situation, and their operation, through the mechanism of the

central nervous system, as part of the factors or conditions determining present behavior, which

decisively contrasts intelligent conduct or behavior with reflex, instinctive, and habitual conduct or

behavior--delayed reaction with immediate reaction. That which takes place in present organic

behavior is always in some sense an emergent from the past, and never could have been precisely

predicted in advance-never could have been predicted on the basis of a knowledge, however

complete, of the past, and of the conditions in the past which are relevant to its emergence; and in

the case of organic behavior which is intelligently controlled, this element of spontaneity is

especially prominent by virtue of the present influence exercised over such behavior by the possible

future results or consequences which it may have. Our ideas of or about future conduct are our

tendencies to act in several alternative ways in the presence of a given environmental situation-

tendencies or attitudes which can appear, or be implicitly aroused, in the structure of the central

nervous system in advance of the overt response or reaction to that situation, and which thus can

enter as determining factors into the control or selection of this overt response. Ideas, as distinct

from acts, or as failing to issue in overt behavior, are simply what we do not do; they are possibilities

of overt responses which we test out implicitly in the central nervous system and then reject in favor

of those which we do in fact act upon or carry into effect. The process of intelligent conduct is

essentially a process of selection from among various alternatives; Intelligence is largely a matter of

selectivity.

Delayed reaction is necessary to intelligent conduct. The organization, implicit testing, and final

selection by the individual of his overt responses or reactions to the social situations which confront

him and which present him with problems of adjustment, would be impossible if his overt responses

or reactions could not in such situations be delayed until this process of organizing, implicitly testing,

and finally selecting is carried out; that is, would be impossible if some overt response or other to

the given environmental stimuli had to be immediate. Without delayed reaction, or except in terms of

it, no conscious or intelligent control over behavior could be exercised; for it is through this process

of selective reaction-which can be selective only because it is delayed-that intelligence operates in

the determination of behavior. Indeed, it is this process which constitutes intelligence. The central

nervous system provides not only the necessary physiological mechanism for this process, but also

the necessary physiological condition of delayed reaction which this process presupposes.

Intelligence is essentially the ability to solve the problems of present behavior in terms of its possible

future consequences as implicated on the basis of past experience-the ability, that is, to solve the

problems of present behavior in the light of, or by reference to, both the past and the future; it

involves both memory and foresight. And the process of exercising intelligence is the process of

delaying, organizing, and selecting a response or reaction to the stimuli of the given environmental

situation. The process is made possible by the mechanism of the central nervous system, which

permits the individual's taking of the attitude of the other toward himself, and thus becoming an

object to himself. This is the most effective means of adjustment to the social environment, and

indeed to the environment in general, that the individual has at his disposal.

An attitude of any sort represents the beginning, or potential initiation, of some composite act or

other, a social act in which, along with other individuals, the individual taking the given attitude is

involved or implicated. The traditional supposition has been that the purposive element in behavior

must ultimately be an idea, a conscious motive, and hence must imply or depend upon the presence

of a mind. But the study of the nature of the central nervous system shows that in the form of

physiological attitudes (expressed in specific physiological sets) different possible completions to

the given act are there in advance of its actual completion, and that through them the earlier parts of

the given act are affected or influenced (in present conduct) by its later phases; so that the

purposive element in behavior has a physiological seat, a behavioristic basis, and is not

fundamentally nor necessarily conscious or psychical.

Endnotes

1. Intelligence and knowledge are inside the process of conduct. Thinking is an elaborate

process of .... presenting the world so -that it will be favorable for conduct, so that the ends

of the life of the form may be reached (MS).

Thinking is pointing out - to think about a thing is to point it out before acting (1924).

2. [See also Section 16.)

3. It is an advantage to have these responses ready before we get to the object. If our world

were right on top of us, in contact with us, we would have no time for deliberation. There

would be only one way of responding to that world.

Through his distance organs and his capacity for delayed responses the individual lives in

the future with the possibility of planning his life with reference to that future (1931).

14. BEHAVIORISM, WATSONISM, AND REFLECTION

I have been discussing the possibility of bringing the concept or idea into the range of behavioristic

treatment, endeavoring in this way to relieve behaviorism as presented by Watson of what seems to

be an inadequacy. In carrying back the thinking process to the talking process, Watson seems to

identify thought simply with the word, with the symbol, with the vocal gesture. He does this by

means of the transference of a reflex from one stimulus to another-conditioned reflex is the

technical term for the process. The psychologist isolates a set of reflexes which answer to certain

specific stimuli, and then allows these reflexes expression under different conditions so that the

stimulus itself is accompanied by other stimuli. He finds that these reflexes can then be brought

about by the new stimulus even in the absence of that which has been previously the necessary

stimulus. The typical illustration is that of a child becoming afraid of a white rat because it was

presented to him several times at the moment at which a loud sound was made behind him. The

loud noise occasions fright. The presence of the white rat conditions this reaction of fright so that the

child becomes afraid of the white rat. The fear reactions are then called out by the white rat even

when no sound is made.(1)

The conditioned reflex of the objective psychologists is also used by Watson to explain the process

of thinking. On this view we utilize vocal gestures in connection with things, and thereby condition

our reflexes to the things in terms of the vocal process. If we have a tendency to sit down when the

chair is there, we condition this reflex by the word "chair." Originally the chair is a stimulus that sets

free this act of sitting, and by being conditioned the child may come to the point of setting free the

act by the use of the word. No particular limit can be set up to such a process. The language

process is peculiarly adapted to such a conditioning of reflexes. We have an indefinite number of

responses to objects about us. If we can condition these responses by the vocal gesture so that

whenever a certain reaction is carried out we at the same time utilize certain phonetic elements,

then we can reach the point at which the response will be called out whenever this vocal gesture

arises. Thinking would then be nothing but the use of these various vocal elements together with the

responses which they call out. Psychologists would not need to look for anything more elaborate in

the thinking process than the mere conditioning of reflexes by vocal gestures.

From the point of view of the analysis of the experience involved this account seems very

inadequate. For certain types of experience it may perhaps be sufficient. A trained body of troops

exhibits a set of conditioned reflexes. A certain formation is brought about by means of certain

orders. Its success lies in an automatic response when these orders are given. There, of course,

one has action without thought. If the soldier thinks under the circumstances he very likely will not

act; his action is dependent in a certain sense on the absence of thought. There must be elaborate

thinking done somewhere, but after that has been done by the officers higher up, then the process

must become automatic. What we recognize is that this statement does not do justice to the thinking

that has to be done higher up. It is true that the people below carry out the process without thinking.

Now if the thinking is done higher up under the same conditions the behaviorist evidently falls to

bring into account what is peculiar to planning. Something very definite goes on there which cannot

be stated in terms of conditioned reflexes.

The unthinking conduct of the soldier in carrying out the order, so that the mere giving of the order

involves its execution, is characteristic of the type of conduct in lower animals. We use this

mechanism to explain the elaborate instincts of certain organisms. One set of responses follows

another; the completion of one step brings the form into contact with certain stimuli which set

another free, and so on. Great elaborations of this process are found, especially in the ants. That

thought which belongs to the human community is presumably absent in these communities. The

wasp that stores the paralyzed spider as food for larvae that it never will see and with which it never

has come into contact, is not acting in terms of conscious foresight. The human community that

stores away food in cold storage, and human community that stores away later makes use of it, is

doing in a certain sense the same thing that the wasp is doing, but the important distinction is that

the action is now consciously purposive. The individual arranging for the cold storage is actually

presenting to himself a situation that is going to arise, and determining his methods of preservation

with reference to future uses.

The statement which Watson gives of the conditioning of reflexes does not bring in these parts of

experience. Such a treatment has been experimentally applied only in such experiences as those of

the infant. Watson is trying to work out a simple mechanism which can be widely applied without

taking into consideration all the complications involved in that application. idea to find its widest

application and then meet the specific difficulties later. Now, is it possible to recast our statement of

behavioristic psychology that it can do more justice to what we ordinarily term a consciousness of

what we are doing? I have been suggesting that we could at least give a picture in the central

nervous system of what answers to an idea. That seems to be what is left out of Watson's

statement. He simply attaches a set of responses to certain stimuli and shows that the mechanism

of the organism is able to change those stimuli, substitute one stimulus for another stimulus; but the

ideas that accomplish such a process are not accounted for simply by this substitution.

In the illustration I gave of offering a chair and asking a person to sit down, the asking may take the

place of the particular perception of the chair. One may be occupied entirely with something else,

and then the stimulus is not the stimulus operative in the original reflex; one might come in and sit

down without paying attention to the chair. But such substitution does not give to us the picture of

the mechanism which in some sense answers to the chair, or the idea of what the person is asking

him to do. What I suggested was that we have such a mechanism in the central nervous system that

answers to these elaborate reactions, and that the stimuli which call these out may set up a process

there which is not fully carried out. We do not actually sit down when a person asks us to, yet the

process is in some sense initiated; we are ready to sit down but we do not. We prepare for a certain

process by thinking about it, mapping out a campaign of conduct, and then we are ready to carry out

the different steps. The motor impulses which are already there have stirred up those different

paths, and the reactions may take place more readily and more securely. This is particularly true of

the relation of different acts to another. We can attach one Process of response to another and we

can build up from the lower instinctive form what is called a general reflex in our own conduct. Now

that can be, in some sense, indicated by the structure of the nervous system. We can conceive of

reactions arising with their different responses to these objects, to what, in other words, we call the

meanings of these objects. The meaning of a chair is sitting down in it, the meaning of the hammer

is to drive a nail-and these responses can be innervated even though not carried out. The

innervation of these processes in the central nervous system is perhaps necessary for what we call

meaning.

It may be asked at this point whether the actual nervous excitement in a certain area or over certain

paths, is a legitimate substitute for what we call the idea. We come up against the parallelistic

explanation of the seeming difference between ideas and bodily states, between that which we call

psychical and the physical statement in terms of neuroses. It may be complained of the behavioristic

psychology that it sets up a number of mechanisms, but still leaves what we term consciousness out

of play. It may be said that such a connection of different processes as I have been describing, such

an organization of different responses in the central nervous system, is after all not different from

what Watson referred to. He, too, has a whole set of reactions that answer to the chair, and he

conditions the response by the vocal gesture, "chair." It may be felt that that is all we have done.

And yet, as I have said, we recognize there is something more to consciousness than such a

conditioned response. The automatic response which the soldier gives is different from the conduct

which involves thought In regard to it, and a consciousness of what we are doing.

The behavioristic psychology has tried to get rid of the more or less metaphysical complications

involved in the setting-up of the psychical over against the world, mind over against body,

consciousness over against matter. That was felt to lead into a blind alley. Such a parallelism had

proved valuable, but after it had been utilized in the analysis of what goes on in the central nervous

system it simply led into a blind alley. The opposition of the behaviorist to introspection is justified. It

is not a fruitful undertaking from the point of view of psychological study. It may be illegitimate for

Watson simply to wipe it out, and to say that all we are doing is listening to the words we are

subjectively pronouncing; that certainly is an entirely inadequate way of dealing with what we term

introspection. Yet it is true that introspection as a means of dealing with phenomena with which

psychology must concern itself is pretty hopeless. What the behaviorist is occupied with, what we

have to come back to, is the actual reaction itself, and it is only in so far as we can translate the

content of introspection over into response that we can get any satisfactory psychological doctrine. It

is not necessary for psychology to get into metaphysical questions, but it is of importance that it

should try to get hold of the response that is used in the psychological analysis itself.

What I want to insist upon is that the process, by means of which these responses that are the ideas

or meanings become associated with a certain vocal gesture, lies in the activity of the organism,

while in the case of the dog, the child, the soldier, this process takes place, as it were, outside of the

organism. The soldier is trained through a whole set of evolutions. He does not know why this

particular set is given to him or the uses to which it will be put; he is just put through his drill, as an

animal is trained in a circus. The child is similarly exposed to experiments without any thinking on

his part. What thinking proper means is that this process of associating chair as object with the word

"chair" is a process that human beings in society carry out, and then internalize. Such behavior

certainly has to be considered just as much as conditioned behavior which takes place externally,

and should be considered still more, because it is vastly more important that we should understand

the process of thinking than the product of it.

Now, where does this thought process itself take place? If you like, I am here sidestepping the

question as to just what consciousness is, or the question whether what is going on in the area of

the brain is to be identified with consciousness. That is a question which is not psychological. What I

am asking is, where does this process, by means of which, in Watson's sense, all of our reflexes or

reactions are conditioned, take place; For this process is one which takes place in conduct and

cannot be explained by the conditioned reflexes which result from it. You can explain the child's fear

of the white rat by conditioning its reflexes, but you cannot explain the conduct of Mr. Watson in

conditioning that stated reflex by means of a set of conditioned reflexes, unless you set up a super-

Watson to condition his reflexes. That process of conditioning reflexes has to be taken into conduct

itself, not in the metaphysical sense of setting up a mind in a spiritual fashion which acts on the

body, but as an actual process with which the behavioristic psychology can deal. The metaphysical

problems still remain, but the psychologist has to be able to state this very process of conditioning

reflexes as it takes place in conduct itself.

We can find part of the necessary mechanism of such conduct in the central nervous system. We

can identify some of the reflexes, such as that of the knee jerk, and follow the stimulus from the

reflex up to the central nervous system and back again. Most of the reflexes we cannot follow out in

detail. With such suitable elements we can carry out the analogy, and present to ourselves the

elaborate organization to which I have referred, and which answers to the objects about us and the

more complex objects such as a symphony or a biography. The question now is whether the mere

excitement of the set of these groups of responses is what we mean by an idea. When we try to

undertake to carry over, translate, such an idea in terms of behavior, instead of stopping with a bit of

consciousness, can we take that idea over into conduct, and at least express in conduct just what

we mean by saying that we have an idea? It may be simpler to assume that each one of us has a

little bit of consciousness stored away and that impressions are made on consciousness, and as a

result of the idea, consciousness in some unexplained way sets up the response in the system

itself. But what must be asked of behaviorism is whether it can state in behavioristic terms what is

meant by having an idea, or getting a concept.

I have just said that Watson's statement of the mere conditioning of the reflex, the setting off of a

certain set of responses when the word is used, does not seem to answer to this process of getting

an idea. It does answer to the result of having an idea, for having reached the idea, then one starts

off to accomplish it, and we assume that the process follows. The getting of an idea is very different

from the result of having an idea, for the former involves the setting-up or conditioning of reflexes,

which cannot, themselves, be used to explain the process. Now, under what conditions does this

take place? Can we indicate these conditions in terms of behavior? We can state in behavioristic

terms what the result will be, but can we state in terms of behaviorism the process of getting and

having ideas?

The process of getting an idea is, in the case of the infant, a process of intercourse with those about

him, a social process. He can battle on by himself without getting any idea of what he is doing.

There is no mechanism in his talking to himself for conditioning any reflex by means of vocal

gestures, but in his intercourse with other individuals he can so condition them, and that takes place

also in the conduct of lower animals. We can teach a dog to do certain things in answer to particular

words. We condition his reflexes by means of certain vocal gestures. In the same way a child gets

to refer to a chair by the word "chair." But the animal does not have an idea of what he is going to

do, and if we stopped with the child here we could not attribute to him any idea. What is involved in

the giving of an idea is what cannot be stated in terms of this conditioning of a reflex. I have

suggested that involved in such giving is the fact that the stimulus not only calls out the response,

but that the individual who receives the response also himself uses that stimulus, that vocal gesture,

and calls out that response in himself. Such is, at least, the beginning of that which follows. It is the

further complication that we do not find in the conduct of the dog. The dog only stands on its hind

legs and walks when we use a particular word, but the dog cannot give to himself that stimulus

which somebody else gives to him. He can respond to it but he cannot himself take a hand, so to

speak, in conditioning his own reflexes; his reflexes can be conditioned by another but he cannot do

it himself. Now, it is characteristic of significant speech that just this process of self-conditioning is

going on all the time.

There are, of course, certain phases of our speech which do not come within the range of what we

term self-consciousness. There are changes which have taken place in the speech of people

through long centuries-changes which none of the individuals were aware of at all. But when we

speak of significant speech we always imply that the individual that hears a word does in some

sense use that word with reference to himself. That is what we call a personal understanding of

what is said. He is not only ready to respond, but he also uses the same stimulus that he hears, and

is tending to respond to it in turn. That is true of a person who makes use of significant speech to

another. He knows and understands what he is asking the other person to do, and in some sense is

inviting in himself the response to carry out the process. The process of addressing another person

is a process of addressing himself as well, and of calling out the response he calls out in another;

and the person who is addressed, in so far as he is conscious of what he is doing, does himself tend

to make use of the same vocal gesture and so to call out in himself the response which the other

calls out – at least to carry on the social process which involves that conduct. This is distinct from

the action of the soldier; for in significant speech the person himself understands what he is asked

to do, and consents to carry out something he makes himself a part of. If one gives to another

directions as to how to proceed to a certain street he himself receives all of these detailed

directions. He is identifying himself with the other individual. The hearer is not simply moving at an

order, but is giving to himself the same directions that the other person gives to him. That, in

behavioristic terms, is what we mean by the person being conscious of something. It is certainly

always implied that the individual does tend to carry out the same process as the person addressed;

he gives to himself the same stimulus, and so takes part in the same process. In so far as he is

conditioning his own reflexes, that process enters into his own experience.

I think it is important to recognize that our behavioristic psychology in dealing with human

intelligence must present the situation which I have just described, where a person knows the

meaning of what is said to him. If the individual does himself make use of something answering to

the same gesture he observes, saying it over again to himself, putting himself in the role of the

person who is speaking to him, then he has the meaning of what he hears, he has the idea: the

meaning has become his. It is that sort of a situation which seems to be involved in what we term

mind, as such: this social process, in which one individual affects other individuals, is carried over

into the experience of the individuals that are so affected.[2] The individual takes this attitude not

simply as a matter of repetition, but as part of the elaborate social reaction which is going on. It is

the necessity of stating that process in terms of behavior that is involved in an adequate

behavioristic statement, as over against a mere account of the conditioned reflex.

Endnotes

1. The child's fear of the dark may have arisen out of his being awakened by loud thunder, so

that he is frightened in the darkness. This has not been proven but it is a possible

interpretation in terms of conditioning.

2. [See Sections 16, 24.]

15. BEHAVIORISM AND PSYCHOLOGICAL PARALLELISM

Behaviorism might seem to reach what could be called a parallelism in relation to the neuroses and

psychoses, that is, in the relationship of what is taking place in the central nervous system to the

experience that parallels this, or answers to it. It might be argued, for instance, that there is an

excitement in the retina due to the disturbance taking place outside, and that only when such

excitement reaches a certain point in the central nervous system does a sensation of color, or an

experience of a colored object, appear. We believe that we see the object at the point at which this

disturbance takes place outside. That is, we see, say, an electric light. But we are told that light

represents physical changes that are going on at enormous rates, and that are in some fashion

transferred by the light waves to the retina and then to the central nervous system, so that we see

the light at the point at which we assume these vibrations take place. Of course, this transmission

involves some time, and during the course of this action a physical change in the object may take

place. There is not only that possibility of error in perception, but we may be mistaken even in the

object which we see before us, since the light is temporally later than the disturbance which it seems

to reveal. The light has a finite velocity, and the process that goes on between the retina and the

point in the central nervous system is a much longer process than that of the light. The situation is

stretched out for us conveniently by the illustration of the light of the stars. We see light that left the

sun some eight minutes ago; the sun that we see is eight minutes old -and there are stars that are

so far away from us that they consume many light-years in reaching us. Thus, our perceptions have

conditions which we locate in the central nervous system at a certain moment; if anything interferes

with the nervous process, then this particular experience does not arise. In some such way we get

the statement of what lies back of the parallelistic account-, if we relate what takes place at that

point as a neurosis to what takes place in our experience we have seemingly two entirely different

things. The disturbance in the central nervous system is an electrical or chemical or mechanical

process going on in the nervous elements, whereas that which we see is a colored light, and the

most we can say is that the one is seemingly parallel to the other, since we cannot say that the two

are identical.

Now behavioristic psychology, instead of setting up these events in the central nervous system as a

causal series which is at least conditional to the sensory experience, takes the entire response to

the environment as that which answers to the colored object we see, in this case the light. It does

not locate the experience at any point in the nervous system; it does not put it, in the terms of Mr.

Russell, inside of a head. Russell makes the experience the effect of what happens at that point

where a causal process takes place in the head. He points out that, from his own point of view, the

head inside of which you can place this experience exists empirically only in the heads of other

people. The physiologist explains to you where this excitement is taking place. He sees the head he

is demonstrating to you and he sees what is inside of the head in imagination, but, on this account,

that which he sees must be inside of his own head. The way in which Russell gets out of this mess

is by saying that the head which he is referring to is not the head we see, but the head which is

implied in physiological analysis. Well, instead of assuming that the experienced world as such is

inside of a head, located at that point at which certain nervous disturbances are going on, what the

behaviorist does is to relate the world of experience to the whole act of the organism. It is true, as

we have just said, that this experienced world does not appear except when the various excitements

reach certain points in the central nervous system; it is also true that if you cut off any of those

channels you wipe out so much of that world. What the behaviorist does, or ought to do, is to take

the complete act, the whole process of conduct, as the unit in his account. In doing that he has to

take into account not simply the nervous system but also the rest of the organism, for the nervous

system is only a specialized part of the entire organism.

Consciousness as stuff, as experience, from the standpoint of behavioristic or dynamic psychology,

is simply the environment of the human individual or social group in so far as constituted by or

dependent upon or existentially relative to that individual or social group. (Another signification of

the term " consciousness" arises in connection with reflective intelligence, and still another in

connection with the private or subjective aspects of experience as contrasted with the common or

social aspects.)

Our whole experiential world-nature as we experience it-is basically related to the social process of

behavior, a process in which acts are initiated by gestures that function as such because they in turn

call forth adjustive responses from other organisms, as indicating or having reference to the

completion or resultant of the acts they initiate. That is to say, the content of the objective world, as

we experience it, is in large measure constituted through the relations of the social process to it, and

particularly through the triadic relation of meaning, which is created within that process. The whole

content of mind and of nature, in so far as it takes on the character of meaning, is dependent upon

this triadic relation within the social process and among the component phases of the social act,

which the existence of meaning presupposes.

