Mental Development in the Child and the Race
Chapter 11: Conscious Imitation (Continued): The Origin of Thought and Emotion
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§ 1. Conception and Thought
PASSING on to the sphere of conception and thought, we find at once an opening for the law of imitation. The principle of Identity which represents the mental demand for consistency of experience, and the mental tendency, already remarked, to the assimilation of new material to old schemes, is seen genetically in the simple fact that repetitions are pleasurable to the infant, and to us all, because of the law of habit in our reactions. Just in so far as a new experience repeats an old one, to this degree it accomplishes what direct imitation would have accomplished, and so makes easy future repetitions of it, by the reaction born of the old. This kind of accommodation by repetition we have seen to be both indicative of pleasure, and in developed organisms, also, the cause of it. So in the fact of assimilation, we have both the method of central organic development, and the platform upon which the structure of thought must be built. To say that identity is necessary to thought, therefore, is only to say that it expresses in a generalization the method of mental development by imitative reaction.
In an earlier work [1] I have depicted the progress of consciousness through the operations of reasoning -- conception,
(307) judgment, syllogism -- in its search for identities, and I need not enlarge upon it here. The new doctrine of judgement, which goes by the name of Brentano, for the first time did justice to the demand for unity found everywhere in mental operations. Judgment always deals with one object, not two. So the mental demand for identity is really a demand, i.e. an irresistible tendency to act in one way upon a variety of experiences. Identity is the formal or logical expression of the principle of Habit. It is for logic, which deals with terms and copulas, what smooth assimilation and swift apperception are for psychology, which deals with elements and processes.
The principle of Sufficient Reason is subject to a corresponding genetic expression, on the side of Accommodation. Sufficient reason, in the child's mind, is a presupposition belief: anything in its experience which tends to modify the course of its habitual reactions in a way which it must accept, indorse, believe -- this has its sufficient reason, and it accommodates to it. I have argued elsewhere! that a conflict between the established, the habitual, the taken for granted, on one hand, and the new, raw, and violent, on the other hand, is necessary to excite doubt, which is the preliminary to belief. And belief follows only when a kind of assimilation or reconciliation takes place. But this assimilation of the new, the doubtful, to the old, the established, is only done by the union of the potencies for action, in a common plan of action. Belief arises in the child in the readjustment or accommodation of himself actively to new elements of reality. Only then does he pass from 'reality-feeling,' which accompanies unimpeded habit, to belief, which comes from a new adjustment of the claims of impeded and split-up habits.
In so far as there is truth in this view, in so far does Suffi-
(308)-cient Reason become a formal or logical statement of the fact of Accommodation. It is for logic, again, what the more violent reconciliations, hard-bought syntheses, strains to compass all in a single 'span of consciousness,' are for psychology.
Put more broadly: whenever we believe a new thing or accept it as real, we accommodate our attitude to its presence, we make place for it in our store of acquisitions for future use; this means that we are prepared to reproduce it voluntarily and involuntarily, to make it a part of that copy system which hangs together in our memory, as representing a consistent course of conduct and the best adjustment we have been able to effect to our physical and moral environment. And on the other hand, anything which cannot get into this system is not believed; and we say we do not believe it because it lacks just in this sufficient ground or reason. The fact is, that not believing a thing simply means that we have not been able to link it up and hold it in the system of copy elements which we have established by long and patient action.
So here also imitation is the method by which our milieu of thought and feeling in all its aspects gets carried over and reproduced within us in a system of relationships to which we have learned to react. We live by faith, now, not by sight, because we depict truth in these relationships whose very establishing by our own action has given us the only warrant we have of their security. Our consciousness of the relationships of the elements of this reproduced world, as sustaining one another -- and sustaining our trust -- this is our sense of sufficient reason. Our accompanying sense of acceptance and endorsement of these copies as suited to draw out our action -- this is belief; and the familiarity which repetition engenders betokens the growth of habit and the sense of identity.
Conception then arises, too, and it proceeds by identities
(309) and sufficient reasons; and we get in this connection a genetic view of the general notion. The child begins with what seems to be a 'general.' His earliest experiences, carried over into memory, become general copies which stand as assimilative nets for every new event or object. All men are 'papa,' all colours are 'wed,' all food 'mik.' Professor Cattell informs me that his little girl, after getting pain from certain bumps of head, etc., got to calling all bodily pain 'bump-bump.' And her little brother further generalized the term to apply to all mental discomforts, such as disagreeable emotions, fears, etc. What this really means is, that the child's motor outlets are fewer than his receptive experiences. Each experience of man, e.g., calls out the same attitude, the same incipient movement, the same sort of attention, on his part, as that with which he hails 'papa.' In other words, each man is a repetition of the papa copy, and carries the child out in action, just as his own early response to the presence of the real papa carried him out. But of course this does not continue. By his learning new accommodations, by his having experiences which will not assimilate, this dominancy of habit is, in part, counteracted; his classes grow more numerous as his reactions do, his general notions become more 'reasonable,' and he is on the proper way to a 'rectification of the concept.'
The ordinary question of the rise of the 'concept' from the 'percept' may, accordingly, get its answer in this view; and it is well to go a little more into details. It is only partially true that the concept arises from the percept at all. It is rather true that the two arise together, by the same mental movement, which is apperception or motor synthesis. Going back again to that neglected period, infancy, we may ask, as a matter of fact, what takes place.
Suppose, after the very common method of the day, a
(310) single presentation, A, in the infant consciousness; then suppose it removed. The child is now ready to germinate in two different ways, forward and backward, future-ward and past-ward. He remembers and he expects. Viewed as memory, his experience, A, is particular, a sensation, after a time a percept. But it includes more than his simple receptive state. He reacts to it, and so stands ready to react to it again. This readiness is his expectation, -- the tendency he has to a definite reaction; and as the only one, it stands ready to 'go off' on any kind of stimulus which is locally near enough to discharge that way. His memory then becomes schematic[3] of the future. Viewed as expectation, it is the whole of the child's reality; it is what will happen, for it is all that can happen; he knows nothing else. Whatever then actually does happen is at first reacted to as A, and remains A, by this active confirmation, if it is possible for the child's consciousness to keep it A. This meaning that past experience, taken as representing future experience, is ' schematic ' II may call the concept of the first degree. It means that at this stage particular experiences are the measure of all things, of things undefined; since they are all that the organism is accommodated to, and they are the copies to which all experiences are assimilated if possible. The child is under the reign of habit or identity.
But as particulars increase, they limit one another, both in memory and in expectation. In expectation, because they are brought only partially under common tendencies of discharge in action; in memory, because by this tendency to partial disunion in action they are subject to the great processes of assimilation, association, and inhibition. Instead of A (red colour) happening, B (green colour) happens; and instead of
(311) all my reds being red squares, and all my greens, green squares, I have red circles and green circles, red and green triangles, fantastic shapes of red and green, etc. This means two things in the growth of concepts: first, that my expectation is no longer of all reds, i.e. my red is no longer a concept of the first degree. It cannot, by passing off through a single motor discharge, stand for all colours. Green is in part refractory. So red is now a particular as compared with green. And, second, my expectation is no longer that all my reds will be square, for the same reason as before. There will be circular, triangular, irregular reds. But with it all they are equally red. In this respect they do assimilate, and my red is now general as compared with particular instances of red. Now this particularizing of experiences in reference to one another is the function of perception, and this generalizing of experience, with reference to its single instances, is conception, which gives the general, a concept of the second degree. So conception and perception arise together.