Consciousness or experience as thus explained or accounted for in terms of the social process

cannot, however, be located in the brain-not only because such location of it implies a spatial

conception of mind (a conception which is at least unwarranted as an uncritically accepted

assumption), but also because such location leads to Russell's physiological solipsism, and to the

insuperable difficulties of interactionism. Consciousness is functional, not substantive; and in either

of the main senses of the term it must be located in the objective world rather than in the brain-it

belongs to, or is a characteristic of, the environment in which we find ourselves. What is located,

what does take place, in the brain, however, is the physiological process whereby we lose and

regain consciousness: a process which is somewhat analogous to that of pulling down and raising a

window shade.

Now, as we noticed earlier, if we want to control the process of experience or consciousness we

may go back to the various processes in the body, especially the central nervous system. When we

are setting up a parallelism what we are trying to do is to state those elements in the world which

enable us to control the processes of experience. Parallelism lies between the point at which

conduct takes place and the experiential reaction, and we must determine those elements which will

enable us to control the reaction itself. As a rule, we control this reaction by means of objects

outside of the organism rather than by directing attention to the organism itself. If we want better

light we put in a higher powered bulb. Our control, as a rule, consists in a reaction on the objects

themselves, and from that point of view the parallelism is between the object and the percept,

between the electric light and visibility. That is the sort of parallelism that the ordinary individual

establishes; by setting up a parallelism between the things about him and his experience, he picks

out those characters of the thing which will enable him to control the experience. His experience is

that of keeping himself seeing things which help him, and consequently he picks out in the objects

those characters which will express themselves in that sort of experience; but if the trouble he has is

due to some disturbance in his central nervous system, then he will have to go back to it. In this

case the parallelism will be between his experience and the excitements in the central nervous

system. If he finds that he is not seeing well he may discover some trouble with the optic nerve, and

the parallelism is then between his vision and the functioning of the optic nerve. If he is interested in

certain mental images he has, he goes back to experiences which have affected the central nervous

system in the past. Certain of the effects on the central nervous system of such experiences are still

present, so that if he is setting up a parallelism he will find that it lies between that past event and

the present condition of his central nervous system. Such a relationship becomes a matter of great

importance in our whole perception. The traces of past experience are continually playing in upon

our perceived world. Now, to get hold of that in the organism which answers to this stage of our

conduct, to our remembering, to our intelligently responding to the present in terms of the past, we

set up a parallelism between what is going on in the central nervous system and immediate

experience. Our memory is dependent upon the condition of certain tracts in our head, and these

conditions have to be picked out to get control of processes of that sort.

This type of correlation is increasingly noticeable when we go from the images as such over to the

thinking process. The intelligence that is involved in perception is elaborated enormously in what we

call "thought." One perceives an object in terms of his response to it. If you notice your conduct you

find frequently that you are turning your head to one side to see something because of light rays

which have reached the periphery of the retina. You turn your head to see what it was. You come to

use the term "aware of something there." We may have the impression that someone is looking at

us out of a crowd and find ourselves turning our head to see who is looking at us, and our tendency

to turn reveals to us the fact that there are rays from other people's eyes. It is true of all of our

experience that it is the response that interprets to us what comes to us in the stimulus, and it is

such attention which makes the percept out of what we call "sensation." The interpretation of the

response is what gives the content to it. Our thinking is simply an elaboration of that interpretation in

terms of our own response. The sound is something that leads to a jumping-away; the light is

something we are to look at. When the danger is something that is perhaps a long way off, the

danger of loss of funds through a bad investment, the danger to some of our organs on account of

injury, the interpretation is one which involves a very elaborate process of thinking. Instead of simply

jumping aside, we can change our diet, take more exercise, or change our investments. This

process of thinking, which is the elaboration of our responses to the stimulus, is a process which

also necessarily goes on in the organism. Yet it is a mistake to assume that all that we call thought

can be located in the organism or can be put inside of the head. The goodness or badness of the

investment is in the investment, and the valuable or dangerous character of food is in the food, not

in our heads. The relationship between these and the organism depends upon the sort of response

we are going to make, and that is a relationship which is mapped out in the central nervous system.

The way in which we are going to respond is found there, and in the possible connections there

must be connections of past experiences with present responses in order that there may be thought.

We connect up a whole set of things outside, especially those which are past, with our present

condition in order that we may intelligently meet some distant danger. In the case of an investment

or organic trouble the danger is a long way off, but still we have to react to it in the way of avoiding

the danger. And the process is one which involves an elaborate connection which has to be found in

the central nervous system, especially in so far as it represents the past. So, then, we set up what is

taking place in the central nervous system as that which is parallel to what lies in experience. If

called upon to make any change in the central nervous system, so far as that could be effected

under present knowledge, we might assist what goes on in the processes of the central nervous

system. We should have to apply our supposed remedies to the central nervous system itself, while

in the previous cases we should have been changing our objects which affect the central nervous

system. There is very little we can do directly at the present time, but we can conceive of such a

response as would enable us to affect our memory and to affect our thought. We do, of course, try

to select the time of the day and conditions when our heads are clear if we have a difficult piece of

work to do. That is an indirect way of attempting to get favorable cooperation of the nervous

elements in the brain to do a certain amount of thinking. It is the same sort of parallelism which lies

between the lighting systems in our houses and the experience we have of visibility. In one case we

have to attend to conditions outside and in the other to conditions inside the central nervous system

in order to control our responses. There is no parallelism in general between the world and the

brain. What a behavioristic psychology is trying to do is to find that in the responses, in our whole

group of responses, which answers to those conditions in the world which we want to change, to

improve, in order that our conduct may be successful.

The past that is in our present experience is there because of the central nervous system in relation

to the rest of the organism. If one has acquired a certain facility in playing the violin, that past

experience is registered in the nerves and muscles themselves, but mainly in connections found in

the central nervous system, in the whole set of paths there which are kept open so that when the

stimulus comes in there is released a complex set of elaborate responses. Our past stays with us in

terms of those changes which have resulted from our experience and which are in some sense

registered there. The peculiar intelligence of the human form lies in this elaborate control gained

through the past. The human animal's past is constantly present in the facility with which he acts,

but to say that that past is simply located in the central nervous system is not a correct statement. It

is true such a mechanism must be present in order that the past may appear in our experience, but

this is part of the conditions, not the only condition. If you recognize somebody it must be through

the fact that you have seen that individual in the past, and when you see him again there are those

tendencies to react as you have in the past, but the individual must be there, or somebody like him,

in order that this may take place. The past must be found in the present world.[1] From the

standpoint of behavioristic psychology we pick out the central nervous system only because it is that

which is the immediate mechanism through which our organism operates in bringing the past to

bear on the present. If we want to understand the way in which an organism responds to a certain

situation which has a past, we have to get into the effects of the past actions on that organism which

have been left in the central nervous system. There is no question about that fact. These effects

accordingly become peculiarly important, but the "parallelism" is no different for a behavioristic

psychology from the parallelism that lies between the warmth in the house and the heating

apparatus installed there.

Endnotes

1. [For the implied theory of the past, see The Philosophy of the Present, pp. 1-31.]

16. MIND AND THE SYMBOL

I have attempted to point out that the meanings of things, our ideas of them, answer to the structure

of the organism in its conduct with reference to things. The structure which makes this possible was

found primarily in the central nervous system. One of the peculiarities of this system is that it has, in

a sense, a temporal dimension : the things we are going to do can be arranged in a temporal order

so that the later processes can in their inception be present determining the earlier processes; what

we are going to do can determine our immediate approach to the object.

The mechanism of the central nervous system enables us to have now present, in terms of attitudes

or implicit responses, the alternative possible overt completions of any given act in which we are

involved; and this fact must be realized and recognized, in virtue of the obvious control which later

phases of any given act exert over its earlier phases. More specifically, the central nervous system

provides a mechanism of implicit response which enables the individual to test out implicitly the

various possible completions of an already initiated act in advance of the actual completion of the

act-and thus to choose for himself, on the basis of this testing, the one which it is most desirable to

perform explicitly or carry into overt effect. The central nervous system, in short, enables the

individual to exercise conscious control over his behavior. It is the possibility of delayed response

which principally differentiates reflective conduct from non-reflective conduct in which the response

is always immediate. The higher centers of the central nervous system are involved in the former

type of behavior by making possible the interposition, between stimulus and response in the simple

stimulus-response arc, of a process of selecting one or another of a whole set of possible responses

and combinations of responses to the given stimulus.

Mental processes take place in this field of attitudes as expressed by the central nervous system;

and this field is hence the field of ideas: the field of the control of present behavior in terms of its

future consequences, or in terms of future behavior; the field of that type of intelligent conduct which

is peculiarly characteristic of the higher forms of life, and especially of human beings. The various

attitudes expressible through the central nervous system can be organized into different types of

subsequent acts; and the delayed reactions or responses thus made possible by the central nervous

system are the distinctive feature of mentally controlled or intelligent behavior.[1]

What is the mind as such, if we are to think in behavioristic terms? Mind, of course, is a very

ambiguous term, and I want to avoid ambiguities. What I suggested as characteristic of the mind is

the reflective intelligence of the human animal which can be distinguished from the intelligence of

lower forms. If we should try to regard reason as a specific faculty which deals with that which is

universal we should find responses in lower forms which are universal. We can also point out that

their conduct is purposive, and that types of conduct which do not lead up to certain ends are

eliminated. This would seem to answer to what we term "mind" when we talk about the animal mind,

but what we refer to as reflective intelligence we generally recognize as belonging only to the human

organism. The nonhuman animal acts with reference to a future in the sense that it has impulses

which are seeking expression that can only be satisfied in later experience, and however this is to

be explained, this later experience does determine what the present experience shall be. If one

accepts a Darwinian explanation he says that only those forms survive whose conduct has a certain

relationship to a specific future, such as belongs to the environment of the specific form. The forms

whose conduct does insure the future will naturally survive. In such a statement, indirectly at least,

one is making the future determine the conduct of the form through the structure of things as they

now exist as a result of past happenings.

When, on the other hand, we speak of reflective conduct we very definitely refer to the presence of

the future in terms of ideas. The intelligent man as distinguished from the intelligent animal presents

to himself what is going to happen. The animal may act in such a way as to insure its food

tomorrow. A squirrel hides nuts, but we do not hold that the squirrel has a picture of what is going to

happen. The young squirrel is born in the summer time, and has no directions from other forms, but

it will start off hiding nuts as well as the older ones. Such action shows that experience could not

direct the activity of the specific form. The provident man, however, does definitely pursue a certain

course, pictures a certain situation, and directs his own conduct with reference to it. The squirrel

follows certain blind impulses, and the carrying-out of its impulses leads to the same result that the

storing of grain does for the provident man. It is this picture, however, of what the future is to be as

determining our present conduct that is the characteristic of human intelligence -the future as

present in terms of ideas.

When we present such a picture it is in terms of our reactions, in terms of what we are going to do.

There is some sort of a problem before us, and our statement of the problem is in terms of a future

situation which will enable us to meet it by our present reactions. That sort of thinking characterizes

the human form and we have endeavored to isolate its mechanism. What is essential to this

mechanism is a way of indicating characters of things which control responses, and which have

various values to the form itself, so that such characters will engage the attention of the organism

and bring about a desired result. The odor of the victim engages the attention of the beast of prey,

and by attention to that odor he does satisfy his hunger and insure his future. What is the difference

between such a situation and the conduct of the man who acts, as we say, rationally? The

fundamental difference is that the latter individual in some way indicates this character, whatever it

may be, to another person and to himself; and the symbolization of it by means of this indicative

gesture is what constitutes the mechanism that gives the implements, at least, for intelligent

conduct. Thus, one points to a certain footprint, and says that it means bear. Now to identify that sort

of a trace by means of some symbol so that it can be utilized by the different members of the group,

but particularly by the individual himself later, is the characteristic thing about human intelligence. To

be able to identify "this as leading to that," and to get some sort of a gesture, vocal or otherwise,

which can be used to indicate the implication to others and to himself so as to make possible the

control of conduct with reference to it, is the distinctive thing in human intelligence which is not

found in animal intelligence.

What such symbols do is to pick out particular characteristics of the situation so that the response to

them can be present in the experience of the individual. We may say they are present in ideal form,

as in a tendency to run away, in a sinking of the stomach when we come on the fresh footprints of a

bear. The indication that this is a bear calls out the response of avoiding the bear, or if one is on a

bear hunt, it indicates the further progress of the hunt. One gets the response into experience before

that response is overtly carried out through indicating and emphasizing the stimulus that instigates

it. When this symbol is utilized for the thing itself one is, in Watson's terms, conditioning a reflex.

The sight of the bear would lead one to run away, the footprint conditioned that reflex, and the word

"bear" spoken by one's self or a friend can also condition the reflex, so that the sign comes to stand

for the thing so far as action is concerned.

What I have been trying to bring out is the difference between the foregoing type of conduct and the

type which I have illustrated by the experiment on the baby with the white rat and the noise behind

its head. In the latter situation there is a conditioning of the reflex in which there is no holding apart

of the different elements. But when there is a conditioning of the reflex which involves the word

"bear," or the sight of the footprint, there is in the experience of the individual the separation of the

stimulus and the response. Here the symbol means bear, and that in turn means getting out of the

way, or furthering the hunt. Under those circumstances the person who stumbles on the footprints of

the bear is not afraid of the footprints-he is afraid of the bear. The footprint means a bear. The child

is afraid of the rat, so that the response of fear is to the sight of the white rat; the man is not afraid of

the footprint, but of the bear. The footprint and the symbol which refers to the bear in some sense

may be said to condition or set off the response, but the bear and not the sign is the object of the

fear. The isolation of the symbol, as such, enables one to hold on to these given characters and to

isolate them in their relationship to the object, and consequently in their relation to the response. It is

that, I think, which characterizes our human intelligence to a peculiar degree. We have a set of

symbols by means of which we indicate certain characters, and in indicating those characters hold

them apart from their immediate environment, and keep simply one relationship clear. We isolate

the footprint of the bear and keep only that relationship to the animal that made it. We are reacting

to that, nothing else. One holds on to it as an indication of the bear and of the value that object has

in experience as something to be avoided or to be hunted. The ability to isolate these important

characters in their relationship to the object and to the response which belongs to the object is, I

think, what we generally mean when we speak of a human being thinking a thing out, or having a

mind. Such ability makes the world-wide difference between the conditioning of reflexes in the case

of the white rat and the human process of thinking by means of symbols.[2]

What is there in conduct that makes this level of experience possible, this selection of certain

characters with their relationship to other characters and to the responses which these call out? My

own answer, it is clear, is in terms of such a set of symbols as arise in our social conduct, in the

conversation of gestures-in a word, in terms of language. When we get into conduct these symbols

which indicate certain characters and their relationship to things and to responses, they enable us to

pick out these characters and hold them in so far as they determine our conduct.

A man walking across country comes upon a chasm which he cannot jump. He wants to go ahead

but the chasm prevents this tendency from being carried out. In that kind of a situation there arises a

sensitivity to all sorts of characters which he has not noticed before. When he stops, mind, we say,

is freed. He does not simply look for the indication of the path going ahead. The dog and the man

would both try to find a point where they could cross. But what the man could do that the dog could

not would be to note that the sides of the chasm seem to be approaching each other in one

direction. He picks out the best places to try, and that approach which he indicates to himself

determines the way in which he is going to go. If the dog saw at a distance a narrow place he would

run to it, but probably he would not be affected by the gradual approach which the human individual

symbolically could indicate to himself.

The human individual would see other objects about him, and have other images appear in his

experience. He sees a tree which might serve as a bridge across the space ahead of him. He might

try various sorts of possible actions which would be suggested to him in such a situation, and

present them to himself by means of the symbols he uses. He has not simply conditioned certain

responses by certain stimuli. If he had, he would be bound to those. What he does do by means of

these symbols is to, indicate certain characters which are present, so that he can have these

responses there all ready to go off. He looks down the chasm and thinks he sees the edges drawing

together, and he may run toward that point. Or he may stop and ask if there is not some other way in

which he can hasten his crossing. What stops him is a variety of other things he may do. He notes

all the possibilities of getting across. He can hold on to them by means of symbols, and relate them

to each other so that he can get a final action. The beginning of the act is there in his experience.

He already has a tendency to go in a certain direction and what he would do is already there

determining him. And not only is that determination there in his attitude but he has that which is

picked out by means of the term "that is narrow, I can jump it." He is ready to jump, and that reflex is

ready to determine what he is doing. These symbols, instead of being a mere conditioning of

reflexes, are ways of picking out the stimuli so that the various responses can organize themselves

into a form of action.[3]

The situation in which one seeks conditioning responses is, I think, as far as effective intelligence is

concerned, always present in the form of a problem. When a man is just going ahead he seeks the

indications of the path but he does it unconsciously. He just sees the path ahead of him; he is not

aware of looking for it under those conditions. But when he reaches the chasm, this onward

movement is stopped by the very process of drawing back from the chasm. That conflict, so to

speak, sets him free to see a whole set of other things. Now, the sort of things he will see will be the

characters which represent various possibilities of action under the circumstances. The man holds

on to these different possibilities of response in terms of the different stimuli which present

themselves, and it is his ability to hold them there that constitutes his mind.

We have no evidence of such a situation in the case of the lower animals, as is made fairly clear by

the fact that we do not find in any animal behavior that we can work out in detail any symbol, any

method of communication, anything that will answer to these different responses so that they can all

be held there in the experience of the individual. It is that which differentiates the action of the

reflectively intelligent being from the conduct of the lower forms; and the mechanism that makes that

possible is language. We have to recognize that language is a part of conduct. Mind involves,

however, a relationship to the characters of things. Those characters are in the things, and while the

stimuli call out the response which is in one sense present in the organism, the responses are to

things out there. The whole process is not a mental product and you cannot put it inside of the brain.

Mentality is that relationship of the organism to the situation which is mediated by sets of symbols.

Endnotes

1. In considering the role or function of the central nervous system-important though it is-in

intelligent human behavior, we must nevertheless keep in mind the fact that such behavior is

essentially and fundamentally social; that it involves and presupposes an evergoing social

life-process; and that the unity of this ongoing social process -- or of any one of its

component acts-is irreducible, and in particular cannot be adequately analyzed simply into a

number of discrete nerve elements. This fact must be recognized by the social psychologist.

These discrete nerve elements lie within the unity of this ongoing social process, or within

the unity of any one of the social acts in which this process is expressed or embodied, and

the analysis which isolates them-the analysis of which they are the results or end-products --

does not and cannot destroy that unity.

2. The meanings of things or objects are actual inherent properties or qualities of them, the

locus of any given meaning is in the thing which, as we say, "has it." We refer to the

meaning of a thing when we make use of the symbol. Symbols stand for the meanings of

those things or objects which have meanings; they are given portions of experience which

point to, indicate, or represent other portions of experience not directly present or given at

the time when, and in the situation in which, any one of them is thus present (or is

immediately experienced). The symbol is thus more than a mere substitute stimulus -- more

than a mere stimulus for a conditioned response or reflex. For the conditioned reflex-the

response to a mere substitute stimulus -- does not or need not involve consciousness;

whereas the response to a symbol does and must involve consciousness. Conditioned

reflexes plus consciousness of the attitudes and meanings they involve are what constitute

language, and hence lay the basis, or comprise the mechanism for, thought and intelligent

conduct. language is the means whereby individuals can indicate to one another what their

responses to objects will be, and hence what the meanings of objects are; it is not a mere

system of conditioned reflexes. Rational conduct always involves a reflexive reference to

self, that is, an indication to the individual of the significances which his actions or gestures

have for other individuals. And the experiential or behavioristic basis for such conduct-the

neuro-physiological mechanism of thinking-is to be found, as we have seen, in the central

nervous system.

3. The reflective act consists in a reconstruction of the perceptual field so that it becomes

possible for impulses which were in conflict to inhibit action no longer. This may take place

by such a temporal readjustment that one of the conflicting impulses finds a later

expression. In this case there has entered into the perceptual field other impulses which

postpone the expression of that which had inhibited action. Thus, the width of the ditch

inhibits the impulse to jump. There enters into the perceptual field the image of a narrower

stretch and the impulse to go ahead finds its place in a combination of impulses, including

that of movement toward the narrower stretch.

The reconstruction may take place through the appearance of other sensory characters in

the field ignored before. A board long enough to bridge the ditch is recognized. Because the

individual has already the complex of impulses which lead to lifting it and placing it across

the ditch it becomes a part of the organized group of impulses that carry the man along

toward his destination. In neither case would he be ready to respond to the stimulus (in the

one case the image of the narrower stretch of the ditch, in the other the sight of the board) if

he had not reactions in his nature answering to these objects, nor would these tendencies to

response sensitize him to their stimuli if they were not freed from firmly organized habits. It is

this freedom, then, that is the prerequisite of reflection, and it is our social self reflective

conduct that gives this freedom to human individuals in their group life (MS).

17. THE RELATION OF MIND TO RESPONSE AND ENVIRONMENT

We have seen that mental processes have to do with the meanings of things, and that these

meanings can be stated in terms of highly organized attitudes of the individual. These attitudes

involve not only situations in which the elements are simultaneous, but also ones which involve

other temporal relationships, i.e., the adjustment of the present response to later responses which

are in some sense already initiated. Such an organization of attitudes with reference to what we

term objects is what constitutes for us the meanings of things. These meanings in logical

terminology are considered as universals) and this universality, we have seen attaches in a certain

sense to a habitual response in contrast to the particular stimuli which elicit this response. The

universality is reflected in behavioristic terms in the identity of the response, although the stimuli that

call out this response are all different. We can throw this statement into a logical form and say that

the response is universal while the stimuli are particulars which are brought under such a universal.

These relations of attitudes to each other throw light upon the relation of a "substance" to its

attributes. We speak of a house as, in a certain sense, a substance to which the attribute of color

may be applied. The color is an accident which inheres in a certain substance, as such. This

relationship of the inherence of a certain character in a certain substance is a relationship of a

specific response, such as that of ornamenting objects about us, to the group of actions involved in

dwelling in a house. The house must protect us, it must provide for us when we are asleep and

when we are awake, it must carry the requisites of a family life-these are essentials that stand for a

set of responses in which one inevitably implies the other. There are other responses, however, that

vary. We can satisfy not simply our taste, but also our whims in the ornaments we use. Those are

not essential. There are certain responses that vary, whereas there is a certain body of more or less

standardized responses that remain unchanged. The organized sets of responses answer to the

meanings of things, answer to them in their universality, that is, in the habitual response that is

called out by a great variety of stimuli. They answer to things in their logical relationships.

I have referred just now to the relationship of the substance as reflected in the body of habits, to the

varied responses answering to the attributes. In the relationship of cause and effect there is the

relation of the responses to each other in the sense of dependence, involving the adjustment of the

steps to be taken with reference to the thing to be carried out. The arrangement which may appear

at one time in terms of means and end appears at another time in terms of cause and effect. We

have here a relationship of dependence of one response on another, a necessary relation that lies

inside of a larger system.[1] It depends upon what we are going to do whether we select this means

or another one, one causal series or another. Our habits are so adjusted that if we decide to take a

journey, for instance, we have a body of related habits that begin to operate-packing our bags,

getting our railroad tickets, drawing out money for use, selecting books to read on the journey, and

so on. There are a whole set of organized responses which at once start to go off in their proper

relationship to each other when a person makes up his mind that he will take a journey. There must

be such an organization in our habits in order that man may have the sort of intelligence which he in

fact has.

We have, then, in the behavioristic statement, a place for that which is supposed to be the peculiar

content of mind, that is, the meanings of things. I have referred to these factors as attitudes. There

is, of course, that in the world which answers to the group of attitudes. We are here avoiding logical

and metaphysical problems, just as modern psychology does. What this psychology is seeking to do

is to get Control; it is not seeking to settle metaphysical questions. Now, from the point of view of

behavioristic psychology, we can state in terms of attitudes what we call the meanings of things; the

organized attitude of the individual is that which the psychologist gets hold of in this situation. It is at

least as legitimate for him to state meaning in terms of attitudes as it was for an earlier psychologist

to state it in terms of a static concept that had its place in the mind.

What I have pointed out is that in the central nervous system one can find, or at least justifiably

assume, just such complexities of responses, or the mechanism of just such complexities of

response, as we have been discussing. If we speak of a person going through the steps to which I

have referred, in preparing for a journey, we have to assume that not only are the nervous elements

essential to the steps, but that the relation of those responses in the central nervous system is of a

such sort that if the person carries out one response he is inevitably ready to find the stimulus which

will set free another related response. There must be an organization in the central nervous system

in the way of its elements, its neurons, for all the combinations which can possibly enter into a mind

and for just such a relationship of responses which are interdependent upon each other. Some of

these have been identified in the physiological study of the nervous system, while others have to be

assumed on the basis of such study. As I have said before, it is not the specific physiological

process which is going on inside of the neurons that as such is supposed to answer to meaning.

Earlier physiological psychologists had spoken of a specific psychical process, but there is nothing

in the mechanical, electrical, and physical activity that goes on in the nerve which answers to what

we term an idea. What is going on in the nerve in a particular situation is the innervation of a certain

response which means this, that, and the other thing, and here is where the specificity of a certain

nervous organization is found. It is in the central nervous system that organization takes place. In a

certain sense you can say that it is in the engineer's office that the organization of the concern is

carried out. But what is found there in the blue-prints and body of statistics is not the actual

production that is going on in the factory, even though that office does organize and coordinate

those various branches of the concern. In the same way the central nervous system coordinates all

the various processes that the body carries out. If there is anything in the organism as a purely

physiological mechanism which answers to what we call experience, when that is ordinarily termed

conscious, it is the total organic process for which these nervous elements stand. These processes

are, as we have seen, attitudes of response, adjustments of the organism to a complex

environment, attitudes which sensitize the form to the stimuli which will set the response free.

The point I want to emphasize is the way that these attitudes determine the environment. There is

an organized set of responses which first send off certain telegrams, then select the means of

transportation, then send us to the bank to get money, and then see to it that we get something to

read on the train. As we advance from one set of responses to another we find ourselves picking out

the environment which answers to this next set of responses. To finish one response is to put

ourselves in a position where we see other things. The appearance of the retinal elements has given

the world color; the development of the organs in the ear has given the world sound. We pick out an

organized environment in relationship to our response, so that these attitudes, as such, not only

represent our organized responses but they also represent what exists for us in the world; the

particular phase of reality that is there for us is picked out for us by our response. We can recognize

that it is the sensitizing of the organism to the stimuli which will set free its responses that is

responsible for one's living in this sort of an environment rather than in another. We see things in

their temporal relationship which answer to the temporal organization which is found in the central

nervous system. We see things as distant from us not only spatially but temporally; when we do this

we can do that. Our world is definitely mapped out for us by the responses which are going to take

place.[2]

It is a difficult matter to state just what we mean by dividing up a certain situation between the

organism and its environment. Certain objects come to exist for us because of the character of the

organism. Take the case of food. If an animal that can digest grass, such as an ox, comes into the

world, then grass becomes food. That object did not exist before, that is, grass as food. The advent

of the ox brings in a new object. In that sense, organisms are responsible for the appearance of

whole sets of objects that did not exist before.[3] The distribution of meaning to the organism and

the environment has its expression in the organism as well as in the thing, and that expression is not

a matter of psychical or mental conditions. There is an expression of the reaction of the organized

response of the organism to the environment, and that reaction is not simply a determination of the

organism by the environment, since the organism determines the environment as fully as the

environment determines the organs. The organic reaction is responsible for the appearance of a

whole set of objects which did not exist before.

There is a definite and necessary structure or gestalt of sensitivity within the organism, which

determines selectively and relatively the character of the external object it perceives. What we term

consciousness needs to be brought inside just this relation between an organism and its

environment. Our constructive selection of an environment-colors, emotional values, and the like-in

terms of our physiological sensitivities, is essentially what we mean by consciousness. This

consciousness we have tended historically to locate in the mind or in the brain. The eye and related

processes endow objects with color in exactly the same sense that an ox endows grass with the

character of food, that is, not in the sense of projecting sensations into objects, but rather of putting

itself into a relation with the object which makes the appearance and existence of the color possible,

as a quality of the object. Colors inhere in objects only by virtue of their relations to given percipient

organisms. The physiological or sensory structure of the percipient organism determines the

experienced content of the object.

The organism, then, is in a sense responsible for its environment. And since organism and

environment determine each other and are mutually dependent for their existence, it follows that the

life-process, to be adequately understood, must be considered in terms of their interrelations.

The social environment is endowed with meanings in terms of the process of social activity; it is an

organization of objective relations which arises in relation to a group of organisms engaged in such

activity, in processes of social experience and behavior. Certain characters of the external world are

possessed by it only with reference to or in relation to an interacting social group of individual

organisms; just as other characters of it are possessed by it only with reference to or in relation to

individual organisms themselves. The relation of the social process of behavior -- or the relation of

the social organism-to the social environment is analogous to the relation of the processes of

individual biological activity-or the relation of the individual organism-to the physical-biological

environment.[4]

The parallelism I have been referring to is the parallelism of the set of the organism and the objects

answering to it. In the ox there is hunger, and also the sight and odor which bring in the food. The

whole process is not found simply in the stomach, but in all the activities of grazing, chewing the

cud, and so on. This process is one which is intimately related to the so-called food which exists out

there. The organism sets up a bacteriological laboratory, such as the ox carries around to take care

of the grass which then becomes food. Within that parallelism what we term the meaning of the

object is found, specifically, in the organized attitude of response on the part of the organism to the

characters and the things. The meanings are there, and the mind is occupied with these meanings.

The organized stimuli answer to the organized responses.

It is the organization of the different responses to each other in their relationship to the stimuli they

are setting free that is the peculiar subject matter of psychology in dealing with what we term "mind."

We generally confine the term "mental," and so "mind," to the human organism, because there we

find that body of symbols that enables us to isolate these characters, these meanings. We try to

distinguish the meaning of a house from the stone, the cement, the bricks that make it up as a

physical object, and in doing so we are referring to the use of it. That is what makes the house a

mental affair.[5] We are isolating, if you like, the building materials from the standpoint of the

physicist and the architect. There are various standpoints from which one can look at a house. The

burrow in which some animal lives is in one sense the house of the animal, but when the human

being lives in a house it takes on what we term a mental character for him which it presumably has

not for the mole that lives in the burrow. The human individual has the ability to pick out the

elements in a house which answer to his responses so that he can control them. He reads the

advertisement of a new form of a boiler and can then have more warmth, have a more comfortable

dressing-room than before. Man is able to control the process from the standpoint of his own

responses. He gets meanings and so controls his responses. -His ability to pick those out is what

makes the house a mental affair. The mole, too, has to find his food, meet his enemies, and avoid

them, but we do not assume that the mole is able to indicate to himself the peculiar advantages of

his burrow over against another one. His house has no mental characteristics. Mentality resides in

the ability of the organism to indicate that in the environment which answers to his responses, so

that he can control those responses in various ways. That, from the point of view of behavioristic

psychology, is what mentality consists in. There are in the mole and other animals complex

elements of behavior related to the environment, but the human animal is able to indicate to itself

and to others what the characters are in the environment which call out these complex, highly

organized responses, and by such indication is able to control the responses. The human animal

has the ability over and above the adjustment which belongs to the lower animal to pick out and

isolate the stimulus. The biologist recognizes that food has certain values, and while the human

animal responds to these values as other animals do, it can also indicate certain characters in the

food which mean certain things in his digestive responses to these foods. Mentality consists in

indicating these values to others and to one's self so that one can control one's responses.

Mentality on our approach simply comes in when the organism is able to point out meanings to

others and to himself. This is the point at which mind appears, or if you like, emerges. What we

need to recognize is that we are dealing with the relationship of the organism to the environment

selected by its own sensitivity. The psychologist is interested in the mechanism which the human

species has evolved to get control over these relationships. The relationships have been there

before the indications are made, but the organism has not in its own conduct controlled that

relationship. It originally has no mechanism by means of which it can control it. The human animal,

however, has worked out a mechanism of language communication by means of which it can get

this control. Now, it is evident that much of that mechanism does not lie in the central nervous

system, but in the relation of things to the organism. The ability to pick these meanings out and to

indicate them to others and to the organism is an ability which gives peculiar power to the human

individual. The control has been made possible by language. It is that mechanism of control over

meaning in this sense which has, I say, constituted what we term "mind." The mental processes do

not, however, lie in words any more than the intelligence of the organism lies in the elements of the

central nervous system. Both are part of a process that is going on between organism and

environment. The symbols serve their part in this process, and it is that which makes

communication so important. Out of language emerges the field of mind.

It is absurd to look at the mind simply from the standpoint of the individual human organism; for,

although it has its focus there, it is essentially a social phenomenon; even its biological functions are

primarily social. The subjective experience of the individual must be brought into relation with the

natural, sociobiological activities of the brain in order to render an acceptable account of mind

possible at all; and this can be done only if the social nature of mind is recognized. The meagerness

of individual experience in isolation from the processes of social experience --in isolation from its

social environment-should, moreover, be apparent. We must regard mind, then, as arising and

developing within the social process, within the empirical matrix of social interactions. We must, that

is, get an inner individual experience from the standpoint of social acts which include the

experiences of separate individuals in a social context wherein those individuals interact. The

processes of experience which the human brain makes possible are made possible only for a group

of interacting individuals: only for individual organisms which are members of a society; not for the

individual organism in isolation from other individual organisms.

Mind arises in the social process only when that process as a whole enters into, or is present in, the

experience of any one of the given individuals involved in that process. When this occurs the

individual becomes self-conscious and has a mind; he becomes aware of his relations to that

process as a whole, and to the other individuals participating in it with him; he becomes aware of

that process as modified by the reactions and interactions of the individuals-including himself-who

are carrying it on. The evolutionary appearance of mind or intelligence takes place when the whole

social process of experience and behavior is brought within the experience of any one of the

separate individuals implicated therein, and when the individual's adjustment to the process is

modified and refined by the awareness or consciousness which he thus has of it. It is by means of

reflexiveness-the turning-back of the experience of the individual upon himself-that the whole social

process is thus brought into the experience of the individuals involved in it; it is by such means,

which enable the individual to take the attitude of the other toward himself, that the individual is able

consciously to adjust himself to that process, and to modify the resultant of that process in any given

social act in terms of his adjustment to it. Reflexiveness, then, is the essential condition, within the

social process, for the development of mind.

Endnotes

1. Representation involves relation of earlier to later acts. This relation of responses gives

implication (1924).

2. The structure of the environment is a mapping out of organic responses to nature; any

environment, whether social or individual, is a mapping out of the logical structure of the act

to which it answers, an act seeking overt expression.

3. It is objectionable to speak of the food-process in the animal as constituting the food-object.

They are certainly relative to each other (MS).

4. A social organism-that is, a social group of individual organisms -- constitutes or creates its

own special environment of objects just as, and in the same sense as, an individual

organism constitutes or creates its own special environment of objects (which, however, is

much more rudimentary than the environment constructed by a social organism).

5. Nature-the external world-is objectively there, in opposition to our experience of it, or in

opposition to the individual thinker himself. Although external objects are there independent

of the experiencing individual, nevertheless they possess certain characteristics by virtue of

their relations to his experiencing or to his mind, which they would not possess otherwise or

apart from those relations. These characteristics are their meanings for him, or in general,

for us. The distinction between physical objects or physical reality and the mental or self-

conscious experience of those objects or that reality-the distinction between external and

internal experience-lies in the fact that the latter is concerned with or constituted by

meanings. Experienced objects have definite meanings for the individuals thinking about

them.

18. THE SELF AND THE ORGANISM

In our statement of the development of intelligence we have already suggested that the language

process is essential for the development of the self. The self has a character which is different from

that of the physiological organism proper. The self is something which has a development; it is not

initially there, at birth, but arises in the process of social experience and activity, that is, develops in

the given individual as a result of his relations to that process as a whole and to other individuals

within that process. The intelligence of the lower forms of animal life, like a great deal of human

intelligence, does not involve a self. In our habitual actions, for example, in our moving about in a

world that is simply there and to which we are so adjusted that no thinking is involved, there is a

certain amount of sensuous experience such as persons have when they are just waking up, a bare

thereness of the world. Such characters about us may exist in experience without taking their place

in relationship to the self. One must, of course, under those conditions, distinguish between the

experience that immediately takes place and our own organization of it into the experience of the

self. One says upon analysis that a certain item had its place in his experience, in the experience of

his self. We do inevitably tend at a certain level of sophistication to organize all experience into that

of a self. We do so intimately identify our experiences, especially our affective experiences, with the

self that it takes a moment's abstraction to realize that pain and pleasure can be there without being

the experience of the self. Similarly, we normally organize our memories upon the string of our self.

If we date things we always date them from the point of view of our past experiences. We frequently

have memories that we cannot date, that we cannot place. A picture comes before us suddenly and

we are at a loss to explain when that experience originally took place. We remember perfectly

distinctly the picture, but we do not have it definitely placed, and until we can place it in terms of our

past experience we are not satisfied. Nevertheless, I think it is obvious when one comes to consider

it that the self is not necessarily involved in the life of the organism, nor involved in what we term our

sensuous experience, that is, experience in a world about us for which we have habitual reactions.

We can distinguish very definitely between the self and the body. The body can be there and can

operate in a very intelligent fashion without there being a self involved in the experience. The self

has the characteristic that it is an object to itself, and that characteristic distinguishes it from other

objects and from the body. It is perfectly true that the eye can see the foot, but it does not see the

body as a whole. We cannot see our backs; we can feel certain portions of them, if we are agile, but

we cannot get an experience of our whole body. There are, of course, experiences which are

somewhat vague and difficult of location, but the bodily experiences are for us organized about a

self. The foot and hand belong to the self. We can see our feet, especially if we look at them from

the wrong end of an opera glass, as strange things which we have difficulty in recognizing as our

own. The parts of the body are quite distinguishable from the self. We can lose parts of the body

without any serious invasion of the self. The mere ability to experience different parts of the body is

not different from the experience of a table. The table presents a different feel from what the hand

does when one hand feels another, but it is an experience of something with which we come

definitely into contact. The body does not experience itself as a whole, in the sense in which the self

in some way enters into the experience of the self.

It is the characteristic of the self as an object to itself that I want to bring out. This characteristic is

represented in the word "self," which is a reflexive, and indicates that which can be both subject and

object. This type of object is essentially different from other objects, and in the past it has been

distinguished as conscious, a term which Indicates an experience with, an experience of, one's self.

It was assumed that consciousness in some way carried this capacity of being an object to itself. In

giving a behavioristic statement of consciousness we have to look for some sort of experience in

which the physical organism can become an object to itself.[1]

When one is running to get away from someone who is chasing him, he is entirely occupied in this

action, and his experience may be swallowed up in the objects about him, so that he has at the time

being, no consciousness of self at all. We must be, of course, very completely occupied to have that

take place, but we can, I think, recognize that sort of a possible experience in which the self does

not enter. We can, perhaps, get some light on that situation through those experiences in which in

very intense action there appear in the experience of the individual, back of this intense action,

memories and anticipations. Tolstoi as an officer in the war gives an account of having pictures of

his past experience in the midst of his most intense action. There are also the pictures that flash into

a person's mind when he is drowning. In such instances there is a contrast between an experience

that is absolutely wound up in outside activity in which the self as an object does not enter, and an

activity of memory and imagination in which the self is the principal object. The self is then entirely

distinguishable from an organism that is surrounded by things and acts with reference to things,

including parts of its own body. These latter may be objects like other objects, but they are just

objects out there in the field, and they do not involve a self that is an object to the organism. This is,

I think, frequently overlooked. It is that fact which makes our anthropomorphic reconstructions of

animal life so fallacious. How can an individual get outside himself (experientially) in such a way as

to become an object to himself? This is the essential psychological problem of selfhood or of self-

consciousness; and its solution is to be found by referring to the process of social conduct or activity

in which the given person or individual is implicated. The apparatus of reason would not be

complete unless it swept itself into its own analysis of the field of experience; or unless the individual

brought himself into the same experiential field as that of the other individual selves in relation to

whom he acts in any given social situation. Reason cannot become impersonal unless it takes an

objective, non-affective attitude toward itself; otherwise we have just consciousness, not self-

consciousness. And it is necessary to rational conduct that the individual should thus take an

objective, impersonal attitude toward himself, that he should become an object to himself. For the

individual organism is obviously an essential and important fact or constituent element of the

empirical situation in which it acts; and without taking objective account of itself as such, it cannot

act intelligently, or rationally.

The individual experiences himself as such, not directly, but only indirectly, from the particular

standpoints of other individual members of the same social group, or from the generalized

standpoint of the social group as a whole to which he belongs. For he enters his own experience as

a self or individual, not directly or immediately, not by becoming a subject to himself, but only in so

far as he first becomes an object to himself just as other individuals are objects to him or in his

experience; and he becomes an object to himself only by taking the attitudes of other individuals

toward himself within a social environment or context of experience and behavior in which both he

and they are involved.

The importance of what we term "communication" lies in the fact that it provides a form of behavior

in which the organism or the individual may become an object to himself. It is that sort of

communication which we have been discussing -not communication in the sense of the cluck of the

hen to the chickens, or the bark of a wolf to the pack, or the lowing of a cow, but communication in

the sense of significant symbols, communication which is directed not only to others but also to the

individual himself. So far as that type of communication is a part of behavior it at least introduces a

self. Of course, one may hear without listening; one may see things that he does not realize; do

things that he is not really aware of. But it is where one does respond to that which he addresses to

another and where that response of his own becomes a part of his conduct, where he not only hears

himself but responds to himself, talks and replies to himself as truly as the other person replies to

him, that we have behavior in which the individuals become objects to themselves.

Such a self is not, I would say, primarily the physiological organism. The physiological organism is

essential to it, [2] but we are at least able to think of a self without it. Persons who believe in

immortality, or believe in ghosts, or in the possibility of the self leaving the body, assume a self

which is quite distinguishable from the body. How successfully they can hold these conceptions is

an open question, but we do, as a fact, separate the self and the organism. It is fair to say that the

beginning of the self as an object, so far as we can see, is to be found in the experiences of people

that lead to the conception of a "double." Primitive people assume that there is a double, located

presumably in the diaphragm, that leaves the body temporarily in sleep and completely in death. It

can be enticed out of the body of one's enemy and perhaps killed. It is represented in infancy by the

imaginary playmates which children set up, and through which they come to control their

experiences in their play.

The self, as that which can be an object to itself, is essentially a social structure, and it arises in

social experience. After a self has arisen, it in a certain sense provides for itself its social

experiences, and so we can conceive of an absolutely solitary self. But it is impossible to conceive

of a self arising outside of social experience. When it has arisen we can think of a person in solitary

confinement for the rest of his life, but who still has himself as a companion, and is able to think and

to converse with himself as he had communicated with others. That process to which I have just

referred, of responding to one's self as another responds to it, taking part in one's own conversation

with others, being aware of what one is saying and using that awareness of what one is saying to

determine what one is going to say thereafter-that is a process with which we are all familiar. We

are continually following up our own address to other persons by an understanding of what we are

saying, and using that understanding in the direction of our continued speech. We are finding out

what we are going to say, what we are going to do, by saying and doing, and in the process we are

continually controlling the process itself. In the conversation of gestures what we say calls out a

certain response in another and that in turn changes our own action, so that we shift from what we

started to do because of the reply the other makes. The conversation of gestures is the beginning of

communication. The individual comes to carry on a conversation of gestures with himself. He says

something, and that calls out a certain reply in himself which makes him change what he was going

to say. One starts to say something, we will presume an unpleasant something, but when he starts

to say it he realizes it is cruel. The effect on himself of what he is saying checks him; there is here a

conversation of gestures between the individual and himself. We mean by significant speech that

the action is one that affects the individual himself, and that the effect upon the individual himself is

part of the intelligent carrying-out of the conversation with others. Now we, so to speak, amputate

that social phase and dispense with it for the time being, so that one is talking to one's self as one

would talk to another person.[3]

This process of abstraction cannot be carried on indefinitely. One inevitably seeks an audience, has

to pour himself out to somebody. In reflective intelligence one thinks to act, and to act solely so that

this action remains a part of a social process. Thinking becomes preparatory to social action. The

very process of thinking is, of course, simply an inner conversation that goes on, but it is a

conversation of gestures which in its completion implies the expression of that which one thinks to

an audience. One separates the significance of what he is saying to others from the actual speech

and gets it ready before saying it. He thinks it out, and perhaps writes it in the form of a book; but it

is still a part of social intercourse in which one is addressing other persons and at the same time

addressing one's self, and in which one controls the address to other persons by the response

made to one's own gesture. That the person should be responding to himself is necessary to the

self, and it is this sort of social conduct which provides behavior within which that self appears. I

know of no other form of behavior than the linguistic in which the individual is an object to himself,

and, so far as I can see, the individual is not a self in the reflexive sense unless he is an object to

himself. It is this fact that gives a critical importance to communication, since this is a type of

behavior in which the individual does so respond to himself.