At the same time, experience takes on another psychological aspect. New experience not only adds new items opposed to old items, but it leads to revision of the old -- all through the law of assimilation by means of motor reaction. What passed for greens turn out to be partly blues; they accordingly require and secure a modified action; so in my expectation of greens, I may no longer accept blues. So also I leave out the demand that my greens be either square, or circular, or triangular, i.e. I leave out figure. This means that in my more generalized motor reaction to colour, I leave out the more special eye explorations which contribute the figure-value to the complex content. Or, to give a more concrete example, first, boat is boat with spread sails, three masts, and sailors in the rigging; then sailors are dropped, sails and masts go, etc. What is left is ordinarily
(312) said to be abstracted, as, far instance, the concept colour, a quality abstracted from particular instances. But true abstraction is not a singling out; it is rather a paring down, a wearing off, an erosion, due to the progress in adjustment which the organism has been able to effect under the law of the reduction of motor habits by compounding. [4] Thus is reached a concept of the third degree. It represents that which is essential in an experience, not only as tested by its uninterrupted recurrence amid shifting and drifting details, but more especially by its regular calling-out force upon me in some great fixed way of acting.
How experience gets collected, related, distinguished, in this way, is ordinarily the question of the function of consciousness itself. I prefer to call the process considered thus as mental function, apperception, and to say that both the percept and the concept arise by the apperceptive function of consciousness, to which a genetic construction is given in the earlier pages. They become, on this view, simply different aspects of one thing -- a synthesis of elements. Looked at backward, the product is an event, a particular, a percept, a concept; looked at forward, it is ' schematic ' of other events still to be determined by action.
We are now able, in summing up, to make out two important points for psychology, I think. First, we see that this so-called apperception is genetically the simple fact of motor habit, with the assimilations and associations which it gives rise to. Motor habit is the great devouring thing which throws its arms around all mental details and unifies them in its embrace. The most refined and subtile form of it takes place higher in attention. Attention is the vehicle of
(313) apperception; as psychologists now agree it supplies the 'form' to every 'content.' To say this, however, is only to say that attention, representing as it does the most refined and most central forms of motor reaction upon revived mental content -- that its adjustments are the medium of conception, thought, reasoning, of all possible groupings and arrangings in the mind. Thought, therefore, exhibits a new stage in motor accommodation. It shows the organism's adjustments to the relationships of truth, as memory, perception, sensation, show its adjustments to those of fact. The mechanism of voluntary attention, by which this selection or adjustment proceeds, is described in a later chapter.
The second thing which may now be said, is that this view shows why we have never been able to find a mental picture or content for a 'general notion.' Attempts at this culminated but did not terminate with Hume. It is evident that the 'general' or 'abstract' is not a content at all. It is an attitude, an expectation, a motor tendency. It is the possibility of a reaction which will answer equally for a great many particular experiences. As far as there are the particular images which Hume pointed out, and such processes of composition as those made much of by Waitz -- these are both true statements of partial aspects of the broader fact of assimilation which has been given general treatment in the exposition above. [5]
Endnotes
- Handbook, Vol. I., Senses and Intellect, Chap. XIV. See also the work Thought
and Things, Vol. II., Chap. I., and Vol. II., Chap. II.
- Handbook, Feeling and Will, Chap. VII.
- The word 'Schema' for such a meaning is suggested in the work Thought and Things, Chap. VIII., §§ 6 ff.
- See above, Chap. VIII., § 4. For a later development of the logical side of the 'general,' the work Thought and Things, Vol. I., Chaps. VIII., X., may be consulted.
- I may note the agreement intimated in the following quotations from a Syllabus of
Lectures by Professor Royce: "All general ideas are the mental aspects of habits of
response in presence of those general characters of things to which the ideas in question
relate. Without motor habits, no ideas;" "consciously general ideas are the
mental aspects of deliberately formed habits of response to the general characters of
things; and for that very reason are modifiable in definite ways, and are, accordingly,
more or less successfully adjustable to decidedly novel conditions. Of such deliberate
habits of response the processes of language are a familiar example." " These
attributes of Deliberateness and Modifiability are in general due to the Influence of the
Imitative Function. For imitation, although founded on instinct, implies for its
development Deliberateness and Plasticity of adjustment. Rational General Ideas are
therefore, on the whole, products of imitation, are the mental aspects of imitative motor
habits of response to the socially recognized general aspects of things."
The true ' genera!,' however, is a meaning of established habit; a retrospective meaning, in contrast with the 'schematic' or prospective meaning which is one of accommodation to new cases as yet not tested nor assimilated. The distinction is worked out m the treatise on genetic logic (Thought and Things, Vol. I.).
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§ 2. Conception as Class-recognition
From what has been said of the formation of the general notion, its relation to recognition becomes interesting. This point has never been made clear, I think, on any of the old theories. How is it that a single object is recognized as belonging to the class which is covered by a general concept ? It is evident that this presents a different phase of recognition from that which comes to view in the recognition of a single object as the same single object. Calling this further kind of recognition 'class-recognition,' we find it now possible to suggest an explanation of it.
We found convenient, it will be remembered, a certain formula in speaking of the elements involved in attention; the formula A + a + <math>&alpha</math>. A represents the fixed, habitual, always-present strains, stresses, organic movings, etc., involved in every act of attention. This element involves the stable elements of the sense of self, and so carries self-recognition or sense of personal identity with it. This is the extreme case of recognition on the habit side. The third element, <math>&alpha</math>, further has already been seen to give us, in its changes from one to another experience of the same object or content, the sense of recognition at the other extreme, the accommodation extreme, the absolute recognitions from
(315) which objective complexity may be largely absent. Now, in the middle, in the a element, we find the very common fact of class-recognition accounted for, in the main. The formation of class notions we have seen to be by union, coalescence, of motor processes, with assimilations of new elements of content to old habitual schemes. Now the attention is directly implicated in all these class formations. Indeed, it is by the training of attention in this way that the most stable class divisions are formed, i.e. those which mark off the great quality-types of mental processes. One's attention is visual, or auditive, or motor, as it gets habitually exercised with one or other of the senses. [1] So the elements, in an act of attention, which arise from the contractions peculiar to one kind of content, remaining relatively constant for all instances of that kind of content, give us the recognition-coefficient for that class. I recognize a visual picture as something I have seen, because it stirs up that a element of attention which consists in the motor revivals, reverberations, etc., of the eyebrow, frown-muscles, scalp shiftings, etc., peculiar to visual attention. Auditory class-recognition proceeds, similarly, upon revived auditory attention-strains, etc. So we have in the a element in the attention formula sufficient explanation of class-recognition, and of its position midway between recognition of self and recognition of single objects, qua single. Of course, as Wundt says, just in so far as a single object is recognized as complex, and by reason of its complexity, just so far it tends to become a case of class-recognition; inasmuch as the relationships inside of which its assimilation proceeds are common nets for a possibly varied filling.
The three recognition phenomena, therefore, which this scheme sets in order are, self-identity (A), the great ground
(316) swell of organic habit, and mental sameness; class-recognition (a), covering the wide objective side, the contents subject to assimilation in classes; and absolute recognition (<math>&alpha</math>), the refined adjustments in which present functional elements are paramount. The motor formula for attention, then, adds up these three elements, all of which are facts of attention, giving Att. = A + a + a.
Endnotes
- This is taken up in some detail in the chapter on Attention (Chap. XV.).
§ 3. Emotion and Sentiment [1]
Again, in the affective life we find evidence of the working of the imitative principle. Emotion we have seen to be, largely, in its qualitative marks, a revival product, a clustering, so to speak, of organic and muscular reverberations about revived elements of content. So the production of emotion depends upon the reinstatement, by association or action, of parts of the ideal copy system which it is the function of memory and association to build up and to preserve. This follows from what we have said in two earlier discussions, that on the nature of emotion, and that on the organic basis of memory and association.