We realize in everyday conduct and experience that an individual does not mean a great deal of

what he is doing and saying. We frequently say that such an individual is not himself. We come

away from an interview with a realization that we have left out important things, that there are parts

of the self that did not get into what was said. What determines the amount of the self that gets into

communication is the social experience itself. Of course, a good deal of the self does not need to

get expression. We carry on a whole series of different relationships to different people. We are one

thing to one man and another thing to another. There are parts of the self which exist only for the

self in relationship to itself. We divide ourselves up in all sorts of different selves with reference to

our acquaintances. We discuss politics with one and religion with another. There are all sorts of

different selves answering to all sorts of different social reactions. It is the social process itself that is

responsible for the appearance of the self; it is not there as a self apart from this type of experience.

A multiple personality is in a certain sense normal, as I have just pointed out. There is usually an

organization of the whole self with reference to the community to which we belong, and the situation

in which we find ourselves. What the society is, whether we are living with people of the present,

people of our own imaginations, people of the past, varies, of course, with different individuals.

Normally, within the sort of community as a whole to which we belong, there is a unified self, but that

may be broken up. To a person who is somewhat unstable nervously and in whom there is a line of

cleavage, certain activities become impossible, and that set of activities may separate and evolve

another self. Two separate "Me's" and "I's," two different selves, result, and that is the condition

under which there is a tendency to break up the personality. There is an account of a professor of

education who disappeared, was lost to the community, and later turned up in a logging camp in the

West. He freed himself of his occupation and turned to the woods where he felt, if you like, more at

home. The pathological side of it was the forgetting, the leaving out of the rest of the self. This result

involved getting rid of certain bodily memories which would identify the individual to himself. We

often recognize the lines of cleavage that run through us. We would be glad to forget certain things,

get rid of things the self is bound up with in past experiences. What we have here is a situation in

which there can be different selves, and it is dependent upon the set of social reactions that is

involved as to which self we are going to be. If we can forget everything involved in one set of

activities, obviously we relinquish that part of the self. Take a person who is unstable, get him

occupied by speech, and at the same time get his eye on something you are writing so that he is

carrying on two separate lines of communication, and if you go about it in the right way you can get

those two currents going so that they do not run into each other. You can get two entirely different

sets of activities going on. You can bring about in that way the dissociation of a person's self. It is a

process of setting up two sorts of communication which separate the behavior of the individual. For

one individual it is this thing said and heard, and for the other individual there exists only that which

he sees written. You must, of course, keep one experience out of the field of the other.

Dissociations are apt to take place when an event leads to emotional upheavals. That which is

separated goes on in its own way.

The unity and structure of the complete self reflects the unity and structure of the social process as

a whole; and each of the elementary selves of which it is composed reflects the unity and structure

of one of the various aspects of that process in which the individual is implicated. In other words, the

various elementary selves which constitute, or are organized into, a complete self are the various

aspects of the structure of that complete self answering to the various aspects of the structure of the

social process as a whole; the structure of the complete self is thus a reflection of the complete

social process. The organization and unification of a social group is identical with the organization

and unification of any one of the selves arising within the social process in which that group is

engaged, or which it is carrying on.[4]

The phenomenon of dissociation of personality is caused by a breaking up of the complete, unitary

self into the component selves of which it is composed, and which respectively correspond to

different aspects of the social process in which the person is involved, and within which his

complete or unitary self has arisen; these aspects being the different social groups to which he

belongs within that process.

Endnotes

1. Man's behavior is such in his social group that he is able to become an object to himself, a

fact which constitutes him a more advanced product of evolutionary development than are

the lower animals. Fundamentally it is this social fact-and not his alleged possession of a

soul or mind with which he, as an individual, has been mysteriously and supernaturally

endowed, and with which the lower animals have not been endowed-that differentiates him

from them.

2. a) All social interrelations and interactions are rooted in a certain common socio-

physiological endowment of every individual involved in them. These physiological bases of

social behavior-which have their ultimate scat or locus in the lower part of the individual's

central nervous system-are the bases of such behavior, precisely because they in

themselves are also social; that is, because they consist in drives or instincts or behavior

tendencies, on the part of the given individual, which he cannot carry out or give overt

expression and satisfaction to without the cooperative aid of one or more other individuals.

The physiological processes of behavior of which they are the mechanisms are processes

which necessarily involve more than one individual, processes in which other individuals

besides the given individual are perforce implicated. Examples of the fundamental social

relations to which these physiological bases of social behavior give rise are those between

the sexes (expressing the reproductive instinct), between parent and child (expressing the

parental instinct), and between neighbors (expressing the gregarious instinct). These

relatively simple and rudimentary physiological mechanisms or tendencies of individual

human behavior, besides constituting the physiological bases of all human social behavior,

are also the fundamental biological materials of human nature; so that when we refer to

human nature, we are referring to something which is essentially social.

b)Sexually and parentally, as well as in its attacks and defenses, the activities of the

physiological organism are social in that the acts begun within the organism require their

completion in the actions of others......... But while the pattern of the individual act may be

said to be in these cases social, it is only so in so far as the organism seeks for the stimuli in

the attitudes and characters of other forms for the completion of its own responses, and by

its behavior tends to maintain the other as a part of its own environment. The actual

behavior of the other or the others is not initiated in the individual form as a part of its own

pattern of behavior (MS).

3. It is generally recognized that the specifically social expressions of intelligence, or the

exercise of what is often called "social intelligence," depend upon the given individual's

ability to take the roles of, or "put himself in the place of," the other individuals implicated

with him in given social situations; and upon his consequent sensitivity to their attitudes

toward himself and toward one another. These specifically social expressions of intelligence,

of course, acquire unique significance in terms of our view that the whole nature of

intelligence is social to the very core-that this putting of one's self in the places of others, this

taking by one's self of their roles or attitudes, is not merely one of the various aspects or

expressions of intelligence or of intelligent behavior, but is the very essence of its character.

Spearman's "X factor" in intelligence - the unknown factor which, according to him,

intelligence contains-is simply (if our social theory of intelligence is correct) this ability of the

intelligent individual to take the attitude of the other, or the attitudes of others, thus realizing

the significations or grasping the meanings of the symbols or gestures in terms of which

thinking proceeds; and thus being able to carry on with himself the internal conversation with

these symbols or gestures which thinking involves.

4. The unity of the mind is not identical with the unity of the self. The unity of the self is

constituted by the unity of the entire relational pattern of social behavior and experience in

which the individual is implicated, and which is reflected in the structure of the self; but many

of the aspects or features of this entire pattern do not enter into consciousness, so that the

unity of the mind is in a sense an abstraction from the more inclusive unity of the self.

19. THE BACKGROUND OF THE GENESIS OF THE SELF

The problem now presents itself as to how, in detail, a self arises. We have to note something of the

background of its genesis. First of all there is the conversation of gestures between animals

involving some sort of cooperative activity. There the beginning of the act of one is a stimulus to the

other to respond in a certain way, while the beginning of this response becomes again a stimulus to

the first to adjust his action to the oncoming response. Such is the preparation for the completed act,

and ultimately it leads up to the conduct which is the outcome of this preparation. The conversation

of gestures, however, does not carry with it the reference of the individual, the animal, the organism,

to itself. It is not acting in a fashion which calls for a response from the form itself, although it is

conduct with reference to the conduct of others. We have seen, however, that there are certain

gestures that do affect the organism as they affect other organisms and may, therefore, arouse in

the organism responses of the same character as aroused in the other. Here, then, we have a

situation in which the individual may at least arouse responses in himself and reply to these

responses, the condition being that the social stimuli have an effect on the individual which is like

that which they have on the other. That, for example, is what is implied in language; otherwise

language as significant symbol would disappear, since the individual would not get the meaning of

that which he says.

The peculiar character possessed by our human social environment belongs to it by virtue of the

peculiar character of human social activity; and that character, as we have seen, is to be found in

the process of communication, and more particularly in the triadic relation on which the existence of

meaning is based: the relation of the gesture of one organism to the adjustive response made to it

by another organism, in its indicative capacity as pointing to the completion or resultant of the act it

initiates (the meaning of the gesture being thus the response Of the second organism to it as such,

or as a gesture). What, as it were, takes the gesture out of the social act and isolates it as such-

what makes it something more than just an early phase of an individual act-is the response of

another organism, or of other organisms, to it. Such a response is its meaning, or gives it its

meaning. The social situation and process of behavior are here presupposed by the acts of the

individual organisms implicated therein. The gesture arises as a separable element in the social act,

by virtue of the fact that it is selected out by the sensitivities of other organisms to it; it does not exist

as a gesture merely in the experience of the single individual. The meaning of a gesture by one

organism, to repeat, is found in the response of another organism to what would be the completion

of the act of the first organism which that gesture initiates and indicates.

We sometimes speak as if a person could build up an entire argument in his mind, and then put it

into words to convey it to someone else. Actually, our thinking always takes place by means of

some sort of symbols. It is possible that one could have the meaning of "chair" in his experience

without there being a symbol, but we would not be thinking about it in that case. We may sit down in

a chair without thinking about what we are doing, that is, the approach to the chair is presumably

already aroused in our experience, so that the meaning is there. But if one is thinking about the

chair he must have some sort of a symbol for it. It may be the form of the chair, it may be the attitude

that somebody else takes in sitting down, but it is more apt to be some language symbol that

arouses this response. In a thought process there has to be some sort of a symbol that can refer to

this meaning, that is, tend to call out this response, and also serve this purpose for other persons as

well. It would not be a thought process if that were not the case.

Our symbols are all universal. [1] You cannot say anything that is absolutely particular; anything you

say that has any meaning at all is universal. You are saying something that calls out a specific

response in anybody else provided that the symbol exists for him in his experience as it does for

you. There is the language of speech and the language of hands, and there may be the language of

the expression of the countenance. One can register grief or joy and call out certain responses.

There are primitive people who can carry on elaborate conversations just by expressions of the

countenance. Even in these cases the person who communicates is affected by that expression just

as he expects somebody else to be affected. Thinking always implies a symbol which will call out

the same response in another that it calls out in the thinker. Such a symbol is a universal of

discourse; it is universal in its character. We always assume that the symbol we use is one which

will call out in the other person the same response, provided it is a part of his mechanism of

conduct. A person who is saying something is saying to himself what he says to others; otherwise

he does not know what he is talking about.

There is, of course, a great deal in one's conversation with others that does not arouse in one's self

the same response it arouses in others. That is particularly true in the case of emotional attitudes.

One tries to bully somebody else; he is not trying to bully himself. There is, further, a whole set of

values given in speech which are not of a symbolic character. The actor is conscious of these

values; that is, if he assumes a certain attitude he is, as we say, aware that this attitude represents

grief. If it does he is able to respond to his own gesture in some sense as his audience does. It is

not a natural situation; one is not an actor all of the time. We do at times act and consider just what

the effect of our attitude is going to be, and we may deliberately use a certain tone of voice to bring

about a certain result. Such a tone arouses the same response in ourselves that we want to arouse

in somebody else. But a very large part of what goes on in speech has not this symbolic status.

It is the task not only of the actor but of the artist as well to find the sort of expression that will arouse

in others what is going on in himself. The lyric poet has an experience of beauty with an emotional

thrill to it, and as an artist using words he is seeking for those words which will answer to his

emotional attitude, and which will call out in others the attitude he himself has. He can only test his

results in himself by seeing whether these words do call out in him the response he wants to call out

in others. He is in somewhat the same position as that of the actor. The first direct and immediate

experience is not in the form of communication. We have an interesting light on this from such a

poet as Wordsworth, who was very much interested in the technique of the poet's expression; and

he has told us in his prefaces and also in his own poetry how his poems, as poems, arose and

uniformly the experience itself was not the immediate stimulus to the poetic expression. A period of

ten years might lie between the original experience and the expression of it. This process of finding

the expression in language which will call out the emotion once had is more easily accomplished

when one is dealing with the memory of it than when one is in the midst of the trance-like

experiences through which Wordsworth passed in his contact with nature. One has to experiment

and see how the expression that is given does answer to the responses which are now had in the

fainter memories of experience. Someone once said that he had very great difficulty in writing

poetry; he had plenty of ideas but could not get the language he needed. He was rightly told that

poetry was written in words, not in ideas.

A great deal of our speech is not of this genuinely aesthetic character; in most of it we do not

deliberately feel the emotions which we arouse. We do not normally use language stimuli to call out

in ourselves the emotional response which we are calling out in others. One does, of course, have

sympathy in emotional situations; but what one is seeking for there is something which is, after all,

that in the other which supports the individual in his own experience. In the case of the poet and

actor, the stimulus calls out in the artist that which it calls out in the other, but this is not the natural

function of language; we do not assume that the person who is angry is calling out the fear in

himself that he is calling out in someone else. The emotional part of our act does not directly call out

in us the response it calls out in the other. If a person is hostile the attitude of the other that he is

interested in, an attitude which flows naturally from his angered tones, is not one that he definitely

recognizes in himself. We are not frightened by a tone which we may use to frighten somebody

else. On the emotional side, which is a very large part of the vocal gesture, we do not call out in

ourselves in any such degree the response we call out in others as we do in the case of significant

speech. Here we should call out in ourselves the type of response we are calling out in others; we

must know what we are saying, and the attitude of the other which we arouse in ourselves should

control what we do say. Rationality means that the type of the response which we call out in others

should be so called out in ourselves, and that this response should in turn take its place in

determining what further thing we are going to say and do.

What is essential to communication is that the symbol should arouse in one's self what it arouses in

the other individual. It must have that sort of universality to any person who finds himself in the

same situation. There is a possibility of language whenever a stimulus can affect the individual as it

affects the other. With a blind person such as Helen Keller, it is a contact experience that could be

given to another as it is given to herself. It is out of that sort of language that the mind of Helen

Keller was built up. As she has recognized, it was not until she could get into communication with

other persons through symbols which could arouse in herself the responses they arouse in other

people that she could get what we term a mental content, or a self.

Another set of background factors in the genesis of the self is represented in the activities of play

and the game.

Among primitive people, as I have said, the necessity of distinguishing the self and the organism

was recognized in what we term the "double": the individual has a thing-like self that is affected by

the individual as it affects other people and which is distinguished from the immediate organism in

that it can leave the body and come back to it. This is the basis for the concept of the soul as a

separate entity.

We find in children something that answers to this double, namely, the invisible, imaginary

companions which a good many children produce in their own experience. They organize in this way

the responses which they call out in other persons and call out also in themselves. Of course, this

playing with an imaginary companion is only a peculiarly interesting phase of ordinary play. Play in

this sense, especially the stage which precedes the organized games, is a play at something. A

child plays at being a mother, at being a teacher, at being a policeman; that is, it is taking different

roles, as we say. We have something that suggests this in what we call the play of animals: a cat

will play with her kittens, and dogs play with each other. Two dogs playing with each other will attack

and defend, in a process which if carried through would amount to an actual fight. There is a

combination of responses which checks the depth of the bite. But we do not have in such a situation

the dogs taking a definite rôle in the sense that a child deliberately takes the role of another. This

tendency on the part of the children is what we are working with in the kindergarten where the rôles

which the children assume are made the basis for training. When a child does assume a role he has

in himself the stimuli which call out that particular response or group of responses. He may, of

course, run away when he is chased, as the dog does, or he may turn around and strike back just

as the dog does in his play. But that is not the same as playing at something. Children get together

to "play Indian." This means that the child has a certain set of stimuli which call out in itself the

responses that they would call out in others, and which answer to an Indian. In the play period the

child utilizes his own responses to these stimuli which he makes use of in building a self. The

response which he has a tendency to make to these stimuli organizes them. He plays that he is, for

instance, offering himself something, and he buys it; he gives a letter to himself and takes it away;

he addresses himself as a parent, as a teacher; he arrests himself as a policeman. He has a set of

stimuli which call out in himself the sort of responses they call out in others. He takes this group of

responses and organizes them into a certain whole. Such is the simplest form of being another to

one's self. It involves a temporal situation. The child says something in one character and responds

in another character, and then his responding in another character is a stimulus to himself in the first

character, and so the conversation goes on. A certain organized structure arises in him and in his

other which replies to it, and these carry on the conversation of gestures between themselves.

If we contrast play with the situation in an organized game, we note the essential difference that the

child who plays in a game must be ready to take the attitude of everyone else involved in that game,

and that these different rôles must have a definite relationship to each other. Taking a very simple

game such as hide-and-seek, everyone with the exception of the one who is hiding is a person who

is hunting. A child does not require more than the person who is hunted and the one who is hunting.

If a child is playing in the first sense he just goes on playing, but there is no basic organization

gained. In that early stage he passes from one rôle to another just as a whim takes him. But in a

game where a number of individuals are involved, then the child taking one role must be ready to

take the rôle of everyone else. If he gets in a ball nine he must have the responses of each position

involved in his own position. He must know what everyone else is going to do in order to carry out

his own play. He has to take all of these roles. They do not all have to be present in consciousness

at the same time, but at some moments he has to have three or four individuals present in his own

attitude, such as the one who is going to throw the ball, the one who is going to catch it, and so on.

These responses must be, in some degree, present in his own make-up. In the game, then, there is

a set of responses of such others so organized that the attitude of one calls out the appropriate

attitudes of the other.

This organization is put in the form of the rules of the game. Children take a great interest in rules.

They make rules on the spot in order to help themselves out of difficulties. Part of the enjoyment of

the game is to get these rules. Now, the rules are the set of responses which a particular attitude

calls out. You can demand a certain response in others if you take a certain attitude. These

responses are all in yourself as well. There you get an organized set of such responses as that to

which I have referred, which is something more elaborate than the rôles found in play. Here there is

just a set of responses that follow on each other indefinitely. At such a stage we speak of a child as

not yet having a fully developed self. The child responds in a fairly intelligent fashion to the

immediate stimuli that come to him, but they are not organized. He does not organize his life as we

would like to have him do, namely, as a whole. There is just a set of responses of the type of play.

The child reacts to a certain stimulus, and the reaction is in himself that is called out in others, but

he is not a whole self. In his game he has to have an organization of these rôles; otherwise he

cannot play the game. The game represents the passage in the life of the child from taking the rôle

of others in play to the organized part that is essential to self-consciousness in the full sense of the

term.

Endnotes

1. Thinking proceeds in terms of or by means of universals. A universal may be interpreted

behavioristically as simply the social act as a whole, involving the organization and

interrelation of the attitudes of all the individuals implicated in the act, as controlling their

overt responses. This organization of the different individual attitudes and interactions in a

given social act, with reference to their interrelations as realized by the individuals

themselves, is what we mean by a universal; and it determines what the actual overt

responses of the individuals involved in the given social act will be, whether that act be

concerned with a concrete project of some sort (such as the relation of physical and social

means to ends desired) or with some purely abstract discussion, say the theory of relativity

or the Platonic ideas.

20. PLAY, THE GAME, AND THE GENERALIZED OTHER

We were speaking of the social conditions under which the self arises as an object. In addition to

language we found two illustrations, one in play and the other in the game, and I wish to summarize

and expand my account on these points. I have spoken of these from the point of view of children.

We can, of course, refer also to the attitudes of more primitive people out of which our civilization

has arisen. A striking illustration of play as distinct from the game is found in the myths and various

of the plays which primitive people carry out, especially in religious pageants. The pure play attitude

which we find in the case of little children may not be found here, since the participants are adults,

and undoubtedly the relationship of these play processes to that which they interpret is more or less

in the minds of even the most primitive people. In the process of interpretation of such rituals, there

is an organization of play which perhaps might be compared to that which is taking place in the

kindergarten in dealing with the plays of little children, where these are made into a set that will have

a definite structure or relationship. At least something of the same sort is found in the play of

primitive people. This type of activity belongs, of course, not to the everyday life of the people in

their dealing with the objects about them-there we have a more or less definitely developed self-

consciousness -- but in their attitudes toward the forces about them, the nature upon which they

depend; in their attitude toward this nature which is vague and uncertain, there we have a much

more primitive response; and that response finds its expression in taking the rôle of the other,

playing at the expression of their gods and their heroes, going through certain rites which are the

representation of what these individuals are supposed to be doing. The process is one which

develops, to be sure, into a more or less definite technique and is controlled; and yet we can say

that it has arisen out of situations similar to those in which little children play at being a parent, at

being a teacher-vague personalities that are about them and which affect them and on which they

depend. These are personalities which they take, rôles they play, and in so far control the

development of their own personality. This outcome is just what the kindergarten works toward. It

takes the characters of these various vague beings and gets them into such an organized social

relationship to each. other that they build up the character of the little child.[1] The very introduction

of organization from outside supposes a lack of organization at this period in the child's experience.

Over against such a situation of the little child and primitive people, we have the game as such.

The fundamental difference between the game and play is that in the latter the child must have the

attitude of all the others involved in that game. The attitudes of the other players which the

participant assumes organize into a sort of unit, and it is that organization which controls the

response of the individual. The illustration used was of a person playing baseball. Each one of his

own acts is determined by his assumption of the action of the others who are playing the game.

What he does is controlled by his being everyone else on that team, at least in so far as those

attitudes affect his own particular response. We get then an "other" which is an organization of the

attitudes of those involved in the same process.

The organized community or social group which gives to the individual his unity of self may be

called "the generalized' other." The attitude of the generalized other is the attitude of the whole

community.[2] Thus, for example, in the case of such a social group as a ball team, the team is the

generalized other in so far as it enters-as an organized process or social activity into the experience

of any one of the individual members of it.