There is, however, one class of emotions which show more clearly the fact that the framework of ideas to which emotion attaches is really a product of imitation; these are the sympathetic emotions. Sympathy may be called the imitative emotion par excellence. My child H. cried out when I pinched a bottle-cork in her fifth month, and wept in her twenty-second week at the sight of a picture of a man sitting
(317) weeping, with bowed head in his hands, and his feet held fast in stocks. [2] In such cases the presentation is assimilated to memory copies of personal suffering, and so calls out the motor attitudes of the emotions habitual to experiences of pleasure- or pain-giving objects. And the motor discharges, each time that they are repeated, become better defined and more telling upon consciousness.
In many cases, however, I think the associative order in the sympathetic emotions is the reverse of this. The sight of the expression of emotion in another stimulates similar attitudes directly in us, and this in turn is felt as the state which usually accompanies such a reaction. The two eases of sympathy in my child, given above, illustrate the truth of both these accounts.
The sympathetic emotion, in fact, shows the 'circular' form of reaction. The pain-suggesting presentation is itself the copy which tends to bring about appropriate attitudes in the person having it. And all emotion has the same origin as this. The 'expression' of fear, for example, is a reinstatement of motor and organic disturbances which were, first of all, utility reactions upon a stimulation. But all utility reactions upon a stimulation are simply those elements, in a larger diffused 'excess' discharge, which were selected just because they were fitted to maintain or avoid, as the case may be, a particular kind of stimulation. So just in so far as the position is valid that all adapted movements are illustrations of the fundamental vital adaptations represented by reaching-out and drawing-in movements, just so far all the revivals of them, which break into consciousness as emotion, are imitative in their origin.
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There are, further, two or three special illustrations of this function of imitation in
the genesis of emotion so clear in the making, in children, that I shall briefly
trace them. First let us consider the sense of self, with its remarkable group of
emotions.
I have described in an earlier place the kind of responses which infants make in the presence of persons, and the main facts may be here recalled. We have seen that one of the most striking tendencies of the very young child in its responses to its environment is the tendency to recognize differences of personality. It responds to what I have called 'suggestions of personality.' As early as the second month, it distinguishes its mother's or nurse's touch in the dark. It learns characteristic methods of holding, taking up, patting, kissing, etc., and adapts itself, by a marvellous accuracy of protestation or acquiescence, to these personal variations. Its associations of personality come to be of such importance that for a long time its happiness or misery depends upon the presence of certain kinds of 'personality-suggestion.' It is quite a different thing from the child's behaviour towards things which are not persons. Things get to be, with some few exceptions which are involved in the direct gratification of appetite, more and more unimportant; things get subordinated to regular treatment or reaction. But persons become constantly more important, as uncertain and dominating agents of pleasure and pain. The fact of movement by persons and its effects on the infant seem to be the most important factor in this peculiar influence; later the voice gets to stand for a person's presence, and at last the face and its expressions equal the person, in all his attributes.
I think this distinction between persons and things, between agencies and objects, is the child's very first step toward a sense of the qualities which distinguish persons.
(319) The sense of uncertainty or lack of confidence grows stronger and stronger in its dealings with persons -- an uncertainty contingent upon the moods, emotions, nuances of expression, and shades of treatment, of the persons around it. A person stands for a group of experiences quite unstable in its prophetic as it is in its historical meaning. This we may, for brevity of expression, assuming it to be first in order of development, call the ' projective stage' [3] in the growth of the personal consciousness, which is-so important an element in social emotion.
Further observation of children shows that the instrument of transition from such a 'projective' to a subjective sense of personality, is the child's active bodily self, and the method of it is the principle of imitation. As a matter of fact, accommodation by actual muscular imitation does not arise in most children until about the seventh month, so utterly organic is the child before this, and so great is the impetus of its congenital instincts and tendencies. But when the organism is ripe, by reason of cerebral development, for the enlargement of its active range by new accommodations, then he begins to be dissatisfied with 'projects,' with contemplation, and so starts on his career of imitation. And of course he imitates persons. Persons have become, by all his business with them and theirs with him, his interesting objects, the source of his weal or woe, his uncertain factors. And further, persons are bodies which move, and among these bodies which move, which have certain projective attributes, as already described, a very peculiar and interesting one is his own body. It has connected with it certain intimate features which all others lack. Besides the inspection of hand and foot,
(320) by touch and sight, he has experiences in his consciousness which are in all cases connected with this body? -- strains? stresses, resistances, pains, etc., -- an inner felt series matching the outer presented series. But it is only when a new kind of experience arises which we call effort -- a set opposition to strain, stress, resistance, pain, an experience which arises, I think, first as imitative effort -- that there comes that great line of cleavage in his experience which indicates the rise of volition, and which separates off the series now first really subjective. Persistent imitation with effort is the typical case of explicit volition, and the first germinating nucleus of self-hood over against object-hood. Situations before accepted simply, are now set forward, aimed at, wrought; and in the fact of aiming, working, the fact of agency, which we have found to arise with the child's realization of the possible capriciousness of character, is the nascent sense of subject.[4]
The subject sense, then, is an actuating sense. What has formerly been 'projective' now becomes 'subjective.' The associates of other personal bodies, the attributes which made them different from things, are now attached to his own body with the further peculiarity of actuation. This we may call the subjective stage in the growth of the self-notion. It rapidly assimilates to itself all the other elements by which the child's own body differs in his experience from other active bodies, -- the passive inner series of pains, pleasures, strains, etc. The self suffers as well as acts. All get set over against lifeless things, and against other bodies which act, indeed, but whose
(321) actions do not contribute to his own sense of actuation or of suffering.
Again, it is easy to see what now happens. The child's subject sense goes out by a kind of return dialectic, which is really simply a second case of assimilation, to illuminate these other persons. The project of the earlier period is now lighted up, claimed, clothed on with the raiment of self-hood, by analogy with the subjective. The projective becomes ejective; that is, other people's bodies, says the child to himself, have experiences in them such as mine has. They are also me's: let them be assimilated to my me copy. This is the third stage; the ejective, or 'social' self, is born. [5]
The ego and the alter are thus born together. Both are crude and unreflective, largely organic, an aggregate of sensations, prime among which are efforts, pushes, strains, physical pleasures and pains. And the two get purified and clarified together by this twofold reaction between project and subject, and between subject and eject. My sense of myself grows by imitation of you, and my sense of yourself grows in terms of my sense of myself. Both ego and alter are thus essentially social; each is a socius, and each is an imitative creation. So for a long time the child's sense of self includes too much. The circumference of the notion is too wide. It includes the infant's mother, and little brother, and nurse, m a literal sense; for they are what he thinks of and aims to act like, by imitating, when he thinks of himself. To be separated from his mother is to lose a part of himself, as much so as to be separated from a hand or foot. And he is dependent for his growth directly upon these sugges-
(322)-tions which come in for imitation from his personal milieu. [6]
It will be seen by readers of R. Avenarius,[7] that the two stages of this development correspond to the two stages in his process of Introjection, whereby the 'hypothetical' (personal-organic) element of the naturlichen Weltbegriff is secured. Avenarius finds, from analytical and anthropological points of view, a process of 'attribution,' reading-in (Einlegung), by which a consciousness comes to interpret certain peculiarities attaching to those items in its experience which represent organisms and afterwards persons. The second stage is that whereby these peculiarities get carried back and attached to its own organism (Selbsteinlegung), and recognized as 'subjective' (sensations, perceptions, thoughts), in both organisms, over against the regular 'objective' elements contained in the rest of the world experience.