If the given human individual is to develop a self in the fullest sense, it is not sufficient for him

merely to take the attitudes of other human individuals toward himself and toward one another

within the human social process, and to bring that social process as a whole into his individual

experience merely in these terms: he must also, in the same way that he takes the attitudes of other

individuals toward himself and toward one another, take their attitudes toward the various phases or

aspects of the common social activity or set of social undertakings in which, as members of an

organized society or social group, they are all engaged; and he must then, by generalizing these

individual attitudes of that organized society or social group itself, as a whole, act toward different

social projects which at any given time it is carrying out, or toward the various larger phases of the

general social process which constitutes its life and of which these projects are specific

manifestations. This getting of the broad activities of any given social whole or organized society as

such within the experiential field of any one of the individuals involved or included in that whole is, in

other words, the essential basis and prerequisite of the fullest development of that individual's self:

only in so far as he takes the attitudes of the organized social group to which he belongs toward the

organized, cooperative social activity or set of such activities in which that group as such is

engaged, does he develop a complete self or possess the sort of complete self he has developed.

And on the other hand, the complex cooperative processes and activities and institutional

functionings of organized human society are also possible only in so far as every individual involved

in them or belonging to that society can take the general attitudes of all other such individuals with

reference to these processes and activities and institutional functionings, and to the organized social

whole of experiential relations and interactions thereby constituted-and can direct his own behavior

accordingly.

It is in the form of the generalized other that the social process influences the behavior of the

individuals involved in it and carrying it on, i.e., that the community exercises control over the

conduct of its individual members; for it is in this form that the social process or community enters

as a determining factor into the individual's thinking. In abstract thought the individual takes the,

attitude of the generalized other[3] toward himself, without reference to its expression in any

particular other individuals; and in concrete thought he takes that attitude in so far as it is expressed

in the attitudes toward his behavior of those other individuals with whom he is involved in the given

social situation or act, But only by taking the attitude of the generalized other toward himself, in one

or another of these ways, can he think at all; for only thus can thinking -or the internalized

conversation of gestures which constitutes thinking-occur. And only through the taking by individuals

of the attitude or attitudes of the generalized other toward themselves is the existence of a universe

of discourse, as that system of common or social meanings which thinking presupposes at its

context, rendered possible.

The self-conscious human individual, then, takes or assumes the organized social attitudes of the

given social group or community (or of some one section thereof to which he belongs, toward the

social problems of various kinds which confront that group or community at any given time, and

which arise in connection with the correspondingly different social projects or organized cooperative

enterprises in which that group or community as such is engaged; and as an individual participant in

these social projects or cooperative enterprises, he governs his own conduct accordingly. In politics,

for example, the individual identifies himself with an entire political party and takes the organized

attitudes of that entire party toward the rest of the given social community and toward the problems

which confront the party within the given social situation; and he consequently reacts or responds in

terms of the organized attitudes of the party as a whole. He thus enters into a special set of social

relations with all the other individuals who belong to that political party; and in the same way he

enters into various other special sets of social relations, with various other classes of individuals

respectively, the individuals of each of these classes being the other members of some one of the

particular organized subgroups (determined in socially functional terms) of which he himself is a

member within the entire given society or social community. In the most highly developed,

organized, and complicated human social communities-those evolved by civilized man-these

various socially functional classes or subgroups of individuals to which any given individual belongs

(and with the other individual members of which he thus enters into a special set of social relations)

are of two kinds. Some of them are concrete social classes or subgroups, such as political parties,

clubs, corporations, which are all actually functional social units, in terms of which their individual

members are directly related to one another. The others are abstract social classes or subgroups,

such as the class of debtors and the class of creditors, in terms of which their individual members

are related to one another only more or less indirectly, and which only more or less indirectly

function as social units, but which afford or represent unlimited possibilities for the widening and

ramifying and enriching of the social relations among all the individual members of the given society

as an organized and unified whole. The given individual's membership in several of these abstract

social classes or subgroups makes possible his entrance into definite social relations (however

indirect) with an almost infinite number of other individuals who also belong to or are included within

one or another of these abstract social classes or subgroups cutting across functional lines of

demarcation which divide different human social communities from one another, and including

individual members from several (in some cases from all) such communities. Of these abstract

social classes or subgroups of human individuals the one which is most inclusive and extensive is,

of course, the one defined by the logical universe of discourse (or system of universally significant

symbols) determined by the participation and communicative interaction of individuals; for of all such

classes or subgroups, it is the one which claims the largest number of individual members, and

which enables the largest conceivable number of human individuals to enter into some sort of social

relation, however indirect or abstract it may be, with one another -- a relation arising from the

universal functioning of gestures as significant symbols in the general human social process of

communication.

I have pointed out, then, that there are two general stages in the full development of the self. At the

first of these stages, the individual's self is constituted simply by an organization of the particular

attitudes of other individuals toward himself and toward one another in the specific social acts in

which he participates with them. But at the second stage in the full development of the individual's

self that self is constituted not only by an organization of these particular individual attitudes, but

also by an organization of the social attitudes of the generalized other or the social group as a whole

to which he belongs. These social or group attitudes are brought within the individual's field of direct

experience, and are included as elements in the structure or constitution of his self, in the same way

that the attitudes of particular other individuals are; and the individual arrives at them, or succeeds in

taking them, by means of further organizing, and then generalizing, the attitudes of particular other

individuals in terms of their organized social bearings and implications. So the self reaches its full

development by organizing these individual attitudes of others into the organized social or group

attitudes, and by thus becoming an individual reflection of the general systematic pattern of social or

group behavior in which it and the others are all involved-a pattern which enters as a whole into the

individual's experience in terms of these organized group attitudes which, through the mechanism of

his central nervous system, he takes toward himself, just as he takes the individual attitudes of

others.

The game has a logic, so that such an organization of the self is rendered possible: there is a

definite end to be obtained; the actions of the different individuals are all related to each other with

reference to that end so that they do not conflict; one is not in conflict with himself in the attitude of

another man on the team. If one has the attitude of the person throwing the ball he can also have

the response of catching the ball. The two are related so that they further the purpose of the game

itself. They are interrelated in a unitary, organic fashion. There is a definite unity, then, which is

introduced into the organization of other selves when we reach such a stage as that of the game, as

over against the situation of play where there is a simple succession of one rôle after another, a

situation which is, of course, characteristic of the child's own personality. The child is one thing at

one time and another at another, and what he is at one moment does not determine what he is at

another. That is both the charm of childhood as well as its inadequacy. You cannot count on the

child; you cannot assume that all the things he does are going to determine what he will do at any

moment. He is not organized into a whole. The child has no definite character, no definite

personality.

The game is then an illustration of the situation out of which an organized personality arises. In so

far as the child does take the attitude of the other and allows that attitude of the other to determine

the thing he is going to do with reference to a common end, he is becoming an organic member of

society. He is taking over the morale of that society and is becoming an essential member of it. He

belongs to it in so far as he does allow the attitude of the other that he takes to control his own

immediate expression. What is involved here is some sort of an organized process. That which is

expressed in terms of the game is, of course, being continually expressed in the social life of the

child, but this wider process goes beyond the immediate experience of the child himself. The

importance of the game is that it lies entirely inside of the child's own experience, and the

importance of our modern type of education is that it is brought as far as possible within this realm.

The different attitudes that a child assumes are so organized that they exercise a definite control

over his response, as the attitudes in a game control his own immediate response. In the game we

get an organized other, a generalized other, which is found in the nature of the child itself, and Ands

its expression in the immediate- experience of the child. And it is that organized activity in the child's

own nature controlling the particular response which gives unity, and which builds up his own self.

What goes on in the game goes on in the life of the child all the time. He is continually taking the

attitudes of those about him, especially the roles of those who in some sense control him and on

whom he depends. He gets the function of the process in an abstract sort of a way at first. It goes

over from the play into the game in a real sense. He has to play the game. The morale of the game

takes hold of the child more than the larger morale of the whole community. The child passes into

the game and the game expresses a social situation in which he can completely enter; its morale

may have a greater hold on him than that of the family to which he belongs or the community in

which he lives. There are all sorts of social organizations, some of which are fairly lasting, some

temporary, into which the child is entering, and he is playing a sort of social game in them. It is a

period in which he likes "to belong," and he gets into organizations which come into existence and

pass out of existence. He becomes a something which can function in the organized whole, and

thus tends to determine himself in his relationship with the group to which he belongs. That process

is one which is a striking stage in the development of the child's morale. It constitutes him a self-

conscious member of the community to which he belongs.

Such is the process by which a personality arises. I have spoken of this as a process in which a

child takes the role of the other, and said that it takes place essentially through the use of language.

Language is predominantly based on the vocal gesture by means of which cooperative activities in a

community are carried out. Language in its significant sense is that vocal gesture which tends to

arouse in the individual the attitude which it arouses in others, and it is this perfecting of the self by

the gesture which mediates the social activities that gives rise to the process of taking the rôle of the

other. The latter phrase is a little unfortunate because it suggests an actor's attitude which is actually

more sophisticated than that which is involved in our own experience. To this degree it does not

correctly describe that which I have in mind. We see the process most definitely in a primitive form

in those situations where the child's play takes different rôles. Here the very fact that he is ready to

pay out money, for instance, arouses the attitude of the person who receives money; the very

process is calling out in him the corresponding activities of the other person involved. The individual

stimulates himself to the response which he is calling out in the other person, and then acts in some

degree in response to that situation. In play the child does definitely act out the rôle which he himself

has aroused in himself. It is that which gives, as I have said, a definite content in the individual

which answers to the stimulus that affects him as it affects somebody else. The content of the other

that enters into one personality is the response in the individual which his gesture calls out in the

other.

We may illustrate our basic concept by a reference to the notion of property. If we say "This is my

property, I shall control it," that affirmation calls out a certain set of responses which must be the

same in any community in which property exists. It involves an organized attitude with reference to

property which is common to all the members of the community. One must have a definite attitude

of control of his own property and respect for the property of others. Those attitudes (as organized

sets of responses) must be there on the part of all, so that when one says such a thing he calls out

in himself the response of the others. He is calling out the response of what I have called a

generalized other. That which makes society possible is such common responses, such organized

attitudes, with reference to what we term property, the cults of religion, the process of education,

and the relations of the family. Of course, the wider the society the more definitely universal these

objects must be. In any case there must be a definite set of responses, which we may speak of as

abstract, and which can belong to a very large group. Property is in itself a very abstract concept. It

is that which the individual himself can control and nobody else can control. The attitude is different

from that of a dog toward a bone. A dog will fight any other dog trying to take the bone. The dog is

not taking the attitude of the other dog. A man who says "This is my property" is taking an attitude of

the other person. The man is appealing to his rights because he is able to take the attitude which

everybody else in the group has with reference to property, thus arousing in himself the attitude of

others.

What goes to make up the organized self is the organization of the attitudes which are common to

the group. A person is a personality because he belongs to a community, because he takes over the

institutions of that community into his own conduct. He takes its language as a medium by which he

gets his personality, and then through a process of taking the different roles that all the others

furnish he comes to get the attitude of the members of the community. Such, in a certain sense, is

the structure of a man's personality. There are certain common responses which each individual has

toward certain common things, and in so far as those common responses are awakened in the

individual when he is affecting other persons he arouses his own self. The structure, then, on which

the self is built is this response which is common to all, for one has to be a member of a community

to be a self. Such responses are abstract attitudes, but they constitute just what we term a man's

character. They give him what we term his principles, the acknowledged attitudes of all members of

the community toward what are the values of that community. He is putting himself in the place of

the generalized other, which represents the organized responses of all the members of the group. It

is that which guides conduct controlled by principles, and a person who has such an organized

group of responses is a man whom we say has character, in the moral sense.

It is a structure of attitudes, then, which goes to make up a self, as distinct from a group of habits.

We all of us have, for example, certain groups of habits, such as, the particular intonations which a

person uses in his speech. This is a set of habits of vocal expression which one has but which one

does not know about. The sets of habits which we have of that sort mean nothing to us; we do not

hear the intonations of our speech that others hear unless we are paying particular attention to

them. The habits of emotional expression which belong to our speech are of the same sort. We may

know that we have expressed ourselves in a joyous fashion but the detailed process is one which

does not come back to our conscious selves. There are whole bundles of such habits which do not

enter into a conscious self, but which help to make up what is termed the unconscious self.

After all, what we mean by self-consciousness is an awakening in ourselves of the group of attitudes

which we are arousing in others, especially when it is an important set of responses which go to

make up the members of the community. It is unfortunate to fuse or mix up consciousness, as we

ordinarily use that term, and self-consciousness. Consciousness, as frequently used, simply has

reference to the field of experience, but self-consciousness refers to the ability to call out in

ourselves a set of definite responses which belong to the others of the group. Consciousness and

self-consciousness are not on the same level. A man alone has, fortunately or unfortunately, access

to his own toothache, but that is not what we mean by self-consciousness.

I have so far emphasized what I have called the structures upon which the self is constructed, the

framework of the self, as it were. Of course we are not only what is common to all: each one of the

selves is different from everyone else; but there has to be such a common structure as I have

sketched in order that we may be members of a community at all. We cannot be ourselves unless

we are also members in whom there is a community of attitudes which control the attitudes of all.

We cannot have rights unless we have common attitudes. That which we have acquired as self-

conscious persons makes us such members of society and gives us selves. Selves can only exist in

definite relationships to other selves. No hard-and-fast line can be drawn between our own selves

and the selves of others, since our own selves exist and enter as such into our experience only in so

far as the selves of others exist and enter as such into our experience also. The individual

possesses a self only in relation to the selves of the other members of his social group; and the

structure of his self expresses or reflects the general behavior pattern of this social group to which

he belongs, just as does the structure of the self of every other individual belonging to this social

group.

Endnotes

1. ["The Relation of Play to Education," University of Chicago Record, I (1896-97), 140 ff.]

2. It is possible for inanimate objects, no less than for other human organisms, to form parts of

the generalized and organized-the completely socialized -- other for any given human

individual, in so far as he responds to such objects socially or in a social fashion (by means

of the mechanism of thought, the internalized conversation of gestures). Any thing-any

object or set of objects, whether animate or inanimate, human or animal, or merely physical

-- toward which he acts, or to which he responds, socially, is an element in what for him is

the generalized other; by taking the attitudes of which toward himself he becomes conscious

of himself as an object or individual, and thus develops a self or personality. Thus, for

example, the cult, in its primitive form, is merely the social embodiment of the relation

between the given social group or community and its physical environment-an organized

social means, adopted by the individual members of that group or community, of entering

into social relations with that environment, or (in a sense) of carrying on conversations with

it; and in this way that environment becomes part of the total generalized other for each of

the individual members of the given social group or community.

3. We have said that the internal conversation of the individual with himself in terms of words

or significant gestures - the conversation of which constitutes the process or activity of

thinking - is carried on by the individual from the standpoint of the "generalized other." And

the more abstract that conversation is, the more abstract thinking happens to be, the further

removed is the generalized other from any connection with particular individuals. It is

especially in abstract thinking, that is to say, that the conversation involved is carried on by

the individual with the generalized other, rather than with any particular individuals. Thus it

is, for example, that abstract concepts are concepts stated in terms of the attitudes of the

entire social group or community; they are stated on the basis of the individual's

consciousness of the attitudes of the generalized other toward them, as a result of his taking

these attitudes of the generalized other and then responding to them. And thus it is also that

abstract propositions are stated in a form which anyone - any other intelligent individual--will

accept.

21. THE SELF AND THE SUBJECTIVE

The process out of which the self arises is a social process which implies interaction of individuals in

the group, implies the preexistence of the group.[1] It implies also certain co-operative activities in

which the different members of the group are involved. It implies, further, that out of this process

there may in turn develop a more elaborate organization than that out of which the self has arisen,

and that the selves may be the organs, the essential parts at least, of this more elaborate social

organization within which these selves arise and exist. Thus, there is a social process out of which

selves arise and within which further differentiation, further evolution, further organization, take

place.

It has been the tendency of psychology to deal with the self as a more or less isolated and

independent element, a sort of entity that could conceivably exist by itself. It is possible that there

might be a single self in the universe if we start off by identifying the self with a certain feeling-

consciousness. If we speak of this feeling as objective, then we can think of that self as existing by

itself. We can think of a separate physical body existing by itself, we can assume that it has these

feelings or conscious states in question, and so we can set up that sort of a self in thought as

existing simply by itself.

Then there is another use of "consciousness" with which we have been particularly occupied,

denoting that which we term thinking or reflective intelligence, a use of consciousness which always

has, implicitly at least, the reference to an "I" in it. This use of consciousness has no necessary

connection with the other; it is an entirely different conception. One usage has to do with a certain

mechanism, a certain way in which an organism acts. If an organism is endowed with sense organs

then there are objects in its environment, and among those objects will be parts of its own body.[2] It

is true that if the organism did not have a retina and a central nervous system there would not be

any objects of vision. For such objects to exist there have to be certain physiological conditions, but

these objects are not in themselves necessarily related to a self. When we reach a self we reach a

certain sort of conduct, a certain type of social process which involves the interaction of different

individuals and yet implies individuals engaged in some sort of cooperative activity. In that process a

self, as such, can arise.

We want to distinguish the self as a certain sort of structural process in the conduct of the form, from

what we term consciousness of objects that are experienced. The two have no necessary

relationship. The aching tooth is a very important element. We have to pay attention to it. It is

identified in a certain sense with the self in order that we may control that sort of experience.

Occasionally we have experiences which we say belong to the atmosphere. The whole world seems

to be depressed, the sky is dark, the weather is unpleasant, values that we are interested in are

sinking. We do not necessarily identify such a situation with the self; we simply feel a certain

atmosphere about us. We come to remember that we are subject to such sorts of depression, and

find that kind of an experience in our past. And then we get some sort of relief, we take aspirin, or

we take a rest, and the result is that the world changes its character. There are other experiences

which we may at all times identify with selves. We can distinguish, I think, very clearly between

certain types of experience, which we call subjective because we alone have access to them, and

that experience which we call reflective.

It is true that reflection taken by itself is something to which we alone have access. One thinks out

his own demonstration of a proposition, we will say in Euclid, and the thinking is something that

takes place within his own conduct. For the time being it is a demonstration which exists only in his

thought. Then he publishes it and it becomes common property. For the time being it was

accessible only to him. There are other contents of this sort, such as memory images and the play

of the imagination, which are accessible only to the individual. There is a common character that

belongs to these types of objects which we generally identify with consciousness and this process

which we call that of thinking, in that both are, at least in certain phases, accessible only to the

individual. But, as I have said the two sets of phenomena stand on entirely different levels. This

common feature of accessibility does not necessarily give them the same metaphysical status. I do

not now want to discuss metaphysical problems, but I do want to insist that the self has a sort of

structure that arises in social conduct that is entirely distinguishable from this so-called subjective

experience of these particular sets of objects to which the organism alone has access-the common

character of privacy of access does not fuse them together.

The self to which we have been referring arises when the conversation of gestures is taken over into

the conduct of the individual form. When this conversation of gestures can be taken over into the

individual's conduct so that the attitude of the other forms can affect the organism, and the organism

can reply with its corresponding gesture and thus arouse the attitude of the other in its own process,

then a self arises. Even the bare conversation of gestures that can be carried out in lower forms is to

be explained by the fact that this conversation of gestures has an intelligent function. Even there it is

a part of social process. If it is taken over into the conduct of the individual it not only maintains that

function but acquires still greater capacity. If I can take the attitude of a friend with whom I am going

to carry on a discussion, in taking that attitude I can apply it to myself and reply as he replies, and I

can have things in very much better shape than if I had not employed that conversation of gestures

in my own conduct. The same is true of him. It is good for both to think out the situation in advance.

Each individual has to take also the attitude of the community, the generalized attitude. He has to be

ready to act with reference to his own conditions just as any individual in the community would act.

One of the greatest advances in the development of the community arises when this reaction of the

community on the individual takes on what we call an institutional form. What we mean by that is

that the whole community acts toward the individual under certain circumstances in an identical way.

It makes no difference, over against a person who is stealing your property, whether it is Tom, Dick,

or Harry. There is an identical response on the part of the whole community under these conditions.

We call that the formation of the institution.

There is one other matter which I wish briefly to refer to now. The only way in which we can react

against the disapproval of the entire community is by setting up a higher sort of cornmunity which in

a certain sense out-votes the one we find. A person may reach a point of going against the whole

world about him; he may stand out by himself over against it. But to do that he has to speak with the

voice of reason to himself. He has to comprehend the voices of the past and of the future. That is

the only way in which the self can get a voice which is more than the voice of the community. As a

rule we assume that this general voice of the community is identical with the larger community of the

past and the future; we assume that an organized custom represents what we call morality. The

things one cannot do are those which everybody would condemn. If we take the attitude of the

community over against our own responses, that is a true statement, but we must not forget this

other capacity, that of replying to the community and insisting on the gesture -of the community

changing. We can reform the order of things; we can insist on making the community standards

better standards. We are not simply bound by the community. We are engaged in a conversation in

which what we say is listened to by the community and its response is one which is affected by what

we have to say. This is especially true in critical situations. A man rises up and defends himself for

what he does; he has his "day in court"; he can present his views. He can perhaps change the

attitude of the community toward himself. The process of conversation is one in which the individual

has not only the right but the duty of talking to the community of which lie is a part, and bringing

about those changes which take place through the interaction of individuals. That is the way, of

course, in which society gets ahead, by just such interactions as those in which some person thinks

a thing out. We are continually changing our social system in some respects, and we are able to do

that intelligently because we can think.

Such is the reflective process within which a self arises; and what I have been trying to do is to

distinguish this kind of consciousness from consciousness as a set of characters determined by the

accessibility to the organism of certain sorts of objects. It is true that our thinking is also, while it is

just thinking, accessible only to the organism. But that common character of being accessible only

to the organism does not make either thought or the self something which we are to identify with a

group of objects which simply are accessible. We cannot identify the self with what is commonly

called consciousness, that is, with the private or subjective thereness of the characters of objects.

There is, of course, a current distinction between conscious ness and self-consciousness:

consciousness answering to certain experiences such as those of pain or pleasure, self-

consciousness referring to a recognition or appearance of a self as an object. It is, however, very

generally assumed that these other conscious contents carry with them also a self-consciousness-

that a pain is always somebody's pain, and that if there were not this reference to some individual it

would not be pain. There is a very definite element of truth in this, but it is far from the whole story.