This general doctrine of Avenarius finds better justification than he gives it, I think, from the genetic sphere, into which he does not go. The two phenomena, 'personality suggestion' and 'imitation,' supply just the support for a revised doctrine of 'Introjection.' First comes what I have called, in what precedes, the 'projective' stage of the self-notion. It is the stage in which the infant gets 'personality suggestions.' It is simply the infant's way of getting 'more copy ' of a peculiar kind from the personal element in its objective surroundings. The second stage is secured by imita-
(323)-tion. The child reproduces the copy thus obtained, consisting of the physical signs' and? through them? of the mental accompaniments. Here the imitation of emotional expressions has its great influence. By this reproduction it 'interprets' its projects as subjective, in itself, and then refers them back to the 'other person' again, with all the gain of this interpretation. Avenarius, as far as I have been able to discover, has no means of passing from the first to the second stage, from project to subject. He speaks [8] of a certain confusion (Verwechselung) of the projective experience (T-Erfahrung) with the remaining personal elements in consciousness (M-Erfahrung): but what the true leading-thread into this 'confusion' and out of it is, he does not note. This is just what I claim it is the function of imitation to do; it supplies the bridge with two reaches. It enables me -- the child -- to pass from my experience of what you are, to an interpretation of what I am; and then from this fuller sense of what I am, back to a fuller knowledge of what you are. [9]
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Further, this process of taking in elements from the social world by imitation and giving
them out again by a reverse process of invention (for such the sequel proves invention to
be: the modified way in which I put things together in reading the elements which I get
from nature and other men, back into nature and other men again) -- this process never
stops. We never outgrow imitation, nor our social obligation to it. Our sense of self is
constantly growing richer and fuller as we understand others better, -- as we get into
social co-operation with them, -- and our understanding of them is in turn enriched by the
additions which our own private experience makes to the lessons which we learn from them.
These and other aspects of social emotion, which come to mind in connection with this
suggestive topic, are reserved. [10]
I think some light falls on the growth of ethical feeling, also, from the psychology of imitation, although I must again disclaim adequacy of treatment. The two principles, habit and imitative accommodation, seem to get application on this higher plane: the plane which is the theatre of the rise of moral sentiment. Moral sentiment arises evidently around acts and attitudes of will. It is accordingly to be expected that the account of the genesis of volition will throw some light upon the conditions of the rise of conscience. So if it be true that present character is the deposit of all former reactions of whatever kind, and that what we call will is a general term for our concrete acts of volition, and further that volition represents a co-ordination of tendencies, then according as these tendencies are suggestions from other persons, on the one hand, and represent partial expressions of one's own personal character, on the other hand, there arises a division within that sense of voluntary agency which is the germ of the notion of self. Your suggestion to me may con-
(325)-flict with my desire; my desire may conflict with my own present sympathy. Self meets self, so to speak. The self of accommodation, imitation, the self that learns, collides with the self of habit, of character, the self that seeks to dominate. It is no longer a matter of simple habit versus simple suggestion, as is the case in infancy, before the self gets the degree of complexity which constitutes it a voluntary agent, as a later chapter shows. It is now that form of habit which is personal agency, coming into conflict with that form of suggestion which is also personal to me as representing my social self. Your example is powerful to me intrinsically; not because it is abstractly good or evil, but because it represents a part of myself, inasmuch as I have become what I am in part through my sympathy with you and imitation of you. So your injunctions to me bring out a difference of motor attitude between what is socially responsive in me, in a sense public, and that which is relatively me alone, my private self.
When I come to a new moral situation, therefore, my state is this, in each case -- and we shall see as we go on that it is yet more: I am in a condition of relative equilibrium, or balance of two factors, my personal or habitual self, and my social suggestive self. Your wife announces to you that you are to go to a reception given by Mr. A. 'Hang Mr. A !' is your first reply -- that of your habitual private self. But your wife says, " Some one of the family should be there, and besides I want to go." This is an appeal to your family, public, social self in its broad sense, supplemented by an appeal to your sympathetic, narrower, conjugal self. The new decision which you make tends to destroy this equilibrium by reinforcing your 'copy' and its influence in your character, on one side or the other, and so to lead you out for further habit or for new social adaptations.