The pain does have to belong to an individual; it has to be your pain if it is going to belong to you.

Pain can belong to anybody, but if it did belong to everybody it would be comparatively unimportant.

I suppose it is conceivable that under an anesthetic what takes place is the dissociation of

experiences so that the suffering, so to speak, is no longer your suffering. We have illustrations of

that, short of the anesthetic dissociation, in an experience of a disagreeable thing which loses its

power over us because we give our attention to something else. If we can get, so to speak, outside

of the thing, dissociating it from the eye that is regarding it, we may find that it has lost a great deal

of its unendurable character. The unendurableness of pain is a reaction against it. If you can

actually keep yourself from reacting against suffering you get rid of a certain content in the suffering

itself. What takes place in effect is that it ceases to be your pain. You simply regard it objectively.

Such is the point of view we are continually impressing on a person when he is apt to be swept

away by emotion. In that case what we get rid of is not the offense itself, but the reaction against the

offense. The objective character of the judge is that of a person who is neutral, who can simply

stand outside of a situation and assess it. If we can get that judicial attitude in regard to the offenses

of a person against ourselves, we reach the point where we do not resent them but understand

them, we get the situation where to understand is to forgive. We remove much of experience

outside of our own self by this attitude. The distinctive and natural attitude against another is a

resentment of an offense, but we now have in a certain sense passed beyond that self and become

a self with other attitudes. There is a certain technique, then, to which we subject ourselves in

enduring suffering or any emotional situation, and which consists in partially separating one's self

from the experience so that it is no longer the experience of the individual in question.

If, now, we could separate the experience entirely, so that we should not remember it, so that we

should not have to take it up continually into the self from day to day, from moment to moment, then

it would not exist any longer so far as we are concerned. If we had no memory which identifies

experiences with the self, then they would certainly disappear so far as their relation to the self is

concerned, and yet they might continue as sensuous or sensible experiences without being taken

up into a self. That sort of a situation is presented in the pathological case of a multiple personality

in which an individual loses the memory of a certain phase of his existence. Everything connected

with that phase of his existence is gone and he becomes a different personality. The past has a

reality whether in the experience or not, but here it is not identified with the self-it does not go to

make up the self. We take an attitude of that sort, for example, with reference to others when a

person has committed some sort of an offense which leads to a statement of the situation, an

admission, and perhaps regret, and then is dropped. A person who forgives but does not forget is an

unpleasant companion; what goes with forgiving is forgetting, getting rid of the memory of it.

There are many illustrations which can be brought up of the loose relationship of given contents to a

self in defense of our recognition of them as having a certain value outside of the self. At the least, it

must be granted that we can approach the point where something which we recognize as a content

is less and less essential to the self, is held off from the present self, and no longer has the value for

that self which it had for the former self. Extreme cases seem to support the view that a certain

portion of such contents can be entirely cut off from the self. While in some sense it is there ready to

appear under specific conditions, for the time being it is dissociated and does not get in above the

threshold of our self-consciousness.

Self-consciousness, on the other hand, is definitely organized about the social individual, and that,

as we have seen, is not simply because one is in a social group and affected by others and affects

them, but because (and this is a point I have been emphasizing) his own experience as a self is one

which he takes over from his action upon others. He becomes a self in so far as he can take the

attitude of another and act toward himself as others act. In so far as the conversation of gestures

can become part of conduct in the direction and control of experience, then a self can arise. It is the

social process of influencing others in a social act and then taking the attitude of the others aroused

by the stimulus, and then reacting in turn to this response, which constitutes a self.

Our bodies are parts of our environment; and it is possible for the individual to experience and be

conscious of his body, and of bodily sensations, without being conscious or aware of himself

-without, in other words, taking the attitude of the other toward himself. According to the social

theory of consciousness, what we mean by consciousness is that peculiar character and aspect of

the environment of individual human experience which is due to human society, a society of other

individual selves who take the attitude of the other toward themselves. The physiological conception

or theory of consciousness is by itself inadequate; it requires supplementation from the socio-

psychological point of view. The taking or feeling of the attitude of the other toward yourself is what

constitutes self-consciousness, and not mere organic sensations of which the individual is aware

and which he experiences. Until the rise of his self-consciousness in the process of social

experience, the individual experiences his body-its feelings and sensations-merely as an immediate

part of his environment, not as his own, not in terms of self-consciousness. The self and self-

consciousness have first to arise, and then these experiences can be identified peculiarly with the

self, or appropriated by the self; to enter, so to speak, into this heritage of experience, the self has

first to develop within the social process in which this heritage is involved.

Through self-consciousness the individual organism enters in some sense into its own

environmental field; its own body becomes a part of the set of environmental stimuli to which it

responds or reacts. Apart from the context of the social process at its higher levels-those at which it

involves conscious communication, conscious conversations of gestures, among the individual

organisms interacting with it-the individual organism does not set itself as a whole over against its

environment; it does not as a whole become an object to itself (and hence is not self-conscious); it is

not as a whole a stimulus to which it reacts. On the contrary, it responds only to parts or separate

aspects of itself, and regards them, not as parts or aspects of itself at all, but simply as parts or

aspects of its environment in general. Only within the social process at its higher levels, only in

terms of the more developed forms of the social environment or social situation, does the total

individual organism become an object to itself, and hence self-conscious; in the social process at its

lower, non-conscious levels, and also in the merely psycho-physiological environment or situation

which is logically antecedent to and presupposed by the social process of experience and behavior,

it does not thus become an object to itself. In such experience or behavior as may be called self-

conscious, we act and react particularly with reference to ourselves, though also with reference to

other individuals; and to be self-conscious is essentially to become an object to one's self in virtue of

one's social relations to other individuals.

Emphasis should be laid on the central position of thinking when considering the nature of the self.

Self-consciousness, rather than affective experience with its motor accompaniments, provides the

core and primary structure of the self, which is thus essentially a cognitive rather than an emotional

phenomenon. The thinking or intellectual process-the internalization and inner dramatization, by the

individual, of the external conversation of significant gestures which constitutes his chief mode of

interaction with other individuals belonging to the same society -is the earliest experiential phase in

the genesis and development of the self. Cooley and James, it is true, endeavor to find the basis of

the self in reflexive affective experiences, i.e., experiences involving "self-feeling"; but the theory

that the nature of the self is to be found in such experiences does not account for the origin of the

self, or of the self-feeling which is supposed to characterize such experiences. The individual need

not take the attitudes of others toward himself in these experiences, since these experiences merely

in themselves do not necessitate his doing so, and unless he does so, he cannot develop a self; and

he will not do so in these experiences unless his self has already originated otherwise, namely, in

the way we have been describing. The essence of the self, as we have said, is cognitive: it lies in

the internalized conversation of gestures which constitutes thinking, or in terms of which thought or

reflection proceeds. And hence the origin and foundations of the self, like those of thinking, are

social.

Endnotes

1. The relation of individual organisms to the social whole of which they are members is

analogous to the relation of the individual cells of a multi-cellular organism to the organism

as a whole.

2. Our constructive selection of our environment is what we term "consciousness," in the first

sense of the term. The organism does not project sensuous qualities-colors, for example-

into the environment to which it responds; but it endows this environment with such qualities,

in a sense similar to that in which an ox endows grass with the quality of being food, or in

which -- speaking more generally -- the relation between biological organisms and certain

environmental contents give rise to food objects. If there were no organisms with particular

sense organs there would be no environment, in the proper or usual sense of the term. An

organism constructs (in the selective sense) its environment; and consciousness often refers

to the character of the environment in so far as it is determined or constructively selected by

our human organisms, and depends upon the relationship between the former (as thus

selected or constructed) and the latter.

22. THE "I" and the "ME"

We have discussed at length the social foundations of the self, and hinted that the self does not

consist simply in the bare organization of social attitudes. We may now explicitly raise the question

as to the nature of the "I" which is aware of the social "me." I do not mean to raise the metaphysical

question of how a person can be both "I" and "me," but to ask for the significance of this distinction

from the point of view of conduct itself. Where in conduct does the "I" come in as over against the

"me"? If one determines what his position is in society and feels himself as having a certain function

and privilege, these are all defined with reference to an "I," but the "I" is not a "me" and cannot

become a "me." We may have a better self and a worse self, but that again is not the "I" as over

against the "me," because they are both selves. We approve of one and disapprove of the other, but

when we bring up one or the other they are there for such approval as "me's." The "I" does not get

into the limelight; we talk to ourselves, but do not see ourselves. The "I" reacts to the self which

arises through the taking of the attitudes of others. Through taking those attitudes we have

introduced the "me" and we react to it as an "I."

The simplest way of handling the problem would be in terms of memory. I talk to myself, and I

remember what I said and perhaps the emotional content that went with it. The "I" of this moment is

present in the "me" of the next moment. There again I cannot turn around quick enough to catch

myself. I become a "me" in so far as I remember what I said. The "I" can be given, however, this

functional relationship. It is because of the "I" that we say that we are never fully aware of what we

are, that we surprise ourselves by our own action. It is as we act that we are aware of ourselves. It is

in memory that the "I" is constantly present in experience. We can go back directly a few moments

in our experience, and then we are dependent upon memory images for the rest. So that the "I" in

memory is there as the spokesman of the self of the second, or minute, or day ago. As given, it is a

"me," but it is a "me" which was the "I" at the earlier time. If you ask, then, where directly in your own

experience the "I" comes in, the answer is that it comes in as a historical figure. It is what you were a

second ago that is the "I" of the "me." It is another "me" that has to take that rôle. You cannot get the

immediate response of the "I" in the process.[1] The "I" is in a certain sense that with which we do

identify ourselves. The getting of it into experience constitutes one of the problems of most of our

conscious experience; it is not directly given in experience.

The "I" is the response of the organism to the attitudes of the others;,, the "me" is the organized set

of attitudes of others which one himself assumes. The attitudes of the others constitute the

organized "me," and then one reacts toward that as an "I." I now wish to examine these concepts in

greater detail.

There is neither "I" nor "me" in the conversation of gestures; the whole act is not yet carried out, but

the preparation takes place in this field of gesture. Now, in so far as the individual arouses in himself

the attitudes of the others, there arises an organized group of responses. And it is due to the

individual's ability to take the attitudes of these others in so far as they can be organized that he gets

self-consciousness. The taking of all of those organized sets of attitudes gives him his "me"; that is

the self he is aware of. He can throw the ball to some other member because of the demand made

upon him from other members of the team. That is the self that immediately exists for him in his

consciousness. He has their attitudes, knows what they want and what the consequence of any act

of his will be, and he has assumed responsibility for the situation. Now, it is the presence of those

organized sets of attitudes that constitutes that "me" to which he as an "I" is responding. But what

that response will be he does not know and nobody else knows. Perhaps he will make a brilliant

play or an error. The response to that situation as it appears in his immediate experience is

uncertain, and it is that which constitutes the "I."

The "I" is his action over against that social situation within his own conduct, and it gets into his

experience only after he has carried out the act. Then he is aware of it. He had to do such a thing

and he did it. He fulfils his duty and he may look with pride at the throw which he made. The "me"

arises to do that duty-that is the way in which it arises in his experience. He had in him all the

attitudes of others, calling for a certain response; that was the "me" of that situation, and his

response is the "I."

I want to call attention particularly to the fact that this response of the "I" is something that is more or

less uncertain. The attitudes of others which one assumes as affecting his own conduct constitute

the "me," and that is something that is there, but the response to it is as yet not given. When one

sits down to think anything out, he has certain data that are there. Suppose that it is a social

situation which he has to straighten out. He sees himself from the point of view of one individual or

another in the group. These individuals, related all together, give him a certain self. Well, what is he

going to do? He does not know and nobody else knows. He can get the situation into his experience

because he can assume the attitudes of the various individuals involved in it. He knows how they

feel about it by the assumption of their attitudes. He says, in effect, "I have done certain things that

seem to commit me to a certain course of conduct." Perhaps if he does so act it will place him in a

false position with another group. The "I" as a response to this situation, in contrast to the "me"

which is involved in the attitudes which he takes, is uncertain. And when the response takes place,

then it appears in the field of experience largely as a memory image.

Our specious present as such is very short. We do, however, experience passing events; part of the

process of the passage of events is directly there in our experience, including some of the past and

some of the future. We see a ball falling as it passes, and as it does pass part of the ball is covered

and part is being uncovered. We remember where the ball was a moment ago and we anticipate

where it will be beyond what is given in our experience. So of ourselves; we are doing something,

but to look back and see what we are doing involves getting memory images. So the "I" really

appears experientially as a part of a "me." But on the basis of this experience we distinguish that

individual who is doing something from the "me" who puts the problem up to him. The response

enters into his experience only when it takes place. If he says he knows what he is going to do, even

there he may be mistaken. He starts out to do something and something happens to interfere. The

resulting action is always a little different from anything which he could anticipate. This is true even if

he is simply carrying out the process of walking. The very taking of his expected steps puts him in a

certain situation which has a slightly different aspect from what is expected, which is in a certain

sense novel. That movement into the future is the step, so to speak, of the ego, of the "I." It is

something that is not given in the "me."

Take the situation of a scientist solving a problem, where he has certain data which call for certain

responses. Some of this set of data call for his applying such and such a law, while others call for

another law. Data are there with their implications. He knows what such and such coloration means,

and when he has these data before him they stand for certain responses on his part; but now they

are in conflict with each other. If he makes one response he cannot make another. What he is going

to do he does not know, nor does anybody else. The action of the self is in response to these

conflicting sets of data in the form of a problem, with conflicting demands upon him as a scientist.

He has to look at it in different ways. That action of the "I" is something the nature of which we

cannot tell in advance.

The "I," then, in this relation of the "I" and the "me," is something that is, so to speak, responding to

a social situation which is within the experience of the individual. It is the answer which the

individual makes to the attitude which others take toward him when he assumes an attitude toward

them. Now, the attitudes he is taking toward them are present in his own experience, but his

response to them will contain a novel element. The "I" gives the sense of freedom, of initiative. The

situation is there for us to act in a self-conscious fashion. We are aware of ourselves, and of what

the situation is, but exactly how we will act never gets into experience until after the action takes

place.

Such is the basis for the fact that the "I" does not appear in the same sense in experience as does

the "me." The "me" represents a definite organization of the community there in our own attitudes,

and calling for a response, but the response that takes place is something that just happens. There

is no certainty in regard to it. There is a moral necessity but no mechanical necessity for the act.

When it does take place then we find what has been done. The above account gives us, I think, the

relative position of the "I" and "me" in the situation, and the grounds for the separation of the two in

behavior. The two are separated in the process but they belong together in the sense of being parts

of a whole. They are separated and yet they belong together. The separation of the "I" and the "me"

is not fictitious. They are not identical, for, as I have said, the "I" is something that is never entirely

calculable. The "me" does call for a certain sort of an "I" in so far as we meet the obligations that are

given in conduct itself, but the "I" is always something different from what the situation itself calls for.

So there is always that distinction, if you like, between the "I" and the "me." The "I" both calls out the

"me" and responds to it. Taken together they constitute a personality as it appears in social

experience. The self is essentially a social process going on with these two distinguishable phases.

If it did not have these two phases there could not be conscious responsibility, and there would be

nothing novel in experience.

Endnotes

1. The sensitivity of the organism brings parts of itself into the environment. It does not,

however, bring the life-process itself into the environment, and the complete imaginative

presentation of the organism is unable to present the living of the organism. It can

conceivably present the conditions under which living takes place but not the unitary life-

process. The physical organism in the environment always remains a thing (MS).

2. [For the "I" viewed as the biologic individual, see Supplementary Essays II, III.]

23. SOCIAL ATTITUDES AND THE PHYSICAL WORLD

The self is not so much a substance as a process in which the conversation of gestures has been

internalized within an organic form. This process does not exist for itself, but is simply a phase of the

whole social organization of which the individual is a part. The organization of the social act has

been imported into the organism and becomes then the mind of the individual. It still includes the

attitudes of others, but now highly organized, so that they become what we call social attitudes

rather than rôles of separate individuals. This process of relating one's own organism to the others

in the interactions that are going on, in so far as it is imported into the conduct of the individual with

the conversation of the "I" and the "me," constitutes the self.[1] The value of this importation of the

conversation of gestures into the conduct of the individual lies in the superior co-ordination gained

for society as a whole, and in the increased efficiency of the individual as a member of the group. It

is the difference between the process which can take place in a group of rats or ants or bees, and

that which can take place in a human community. The social process with its various implications is

actually taken up into the experience of the individual so that that which is going on takes place

more effectively, because in a certain sense it has been rehearsed in the individual. He not only

plays his part better under those conditions but he also reacts back on the organization of which he

is a part.

The very nature of this conversation of gestures requires that the attitude of the other is changed

through the attitude of the individual to the other's stimulus. In the conversation of gestures of the

lower forms the play back and forth is noticeable, since the individual not only adjusts himself to the

attitude of others, but also changes the attitudes of the others. The reaction of the individual in this

conversation of gestures is one that in some degree is continually modifying the social process

itself. It is this modification of the process which is of greatest interest in the experience of the

individual. He takes the attitude of the other toward his own stimulus, and in taking that he finds it

modified in that his response becomes a different one, and leads in turn to further change.

Fundamental attitudes arc presumably those that are only changed gradually, and no one individual

can reorganize the whole society; but one is continually affecting society by his own attitude

because he does bring up the attitude of the group toward himself, responds to it, and through that

response changes the attitude of the group. This is, of course, what we are constantly doing in our

imagination, in our thought; we are utilizing our own attitude to bring about a different situation in the

community of which we are a part; we are exerting ourselves, bringing forward our own opinion,

criticizing the attitudes of others, and approving or disapproving. But we can do that only in so far as

we can call out in ourselves the response of the community; we only have ideas in so far as we are

able to take the attitude of the community and then respond to it.

In the case of lower animals the response of the individual to the social situation, its gesture as over

against the social situation, is what answers to the idea in the human animal. It is not, however, an

idea. We use the vocal gesture to call out the response which answers to that of the community. We

have, then, in our own stimulus, a reply to that response, and it is that reply which is an idea. You

say that "it is my idea that such and such a thing should be done." Your idea is the reply which you

make to the social demand made upon you. The social demand, we will say, is that you should pay

taxes of a certain sort. You consider those taxes illegitimate. Now, your reply to the demand of the

community, specifically to the tax assessor, as it takes place in your own experience, is an idea. To

the extent that you have in your own conduct symbols which are the expression of your reply to the

demand, you have an idea of what your assessment ought to be. It is an ideal situation in so far as

you are taking the rôle of the tax assessor over against yourself, and replying to it. It is not like the

situation in the dog-fight where the dog is actually preparing to spring and another dog takes

another attitude which defeats that spring. The difference is that the conversation of gestures is a

part of the actual realized fight, whereas in the other case you are taking the attitude of the tax

authorities in advance and working or calling out your own response to it. When that takes place in

your experience you have ideas.

A person threatens you, and you knock him down on the spot. There has been no ideal element in

the situation. If you count ten and consider what the threat means, you are having an idea, are

bringing the situation into an ideal setting. It is that, we have seen, which constitutes what we term

mind. We are taking the attitude of the community and we are responding to it in this conversation of

gestures. The gestures in this case are vocal gestures. They are significant symbols, and by symbol

we do not mean something that lies outside of the field of conduct. A symbol is nothing but the

stimulus whose response is given in advance. That is all we mean by a symbol. There is a word,

and a blow. The blow is the historical antecedent of the word, but if the word means an insult, the

response is one now involved in the word, something given in the very stimulus itself. That is all that

is meant by a symbol. Now, if that response can be given in terms of an attitude utilized for the

further control of action, then the relation of that stimulus and attitude is what we mean by a

significant symbol.

Our thinking that goes on, as we say, inside of us, is a play of symbols in the above sense. Through

gestures responses are called out in our own attitudes, and as soon as they are called out they

evoke, in turn, other attitudes. What was the meaning now becomes a symbol which has another

meaning. The meaning has itself become a stimulus to another response. In the dogfight the

attitude of the one has the meaning of changing the attitude of the other dog, but the change of

attitude now becomes a symbol (though not a language or significant symbol) to the first dog and

he, too, changes his attitude. What was a meaning now becomes a stimulus. Conversation is

continually going on, and what was response becomes in the field of gesture a stimulus, and the

response to that is the meaning. Responses are meanings in so far as they lie inside of such a

conversation of gestures. Our thinking is just such a continual change of a situation by our capacity

to take it over into our own action; to change it so that it calls for a different attitude on our own part,

and to carry it on to the point where the social act may be completed.

The "me" and the "I" lie in the process of thinking and they indicate the give-and-take which

characterizes it. There would not be an "I" in the sense in which we use that term if there were not a

"me"; there would not be a "me" without a response in the form of the "I." These two, as they appear

in our experience, constitute the personality. We are individuals born into a certain nationality,

located at a certain spot geographically, with such and such family relations, and such and such

political relations. All of these represent a certain situation which constitutes the "me"; but this

necessarily involves a continued action of the organism toward the "me" in the process within which

that lies. The self is not something that exists first and then enters into relationship with others, but it

is, so to speak, an eddy in the social current and so still a part of the current. It is a process in which

the individual is continually adjusting himself in advance to the situation to which he belongs, and

reacting back on it. So that the "I" and the "me," this thinking, this conscious adjustment, becomes

then a part of the whole social process and makes a much more highly organized society possible.

The "I" and the "me" belong to the conversation of gestures. If there were simply "a word and a

blow," if one answered to a social situation immediately without reflection, there would be no

personality in the foregoing sense any more than there is personality in the nature of the dog or the

horse. We, of course, tend to endow our domestic animals with personality, but as we get insight

into their conditions we see there is no place for this sort of importation of the social process into the

conduct of the individual. They do not have the mechanism for it-language. So we say that they

have no personality; they are not responsible for the social situation in which they find themselves.

The human individual, on the other hand, identifies himself with that social situation. He responds to

it, and although his response to it may be in the nature of criticism as well as support, it involves an

acceptance of the responsibility presented by the situation. Such an acceptance does not exist in

the case of the lower animals. We put personalities into the animals, but they do not belong to them;

and ultimately we realize that those animals have no rights. We are at liberty to cut off their lives;

there is no wrong committed when an animal's life is taken away. He has not lost anything because

the future does not exist for the animal; he has not the "me" in his experience which by the response

of the "I" is in some sense under his control, so that the future can exist for him. He has no

conscious past since there is no self of the sort we have been describing that can be extended into

the past by memories. There are presumably images in the experience of lower animals, but no

ideas or memories in the required sense.[2] They have not the personality that looks before or after.

They have not that future and past which gives them, so to speak, any rights as such. And yet the

common attitude is that of giving them just such personalities as our own. We talk to them and in

our talking to them we act as if they had the sort of inner world that we have.

A similar attribution is present in the immediate attitude which we take toward inanimate physical

objects about us. We take the attitude of social beings toward them. This is most elaborately true, of

course, in those whom we term nature poets. The poet is in a social relation with the things about

him, a fact perhaps most vividly presented in Wordsworth. The "Lines on Tintern Abbey" gives us, I

believe, the social relationships of Wordsworth when he was a child and their continuation through

his life. His statement of the relationship of man to nature is essentially the relationship of love, a

social relation. This social attitude of the individual toward the physical thing is just the attitude

which one has toward other objects; it is a social attitude. The man kicks the chair he stumbles over,

and he has an affection for an object connected with him in his work or play. The immediate reaction

of children to things about them is social. There is an evident basis for the particular response which

we make to little things, since there is something that calls out a parental response in any small

thing; such a thing calls out a parental response which is universal. This holds for physical things, as

well as for animals.

The physical object is an abstraction which we make from the social response to nature. We talk to

nature; we address the clouds, the sea, the tree, and objects about us. We later abstract from that

type of response because of what we come to know of such objects.[3] The immediate response is,

however, social; where we carry over a thinking process into nature we are making nature rational. It

acts as it is expected to act. We are taking the attitude of the physical things about us, and when we

change the situation nature responds in a different way.

The hand is responsible for what I term physical things, distinguishing the physical thing from what I

call the consummation of the act. If we took our food as dogs do by the very organs by which we

masticate it, we should not have any ground for distinguishing the food as a physical thing from the

actual consummation of the act, the consumption of the food. We should reach it and seize it with

the teeth, and the very act of taking hold of it would be the act of eating it. But with the human

animal the hand is interposed between the consummation and the getting of the object to the mouth.

In that case we are manipulating a physical thing. Such a thing comes in between the beginning of

the act and its final consummation. It is in that sense a universal. When we speak of a thing we

have in mind a physical thing, something we can get hold of. There are, of course, "things" you

cannot get hold of, such as property rights and the imaginations of a poet; but when we ordinarily

speak of things about us we refer to physical things. The characters that go to make these up are

primarily determined by the hand. Contact constitutes what we call the substance of such a thing. It

has color and odor, of course, but we think of these as inherent in the something which we can

manipulate, the physical thing. Such a thing is of very great importance in the development of

human intelligence. It is universal in the sense that it is a physical thing, whether the consummation

is that of eating, or of listening to a concert. There is a whole set of physical things that come in

between the beginning of an act and its consummation, but they are universal in the sense that they

belong to the experience of all of us. The consummation that we get out of a concert is very different

for all of us, but the physical things we are dealing with are common, universal in that sense. The

actual enjoyments may take on forms which represent an experience that is accessible only to

separate individuals, but what the hand handles is something that is universal. We isolate a

particular locality to which any person may come. We have a set of apparatus which any person

may use. We have a certain set of weights and measures by means of which we can define these

physical things. In this sense the physical thing comes in to make possible a common quality within

which the selves can operate.[4]

An engineer who is constructing a bridge is talking to nature in the same sense that we talk to an

engineer. There are stresses and strains there which he meets, and nature comes back with other

responses that have to be met in another way. In his thinking he is taking the attitude of physical

things. He is talking to nature and nature is replying to him. Nature is intelligent in the sense that

there are certain responses of nature toward our action which we can present and which we can

reply to, and which become different when we have replied. It is a change we then can answer to,

and we finally reach a point at which we can cooperate with nature.

Such is the development of modern science out of what we term magic. Magic is just this same

response, but with the further assumption that physical things do think and act as we do. It is

preserved in the attitude which we have toward an offending object or the trustworthy object upon

which we depend. We all carry about a certain amount of this sort of magic. We avoid something

because we feel it is in some way dangerous; we all respect certain omens to which we pay some

attention. We keep up some social response to nature about us, even though we do not allow this to

affect us in important decisions. These are attitudes which perhaps we normally cover up, but which

are revealed to us in numerous situations. In so far as we are rational, as we reason and think, we

are taking a social attitude toward the world about us, critically in the case of science, uncritically in

the case of magic.

Endnotes

1. According to this view, conscious communication develops out of unconscious

communication within the social process; conversation in terms of significant gestures out of

conversation in terms of non-significant gestures; and the development in such fashion of

conscious communication is coincident with the development of minds and selves within the

social process.

2. There is no evidence of animals being able to recognize that one thing is a sign of

something else and so make use of that sign .... (1912).

3. The physical object is found to be that object to which there is no social response which

calls out again a social response in the individual. The objects with which we cannot carry

on social intercourse are the physical objects of the world (MS).

We have carried our attitude in physical science over into psychology, so that we have lost

sight of the social nature of our early consciousness. The child forms social objects before

he forms physical objects (1912).

4. [On the social genesis and nature of the physical thing, see Section 35; also The Philosophy

of the Present, 119-39.]

24. MIND AS THE INDIVIDUAL IMPORTATION OF THE SOCIAL PROCESS

I have been presenting the self and the mind in terms of a social process, as the importation of the

conversation of gestures into the conduct of the individual organism, so that the individual organism

takes these organized attitudes of the others called out by its own attitude, in the form of its

gestures, and in reacting to that response calls out other organized attitudes in the others in the

community to which the individual belongs. This process can be characterized in a certain sense in

terms of the "I" and the "me," the "me" being that group of organized attitudes to which the individual

responds as an "I."

What I want particularly to emphasize is the temporal and logical preexistence of the social process

to the self-conscious individual that arises in it.[1] The conversation of gestures is a part of the

social process which is going on. It is not something that the individual alone makes possible. What

the development of language, especially the significant symbol, has rendered possible is just the

taking over of this external social situation into the conduct of the individual himself. There follows

from this the enormous development which belongs to human society, the possibility of the prevision

of what is going to take place in the response of other individuals, and a preliminary adjustment to

this by the individual. These, in turn, produce a different social situation which is again reflected in

what I have termed the "me," so that the individual himself takes a different attitude.

Consider a politician or a statesman putting through some project in which he has the attitude of the

community in himself. He knows how the community reacts to this proposal. He reacts to this

expression of the community in his own experience-he feels with it. He has a set of organized

attitudes which are those of the community. His own contribution, the "I" in this case, is a project of

reorganization, a project which he brings forward to the community as it is reflected in himself. He

himself changes, of course, in so far as he brings this project forward and makes it a political issue.

There has now arisen a new social situation as a result of the project which he is presenting. The

whole procedure takes place in his own experience as well as in the general experience of the

community. He is successful to the degree that the final "me" reflects the attitude of all in the

community. What I am pointing out is that what occurs takes place not simply in his own mind, but

rather that his mind is the expression in his own conduct of this social situation, this great

cooperative community process which is going on.

I want to avoid the implication that the individual is taking something that is objective and making it

subjective. There is an actual process of living together on the part of all members of the community

which takes place by means of gestures. The gestures are certain stages in the cooperative

activities which mediate the whole process. Now, all that has taken place in the appearance of the

mind is that this process has been in some degree taken over into the conduct of the particular

individual. There is a certain symbol, such as the policeman uses when he directs traffic. That is

something that is out there. It does not become subjective when the engineer, who is engaged by

the city to examine its traffic regulations, takes the same attitude the policeman takes with reference

to traffic, and takes the attitude also of the drivers of machines. We do imply that he has the driver's

organization; he knows that stopping means slowing down, putting on the brakes. There is a definite

set of parts of his organism so trained that under certain circumstances he brings the machine to a

stop. The raising of the policeman's hand is the gesture which calls out the various acts by means of

which the machine is checked. Those various acts are in the expert's own organization; he can take

the attitude of both the policeman and the driver. Only in this sense has the social process been

made "subjective." If the expert just did it as a child does, it would be play; but if it is done for the

actual regulation of traffic, then there is the operation of what we term mind. Mind is nothing but the

importation of this external process into the conduct of the individual so as to meet the problems

that arise.

This peculiar organization arises out of a social process that is logically its antecedent. A community

within which the organism acts in such a cooperative fashion that the action of one is the stimulus to

the other to respond, and so on, is the antecedent of the peculiar type of organization we term a

mind, or a self. Take the simple family relation, where there is the male and the female and the child

which has to be cared for. Here is a process which can only go on through interactions within this

group. It cannot be said that the individuals come first and the community later, for the individuals

arise in the very process itself, just as much as the human body or any multi-cellular form is one in

which differentiated cells arise.

There has to be a life-process going on in order to have the differentiated cells; in the same way

there has to be a social process going on in order that there may be individuals. It is just as true in

society as it is in the physiological situation that there could not be the individual if there was not the

process of which he is a part. Given such a social process, there is the possibility of human

intelligence when this social process, in terms of the conversation of gestures, is taken over into the

conduct of the individual-and then there arises, of course, a different type of individual in terms of

the responses now possible. There might conceivably be an individual who simply plays as the child

does, without getting into a social game; but the human individual is possible because there is a

social process in which it can function responsibly. The attitudes are parts of the social reaction; the

cries would not maintain themselves as vocal gestures unless they did call out certain responses in

the others; the attitude itself could only exist as such in this interplay of gestures.

The mind is simply the interplay of such gestures in the form of significant symbols. We must

remember that the gesture is there only in its relationship to the response, to the attitude. One would

not have words unless there were such responses. Language would never have arisen as a set of

bare arbitrary terms which were attached to certain stimuli. Words have arisen out of a social

interrelationship. One of Gulliver's tales was of a community in which a machine was created into

which the letters of the alphabet could be mechanically fed in an endless number of combinations,

and then the members of the community gathered around to see how the letters arranged after each

rotation, on the theory that they might come in the form of an Iliad or one of Shakespeare's plays, or

some other great work. The assumption back of this would be that symbols are entirely independent

of what we term their meaning. The assumption is baseless: there cannot be symbols unless there

are responses. There would not be a call for assistance if there was not a tendency to respond to

the cry of distress. It is such significant symbols, in the sense of a sub-set of social stimuli initiating a

cooperative response, that do in a certain sense constitute our mind, provided that not only the

symbol but also the responses are in our own nature. What the human being has succeeded in

doing is in organizing the response to a certain symbol which is a part of the social act, so that he

takes the attitude of the other person who cooperates with him. It is that which gives him a mind.

The sentinel of a herd is that member of the herd which is more sensitive to odor or sound than the

others. At the approach of danger, he starts to run earlier than the others, who then follow along, in

virtue of a herding tendency to run together. There is a social stimulus, a gesture, if you like, to

which the other forms respond. The first form gets the odor earlier and starts to run, and its starting

to run is a stimulus to the others to run also. It is all external; there is no mental process involved.

The sentinel does not regard itself as the individual who is to give a signal; it just runs at a certain

moment and so starts the others to run. But with a mind, the animal that gives the signal also takes

the attitude of the others who respond to it. He knows what his signal means. A man who calls "fire"

would be able to call out in himself the reaction he calls out in the other. In so far as the man can

take the attitude of the other-his attitude of response to fire, his sense of terror-that response to his

own cry is something that makes of his conduct a mental affair, as over against the conduct of the

others.[2] But the only thing that has happened here is that what takes place externally in the herd

has been imported into the conduct of the man. There is the same signal and the same tendency to

respond, but the man not only can give the signal but also can arouse in himself the attitude of the

terrified escape, and through calling that out he can come back upon his own tendency to call out

and can check it. He can react upon himself in taking the organized attitude of the whole group in

trying to escape from danger. There is nothing more subjective about it than that the response to his

own stimulus can be found in his own conduct, and that he can utilize the conversation of gestures

that takes place to determine his own conduct. If he can so act, he can set up a rational control, and

thus make possible a far more highly organized society than otherwise. The process is one which

does not utilize a man endowed with a consciousness where there was no consciousness before,

but rather an individual who takes over the whole social process into his own conduct. That ability,

of course, is dependent first of all on the symbol being one to which he can respond; and so far as

we know, the vocal gesture has been the condition for the development of that type of symbol.

Whether it can develop without the vocal gesture I cannot tell.

I want to be sure that we see that the content put into the mind is only a development and product of

social interaction. It is a development which is of enormous importance, and which leads to

complexities and complications of society which go almost beyond our power to trace, but originally

it is nothing but the taking over of the attitude of the other. To the extent that the animal can take the

attitude of the other and utilize that attitude for the control of his own conduct, we have what is

termed mind; and that is the only apparatus involved in the appearance of the mind.

I know of no way in which intelligence or mind could arise or could have arisen, other than through

the internalization by the individual of social processes of experience and behavior, that is, through

this internalization of the conversation of significant gestures, as made possible by the individual's

taking the attitudes of other individuals toward himself and toward what is being thought about. And

if mind or thought has arisen in this way, then there neither can be nor could have been any mind or

thought without language; and the early stages of the development of language must have been

prior to the development of mind or thought.

Endnotes

1. The relation of mind and body is that lying between the organization of the self in its

behavior as a member of a rational community and the bodily organism as a physical thing.

The rational attitude which characterizes the human being is then the relationship of the

whole process in which the individual is engaged to himself as reflected in his assumption of

the organized rôles of the others in stimulating himself to his response. This self as

distinguished from the others lies within the field of communication, and they lie also within

this field. What may be indicated to others or one's self and does not respond to such

gestures of indication is, in the field of perception, what we call a physical thing. The human

body is, especially in its analysis, regarded as a physical thing.

The line of demarcation between the self and the body is found, then, first of all in the social

organization of the act within which the self arises, in its contrast with the activity of the

physiological organism (MS).

The legitimate basis of distinction between mind and body is between the social patterns

and the patterns of the organism itself. Education must bring the two closely together. We

have, as yet, no comprehending category. This does not mean to say that there is anything

logically against it; it is merely a lack of our apparatus or knowledge (1927).

2. Language as made up of significant symbols is what we mean by mind. The content of our

minds is (i) inner conversation, the importation of conversation from the social group to the

individual (2) .... imagery. Imagery should be regarded in relation to the behavior in which its

functions (1931).

Imagery plays just the part in the act that hunger does in the food process (1912). [See

Supplementary Essay 1.]

25. THE "I" AND THE "ME" AS PHASES OF THE SELF[1]

We come now to the position of the self-conscious self or mind in the community. Such a self finds

its expression in self-assertion, or in the devotion of itself to the cause of the community. The self

appears as a new type of individual in the social whole. There is a new social whole because of the

appearance of the type of individual mind I have described, and because of the self with its own

assertion of itself or its own identification with the community. The self is the important phase in the

development because it is in the possibility of the importation of this social attitude into the

responses of the whole community that such a society could arise. The change that takes place

through this importation of the conversation of gestures into the conduct of the individual is one that

takes place in the experience of all of the component individuals.

These, of course, are not the only changes that take place in the community. In speech definite

changes take place that nobody is aware of at all. It requires the investigation of scientists to

discover that such processes have taken place. This is also true of other phases of human

organization. They change, we say, unconsciously, as is illustrated in such a study of the myth as

Wundt has carried out in his Volkerpsychologie. The myth carries an account of the way in which

organization has taken place while largely without any conscious direction-and that sort of change is

going on all the time. Take a person's attitude toward a new fashion. It may at first be one of

objection. After a while he gets to the point of thinking of himself in this changed fashion, noticing

the clothes in the window and seeing himself in them. The change has taken place in him without

his being aware of it. There is, then, a process by means of which the individual in interaction with

others inevitably becomes like others in doing the same thing, without that process appearing in

what we term consciousness. We become conscious of the process when we do definitely take the

attitude of the others, and this situation must be distinguished from the previous one. Perhaps one

says that he does not care to dress in a certain fashion, but prefers to be different; then he is taking

the attitude of others toward himself into his own conduct. When an ant from another nest is

introduced into the nest of other forms, these turn on it and tear it to pieces. The attitude in the

human community may be that of the individual himself, refusing to submit himself because he does

take that common attitude. The ant case is an entirely external affair, but in the human individual it is

a matter of taking the attitudes of the others and adjusting one's self or fighting it out. It is this

recognition of the individual as a self in the process of using his self-consciousness which gives him

the attitude of self-assertion or the attitude of devotion to the community. He has become, then, a

definite self. In such a case of self-assertion there is an entirely different situation from that of the

member of the pack who perhaps dominates it, and may turn savagely on different members of it.

There an individual is just acting instinctively, we say, in a certain situation. In the human society we

have an individual who not only takes his own attitude but takes the attitude in a certain sense of his

subjects; in so far as he is dominating he knows what to expect. When that occurs in the experience

of the individual a different response results with different emotional accompaniments, from that in

the case of the leader of the pack. In the latter case there is simple anger or hostility, and in the

other case there is the experience of the self asserting itself consciously over against other selves,

with the sense of power, of domination. In general, when the community reaction has been imported

into the individual there is a new value in experience and a new order of response.

We have discussed the self from the point of view of the "I" and the "me," the "me" representing that

group of attitudes which stands for others in the community, especially that organized group of

responses which we have detailed in discussing the game on the one hand and social institutions

on the other. In these situations there is a certain organized group of attitudes which answer to any

social act on the part of the individual organism. In any cooperative process, such as the family, the

individual calls out a response from the other members of the group. Now, to the extent that those

responses can be called out in the individual so that he can answer to them, we have both those

contents which go to make up the self, the "other" and the "I." The distinction expresses itself in our

experience in what we call the recognition of others and the recognition of ourselves in the others.

We cannot realize ourselves except in so far as we can recognize the other in his relationship to us.

It is as he takes the attitude of the other that the individual is able to realize himself as a self.

We are referring, of course, to a social situation as distinct from such bare organic responses as

reflexes of the organism, some of which we have already discussed, as in the case where a person

adjusts himself unconsciously to those about him. In such an experience there is no self-

consciousness. One attains self-consciousness only as he takes, or finds himself stimulated to take,

the attitude of the other. Then he is in a position of reacting in himself to that attitude of the other.

Suppose we find ourselves in an economic situation. It is when we take the attitude of the other in

making an offer to us that we can express ourselves in accepting or declining such an offer. That is

a different response of the self from a distinctly automatic offering that can take place without self-

consciousness. A small boy thrusts an advertising bill into our hand and we take it without any

definite consciousness of him or of ourselves. Our thought may be elsewhere but the process still

goes on. The same thing is true, of course, in the care of infants. Young children experience that

which comes to them, they adjust themselves to it in an immediate fashion, without there being

present in their experience a self.

When a self does appear it always involves an experience of another; there could not be an

experience of a self simply by itself. The plant or the lower animal reacts to its environment, but

there is no experience of a self. When a self does appear in experience it appears over against the

other, and we have been delineating the condition under which this other does appear in the

experience of the human animal, namely in the presence of that sort of stimulation in the

cooperative activity which arouses in the individual himself the same response it arouses in the

other. When the response of the other becomes an essential part in the experience or conduct of

the individual; when taking the attitude of the other becomes an essential part in his behavior- then

the individual appears in his own experience as a self; and until this happens he does not appear as

a self.

Rational society, of course, is not limited to any specific set of individuals. Any person who is

rational can become a part of it. The attitude of the community toward our own response is imported

into ourselves in terms of the meaning of what we are doing. This occurs in its widest extent in

universal discourse, in the reply which the rational world makes to our remark. The meaning is as

universal as the community; it is necessarily involved in the rational character of that community; it is

the response that the world made up out of rational beings inevitably makes to our own statement.

We both get the object and ourselves into experience in terms of such a process; the other appears

in our own experience in so far as we do take such an organized and generalized attitude.

If one meets a person on the street whom he fails to recognize, one's reaction toward him is that

toward any other who is a member of the same community. He is the other, the organized,

generalized other, if you like. One takes his attitude over against one's self. If he turns in one

direction one is to go in another direction. One has his response as an attitude within himself. It is

having that attitude within himself that makes it possible for one to be a self. That involves

something beyond the mere turning to the right, as we say, instinctively, without self-consciousness.

To have self-consciousness one must have the attitude of the other in one's own organism as

controlling the thing that he is going to do. What appears in the immediate experience of one's self

in taking that attitude is what we term the "me." It is that self which is able to maintain itself in the

community, that is recognized in the community in so far as it recognizes the others. Such is the

phase of the self which I have referred to as that of the "me."

Over against the "me" is the "I." The individual not only has rights, but he has duties; he is not only a

citizen, a member of the community, but he is one who reacts to this community and in his reaction

to it, as we have seen in the conversation of gestures, changes it. The "I" is the response of the

individual to the attitude of the community as this appears in his own experience. His response to

that organized attitude in turn changes it. As we have pointed out, this is a change which is not

present in his own experience until after it takes place. The "I" appears in our experience in memory.

It is only after we have acted that we know what we have done; it is only after we have spoken that

we know what we have said. The adjustment to that organized world which is present in our own

nature is one that represents the "me" and is constantly there. But if the response to it is a response

which is of the nature of the conversation of gestures, if it creates a situation which is in some sense

novel, if one puts up his side of the case, asserts himself over against others and insists that they

take a different attitude toward himself, then there is something important occurring that is not

previously present in experience.

The general conditions under which one is going to act may be present in one's experience, but he

is as ignorant of just how he is going to respond as is the scientist of the particular hypothesis he will

evolve out of the consideration of a problem. Such and such things are happening that are contrary

to the theory that has been held. How are they to be explained? Take the discovery that a gram of

radium would keep a pot of water boiling, and seemingly lead to no expenditure of energy. Here

something is happening that runs contrary to the theory of physics up to the conception of radium

activity. The scientist who has these facts before him has to pick out some explanation. He suggests

that the radium atom is breaking down, and is consequently setting free energy. On the previous

theory an atom was a permanent affair out of which one could not get energy. But now if it is

assumed that the atom itself is a system involving an interrelationship of energies, then the breaking

down of such a system sets free what is relatively an enormous amount of energy. The point I am

making is that the idea of the scientist comes to him, it is not as yet there in his own mind. His mind,

rather, is the process of the appearance of that idea. A person asserting his rights on a certain

occasion has rehearsed the situation in his own mind; he has reacted toward the community and

when the situation arises he arouses himself and says something already in his mind. But when he

said it to himself in the first place he did not know what he was going to say. He then said something

that was novel to himself, just as the scientist's hypothesis is a novelty when it flashes upon him.

Such a novel reply to the social situation involved in the organized set of attitudes constitutes the "I"

as over against the "me." The "me" is a conventional, habitual individual. It is always there. It has to

have those habits, those responses which everybody has; otherwise the individual could not be a

member of the community. But an individual is constantly reacting to such an organized community

in the way of expressing himself, not necessarily asserting himself in the offensive sense but

expressing himself, being himself in such a cooperative process as belongs to any community. The

attitudes involved are gathered from the group, but the individual in whom they are organized has

the opportunity of giving them an expression which perhaps has never taken place before.

This brings out the general question as to whether anything novel can appear.[2] Practically, of

course, the novel is constantly happening and the recognition of this gets its expression in more

general terms in the concept of emergence. Emergence involves a reorganization, but the

reorganization brings in something that was not there before. The first time oxygen and hydrogen

come together, water appears. Now water is a combination of hydrogen and oxygen, but water was

not there before in the separate elements. The conception of emergence is a concept which recent

philosophy has made much of. If you look at the world simply from the point of view of a

mathematical equation in which there is absolute equality of the different sides, then, of course,

there is no novelty. The world is simply a satisfaction of that equation. Put in any values for X and

the same equation holds. The equations do hold, it is true, but in their holding something else in fact

arises that was not there before. For instance, there is a group of individuals that have to work

together. In a society there must be a set of common organized habits of response found in all, but

the way in which individuals act under specific circumstances gives rise to all of the individual

differences which characterize the different persons. The fact that they have to act in a certain

common fashion does not deprive them of originality. The common language is there, but a different

use of it is made in every new contact between persons; the element of novelty in the reconstruction

takes place through the reaction of the individuals to the group to which they belong. That

reconstruction is no more given in advance than is the particular hypothesis which the scientist

brings forward given in the statement of the problem. Now, it is that reaction of the individual to the

organized "me," the "me" that is in a certain sense simply a member of the community, which

represents the "I" in the experience of the self.

The relative values of the "me" and the "I" depend very much on the situation. If one is maintaining

his property in the community, it is of primary importance that he is a member of that community, for

it is his taking of the attitude of the others that guarantees to him the recognition of his own rights.

To be a "me" under those circumstances is the important thing. It gives him his position, gives him

the dignity of being a member in the community, it is the source of his emotional response to the

values that belong to him as a member of the community. It is the basis for his entering into the

experience of others.

At times it is the response of the ego or "I" to a situation, the way in which one expresses himself,

that brings to one a feeling of prime importance. One now asserts himself against a certain situation,

and the emphasis is on the response. The demand is freedom from conventions, from given laws.

Of course, such a situation is only possible where the individual appeals, so to speak, from a narrow

and restricted community to a larger one, that is, larger in the logical sense of having rights which

are not so restricted. One appeals from fixed conventions which no longer have any meaning to a

community in which the rights shall be publicly recognized, and one appeals to others on the

assumption that there is a group of organized others that answer to one's own appeal-even if the

appeal be made to posterity. In that case there is the attitude of the "I" as over against the me.

Both aspects of the "I" and "me" are essential to the self in its full expression. One must take the

attitude of the others in a group in order to belong to a community; he has to employ that outer

social world taken within himself in order to carry on thought. It is through his relationship to others

in that community, because of the rational social processes that obtain in that community, that he

has being as a citizen. On the other hand, the individual is constantly reacting to the social attitudes,

and changing in this cooperative process the very community to which he belongs. Those changes

may be humble and trivial ones. One may not have anything to say, although he takes a long time to

say it. And yet a certain amount of adjustment and readjustment takes place. We speak of a person

as a conventional individual; his ideas are exactly the same as those of his neighbors; he is hardly

more than a "me" under the circumstances; his adjustments are only the slight adjustments that take

place, as we say, unconsciously. Over against that there is the person who has a definite

personality, who replies to the organized attitude in a way which makes a significant difference. With

such a person it is the "I" that is the more important phase of the experience. Those two constantly

appearing phases are the important phases in the self.[3]

Endnotes

1. [See also "The Definition of the Psychical," University of Chicago Decennial Publications,

1903, pp. 104 ff.; "The Mechanism of Social Consciousness," Journal of Philosophy, IX

(1912), 401 ff.; "The Social Self," ibid., X (1913), 374 ff.]

2. [Cf. The Philosophy of the Act, Part III.] [Editors' note from George's Page: this footnote

refers to a book that will not exist for another 6 years. There apparently was a revision of the

text of Mind, Self and Society after its first printing]

3. Psychologists deal as a rule with the processes which are involved in what we term

perception," but have very largely left out of account the character of the self. It has been

largely through the pathologist that the importance of the self has entered into psychology.

Dissociations have centered attention on the self, and have shown how absolutely

fundamental is this social character of the mind. That which constitutes the personality lies in

this sort of give-and-take between members in a group that engage in a cooperative

process. It is this activity that has led to the humanly intelligent animal.

26. THE REALIZATION OF THE SELF IN THE SOCIAL SITUATION

There is still one phase in the development of the self that needs to be presented in more detail: the

realization of the self in the social situation in which it arises.

I have argued that the self appears in experience essentially as a "me" with the organization of the

community to which it belongs. This organization is, of course, expressed in the particular

endowment and particular social situation of the individual. He is a member of the community, but

he is a particular part of the community, with a particular heredity and position which distinguishes

him from anybody else. He is what he is in so far as he is a member of this community, and the raw

materials out of which this particular individual is born would not be a self but for his relationship to

others in the community of which he is a part. Thus is he aware of himself as such, and his not only

in political citizenship, or in membership in groups of which he is a part, but also from the point of

view of reflective thought. He is a member of the community of the thinkers whose literature he

reads and to which he may contribute by his own published thought. He belongs to a society of all

rational beings, and the rationality that he identifies with himself involves a continued social

interchange. The widest community in which the individual finds himself, that which is everywhere,

through and for everybody, is the thought world as such. He is a member of such a community and

he is what he is as such a member.

The fact that all selves are constituted by or in terms of the social process, and are individual

reflections of it-or rather of this organized behavior pattern which it exhibits, and which they prehend

in their respective structures-is not in the least incompatible with, or destructive of, the fact that

every individual self has its own peculiar individuality, its own unique pattern; because each

individual self within that process, while it reflects in its organized structure the behavior pattern of

that process as a whole, does so from its own particular and unique standpoint within that process,

and thus reflects in its organized structure a different aspect or perspective of this whole social

behavior pattern from that which is reflected in the organized structure of any other individual self

within that process (just as every monad in the Leibnizian universe mirrors that universe from a

different point of view, and thus mirrors a different aspect or perspective of that universe). In other

words, the organized structure of every individual self within the human social process of experience

and behavior reflects, and is constituted by, the organized relational pattern of that process as a

whole; but each individual self-structure reflects, and is constituted by, a different aspect or

perspective of this relational pattern, because each reflects this relational pattern from its own

unique standpoint; so that the common social origin and constitution of individual selves and their

structures does not preclude wide individual differences and variations among them, or contradict

the peculiar and more or less distinctive individuality which each of them in fact possesses. Every

individual self within a given society or social community reflects in its organized structure the whole

relational pattern of organized social behavior which that society or community exhibits or is carrying

on, and its organized structure is constituted by this pattern; but since each of these individual

selves reflects a uniquely different aspect or perspective of this pattern in its structure, from its own

particular and unique place or standpoint within the whole process of organized social behavior

which exhibits this pattern-since, that is, each is differently or uniquely related to that whole process,

and occupies its own essentially unique focus of relations therein-the structure of each is differently

constituted by this pattern from the way in which the structure of any other is so constituted.

The individual, as we have seen, is continually reacting back against this society. Every adjustment

involves some sort of change in the community to which the individual adjusts himself. And this

change, of course, may be very important. Take even the widest community which we can present,

the rational community that is represented in the so-called universal discourse. Up to a

comparatively recent time the form of this was that of an Aristotelian world. But men in America,

England, Italy, Germany, France, have very considerably changed the structure of that world,

introducing a logic of multiple relations in place of the Aristotelian relation of substance and

attribute. Another fundamental change has taken place in the form of the world through the reaction

of an individual-Einstein. Great figures in history bring about very fundamental changes. These

profound changes which take place through the action of individual minds are only the extreme

expression of the sort of changes that take place steadily through-reactions which are not simply

those of a "me" but of an "I." These changes are changes that take place gradually and more or less

imperceptibly. We know that as we pass from one historical period to another there have been

fundamental changes, and we know these changes are due to the reactions of different individuals.

It is only the ultimate effect that we can recognize, but the differences are due to the gestures of

these countless individuals actually changing the situation in which they find themselves, although

the specific changes are too minute for us to identify. As I have pointed out, the ego or "I" that is

responsible for changes of that sort appears in experience only after its reaction has taken place. It

is only after we have said the word we are saying that we recognize ourselves as the person that

has said it, as this particular self that says this particular thing; it is only after we have done the thing

that we are going to do that we are aware of what we are doing. However carefully we plan the

future it always is different from that which we can previse, and this something that we are

continually bringing in and adding to is what we identify with the self that comes into the level of our

experience only in the completion of the act.

In some respects, of course, we can determine what that self is going to do. We can accept certain

responsibilities in advance. One makes contracts and promises, and one is bound by them. The

situation may change, the act may be different from that which the individual himself expected to

carry out, but he is held to the contract which he has made. He must do certain things in order to

remain a member of the community. In the duties of what we call rational conduct, in adjusting

ourselves to a world in which the laws of nature and of economics and of political systems obtain,

we can state what is going to happen and take over the responsibility for the thing we are going to

do, and yet the real self that appears in that act awaits the completion of the act itself. Now, it is this

living act which never gets directly into reflective experience. It is only after the act has taken place

that we can catch it in our memory and place it in terms of that which we have done. It is that "I"

which we may be said to be continually trying to realize, and to realize through the actual conduct

itself. One does not ever get it fully before himself. Sometimes somebody else can tell him

something about himself that he is not aware of. He is never sure about himself, and he astonishes

himself by his conduct as much as he astonishes other people.

The possibilities in our nature, those sorts of energy which William James took so much pleasure in

indicating, are possibilities of the self that lie beyond our own immediate presentation. We do not

know just what they are. They are in a certain sense the most fascinating contents that we can

contemplate, so far as we can get hold of them. We get a great deal of our enjoyment of romance,

of moving pictures, of art, in setting free, at least in imagination, capacities which belong to

ourselves, or which we want to belong to ourselves. Inferiority complexes arise from those wants of

a self which we should like to carry out but which we cannot-we adjust ourselves to these by the so-

called inferiority complexes. The possibilities of the "I" belong to that which is actually going on,

taking place, and it is in some sense the most fascinating part of our experience. It is there that

novelty arises and it is there that our most important values are located. It is the realization in some

sense of this self that we are continually seeking.

There are various ways in which we can realize that self. Since it is a social self, it is a self that is

realized in its relationship to others. It must be recognized by others to have the very values which

we want to have belong to it. It realizes itself in some sense through its superiority to others, as it

recognizes its inferiorities in comparison with others. The inferiority complexes are the reverse

situations to those feelings of superiority which we entertain with reference to ourselves as over

against people about us. It is interesting to go back into one's inner consciousness and pick out

what it is that we are apt to depend upon in maintaining our self-respect. There are, of course,

profound and solid foundations. One does keep his word, meet his obligations; and that provides a

basis for self-respect. But those are characters which obtain in most of the members of the

community with whom we have to do. We all fall down at certain points, but on the whole we always

are people of our words. We do belong to the community and our self-respect depends on our

recognition of ourselves as such self-respecting individuals. But that is not enough for us, since we

want to recognize ourselves in our differences from other persons. We have, of course, a specific

economic and social status that enables us to so distinguish ourselves. We also have to some

extent positions in various groups which give a means of self-identification, but there is back of all

these matters a sense of things which on the whole we do better than other people do. It is very

interesting to get back to these superiorities, many of them of a very trivial character, but of great

importance to us. We may come back to manners of speech and dress, to a capacity for

remembering, to this, that, and the other thing-but always to something in which we stand out above

people. We are careful, of course, not directly to plume ourselves. It would seem childish to intimate

that we take satisfaction in showing that we can do something better than others. We take a great

deal of pains to cover up such a situation; but actually we are vastly gratified. Among children and

among primitive communities these superiorities are vaunted and a person glories in them; but even

among our more advanced groups they are there as essential ways of realizing one's self, and they

are not to be identified with what we term the expression of the egoistic or self-centered person. A

person may be as genuine as you like in matters of dollars and cents or efforts, and he may be

genuine in recognizing other people's successes and enjoy them, but that does not keep him from

enjoying his own abilities and getting peculiar satisfaction out of his own successes.

This sense of superiority does not represent necessarily the disagreeable type of assertive

character, and it does not mean that the person wants to lower other people in order to get himself

into a higher standing. That is the form such self-realization is apt to appear to take, to say the least,

and all of us recognize such a form as not simply unfortunate but as morally more or less

despicable. But there is a demand, a constant demand, to realize one's self in some sort of

superiority over those about us. It appears, perhaps, more definitely in such situations as those to

which I have referred, and which are the hardest things to explain. There is a certain enjoyableness

about the misfortunes of other people, especially those gathered about their personality. It finds its

expression in what we term gossip, even mischievous gossip. We have to be on our guard against

it. We may relate an event with real sorrow, and yet there is a certain satisfaction in something that

has happened to somebody else but has not happened to us.

This is the same attitude that is involved in the humor of somebody else tumbling down. In such

laughter there is a certain release from the effort which we do not have to make to get up again. It is

a direct response, one that lies back of what we term self-consciousness, and the humor of it does

not go along with the enjoyment of the other person's suffering. If a person does actually break a leg

we can sympathize with him, but it was funny, after all, to see him sprawling out. This is a situation

in which there is a more or less identification of the individual with the other. We do, so to speak,

start to fall with him, and to rise up after he has fallen, and our theory of laughter is that it is a

release from that immediate tendency to catch ourselves under those conditions. We have identified

ourselves with the other person, taken his attitude. That attitude involves a strenuous effort which

we do not have to carry out, and the release from that effort expresses itself in laughter. Laughter is

the way in which the "I," so to speak, responds under those conditions. The individual probably sets

to work helping the other person to get up, but there was an element in the response which

expressed itself in the sense of the superiority of the person standing toward the person on the

sidewalk. Now, that general situation is not simply found under physical situations, but is equally

evident in the community in which a person committing a faux pas; we have here the same sense of

amusement and of superiority.

I want to bring out in these instances the difference between the naive attitude of the "I" and the

more sophisticated attitude of the "me." One behaves perfectly properly, suppresses his laughter, is

very prompt to get the fallen person on his feet again. There is the social attitude of the "me" over

against the "I" that does enjoy the situation; but enjoys it, we will say, in a certain harmless way.

There is nothing vicious about it, and even in those situations where one has a certain sort of

satisfaction in following out the scandals and difficulties of a more serious sort, there is an attitude

which involves the sense of superiority and at the same time does not carry with it anything that is

vicious. We may be very careful about what we say, but there is still that attitude of the self which is

in some sense superior under such conditions; we have not done this particular untoward thing, we

have kept out of it.

The sense of superiority is magnified when it belongs to a self that identifies itself with the group. It

is aggravated in our patriotism, where we legitimize an assertion of superiority which we would not

admit in the situations to which I have been referring. It seems to be perfectly legitimate to assert the

superiority of the nation to which one belongs over other nations to brand the conduct of other

nationalities in black colors in order that we may bring out values in the conduct of those that make

up our own nation. It is just as true in politics and religion in the putting of one sect over against the

others. This took the place of the exclusive expressions of nationalism in the early period, the period

of religious wars. One belonged to one group that was superior to other groups and could assert

himself confidently because he had God on his side. There we find a situation under which it

seemed to be perfectly legitimate to assert this sort of superiority which goes with self-

consciousness and which in some sense seems to be essential to self-consciousness. It is not, of

course, confined to nationalism and patriotism. We all believe that the group we are in is superior to

other groups. We can get together with the members in a bit of gossip that with anyone else or any

other group would be impossible. Leadership, of course, plays its part, since the enthusiasm for

those who have a high standing among us aids in the organization of the group; but on the whole we

depend upon a common recognition that other people are not quite as good as we are.

The feeling of group superiority is generally explained in terms of the organization of the group.

Groups have survived in the past in so far as they have organized against a common enemy. They

maintain themselves because they have acted as one against the common enemy-such is the

explanation, from the standpoint of the survival of the fittest, of the community which is most

satisfactorily organized. It certainly is the easiest way of getting together, and it may be that it is an

adequate explanation.

If one does have a genuine superiority it is a superiority which rests on the performance of definite

functions. One is a good surgeon, a good lawyer, and he can pride himself on his superiority-but it is

a superiority which he makes use of. And when he does actually make use of it in the very

community to which he belongs it loses that element of egoism which we think of When we think of

a person simply pluming himself on his superiority over somebody else. I have been emphasizing

the other aspect because we do sometimes cover it up in our own experience. But when the sense

of superiority goes over into a functional expression, then it becomes not only entirely legitimate, but

it is the way in which the individuals do change the situations in which they live. We change things

by the capacities which we have that other people do not have. Such capacity is what makes us

effective. The immediate attitude is one which carries with it a sense of superiority, of maintaining

one's self. The superiority is not the end in view. It is a means for the preservation of the self. We

have to distinguish ourselves from other people and this is accomplished by doing something which

other people cannot do, or cannot do as well.

Now, to be able to hold on to ourselves in our peculiarities is something which is lovable. If it is

taken simply in the crude fashion of the person who boasts of himself, then a cheap and ugly side of

this process is exhibited. But if it is an expression which goes out into the functions which it

sustains, then it loses that character. We assume this will be the ultimate outcome of the

expressions of nationalism. Nations ought to be able to express themselves in the functional fashion

that the professional man does. There is the beginning of such an organization in the league of

Nations. One nation recognizes certain things it has to do as a member of the community of nations.

Even the mandate system at least puts a functional aspect on the action of the directing nation and

not one which is simply an expression of power.

27. THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE "ME" AND THE "I"

I have been undertaking to distinguish between the "I" and the "me" as different phases of the self,

the "me" answering to the organized attitudes of the others which we definitely assume and which

determine consequently our own conduct so far as it is of a self-conscious character. Now the "me"

may be regarded as giving the form of the "I." The novelty comes in the action of the "I," but the

structure, the form of the self is one which is conventional.

This conventional form may be reduced to a minimum. In the artist's attitude, where there is artistic

creation, the emphasis upon the element of novelty is carried to the limit. This demand for the

unconventional is especially noticeable in modern art. Here the artist is supposed to break away

from convention; a part of his artistic expression is thought to be in the breakdown of convention.

That attitude is, of course, not essential to the artistic function, and it probably never occurs in the

extreme form in which it is often proclaimed. Take certain of the artists of the past. In the Greek

world the artists were, in a certain sense, the supreme artisans. What they were to do was more or

less set by the community, and accepted by themselves, as the expression of heroic figures, certain

deities, the erection of temples. Definite rules were accepted as essential to the expression. And yet

the artist introduced an originality into it which distinguishes one artist from another. In the case of

the artist the emphasis upon that which is unconventional, that which is not in the structure of the

"me," is carried as far, perhaps, as it can be carried.

This same emphasis also appears in certain types of conduct which are impulsive. Impulsive

conduct is uncontrolled conduct. The structure of the "me" does not there determine the expression

of the "I." If we use a Freudian expression, the " me " is in a certain sense a censor. It determines

the sort of expression which can take place, sets the stage, and gives the cue. In the case of

impulsive conduct this structure of the (,me" involved in the situation does not furnish to any such

degree this control. Take the situation of self-assertion where the self simply asserts itself over

against others, and suppose that the emotional stress is such that the forms of polite society in the

performance of legitimate conduct are overthrown, so that the person expresses himself violently.

There the "me" is determined by the situation. There are certain recognized fields within which an

individual can assert himself, certain rights which he has within these limits. But let the stress

become too great, these limits are not observed, and an individual asserts himself in perhaps a

violent fashion. Then the "I" is the dominant element over against the "me." Under what we consider

normal conditions the way in which an individual acts is determined by his taking the attitude of the

others in the group, but if the individual is not given the opportunity to come up against people, as a

child is not who is held out of intercourse with other people, then there results a situation in which

the reaction is uncontrolled.

Social control[1] is the expression of the "me" over against the expression of the "I." It sets the

limits, it gives the determination that enables the "I," so to speak, to use the "me" as the means of

carrying out what is the undertaking that all are interested in. Where persons are held outside or

beyond that sort of organized expression there arises a situation in which social control is absent. In

the more or less fantastic psychology of the Freudian group, thinkers are dealing with the sexual life

and with self-assertion in its violent form. The normal situation, however, is one which involves a

reaction of the individual in a situation which is socially determined, but to which he brings his own

responses as an "I." The response is, in the experience of the individual, an expression with which

the self is identified. It is such a response which raises him above the institutionalized individual.

As I have said before, an institution is, after all, nothing but an organization of attitudes which we all

carry in us, the organized attitudes of the others that control and determine conduct. Now, this

institutionalized individual is, or should be, the means by which the individual expresses himself in

his own way, for such individual expression is that which is identified with the self in those values

which are essential to the self, and which arise from the self. To speak of them as arising from the

self does not attach to them the character of the selfish egoist, for under the normal conditions to

which we were referring the individual is making his contribution to a common undertaking. The

baseball player who makes a brilliant play is making the play called for by the nine to which he

belongs. He is playing for his side. A man may, of course, play the gallery, be more interested in

making a brilliant play than in helping the nine to win, just as a surgeon may carry out a brilliant

operation and sacrifice the patient. But under normal conditions