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And now on this basis comes a new mental movement which seems to me to involve a further
development of the imitative motif -- a development which substitutes warmth and
life for the horrible coldness and death of that view which identifies voluntary morality
with submission to a 'word of command.' The child, it is true, very soon comes across that
most impressive thing in its moral environment which we call authority; and acquires that
most responsive thing in our moral equipment which we call obedience. He acquires
obedience in one of two ways, or both: by suggestion, or by reward and punishment. The way
of suggestion is the higher; because it proceeds by gradual lessons in accommodation,
until the habit of regularity in conduct is acquired, in opposition to the capriciousness
of his own reactions. It is also the better way because it sets before the child in an
object lesson an example of that stability and lawfulness which it is the end of obedience
to foster. Yet the way of punishment is good and necessary. Punishment is nature's way;
she inflicts the punishment first, and afterwards nurses the insight by which the
punishment comes to be understood. A child's capricious movement may bring a pain which
represents all the organic growth of the race; and so when we punish a child's capricious
conduct, we are letting fall upon him the pain which represents all the social and ethical
growth of the race. But by whatever method, -- suggestion or punishment, -- the object is
the same: to preserve the child, until he reams from his own habit the insight which is
necessary to his own salvation through intelligent submission.
But whether obedience comes by suggestion or by punishment, it has this genetic value: it leads to another refinement in the sense of self, at first 'projective,' then subjective. The child finds himself stimulated constantly to
(327) deny his impulses, his desires, even his irregular sympathies, by conforming to the will of another. This other represents a regular, systematic, unflinching, but reasonable personality -- still a person, but a very different person from the child's own. In the analysis of 'personality suggestion,' we found this stage of the child's apprehension of persons -- his sense of the regularity of personal character in the midst of the capriciousness that before this stood out in contrast to the regularity of mechanical movement in things. There are extremes of indulgence, the child learns, which even the grandmother does not permit; there are extremes of severity from which even the cruel father draws back. Here, in this dawning sense of the larger limits which set barriers to personal freedom, is the 'copy' forming, which is his personal authority or law. It is 'projective,' because he cannot understand it, cannot anticipate it, cannot find it in himself. And it is only by imitation that he is to reproduce it, and so arrive at a knowledge of what he is to understand it to be. So it is a 'copy for imitation.' It is its aim, -- so may the child say to himself, -- and should be mine, -- if I am awake to it, -- to have me obey it, act like it, think like it, be like it in all respects. It is not I, but I am to become it. Here is my ideal self, my final pattern, my 'ought' set before me. My parents and teachers are good because, with all their differences from one another, they yet seem to be alike in their acquiescence to this law. Only in so far as I get into the habit of being and doing like them in reference to it, get my character moulded into conformity with it, only so far am I good, And so, like all other imitative functions, it teaches its lesson only by stimulating to action. I must succeed in doing -- he finds out, as he grows older and begins to reflect upon right and wrong -- if I would understand. But as I thus progress in doing, I forever find new patterns set for me; and so my ethical insight
(328) must always find its profoundest expression in that yearning which anticipates, but does not overtake? the ideal. [11]
My sense of moral ideal, therefore, is my sense of a possible perfect, regular will, taken over in me, in which the personal and the social self -- my habits and my social calls -- are brought completely into harmony; the sense of obligation in me, in each case, is a sense of lack of harmony -- a sense of the actual discrepancies between my various concrete thoughts of self. To pursue my commonplace illustration, your wife adds to the reasons for your attending the reception of Mr. A., this one: 'And besides, you ought to go out more.' This is the profoundest reason of all; not because it has in it the word 'ought,' merely, but because it makes appeal to the ideal self, before the law of which all the earlier claims have their lesser or greater value.
And then, once more, the thought of this ideal self, made ejective, as it must be by the dialectic of this germinating social sense, put out of and beyond me -- this is embodied in the moral sanctions of society, and finally in God. [2]
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The value of the ejective sense of moral self is seen in the great sensitiveness we have
to the supposed opinions of others about our conduct. It is an essential and constant
ingredient. From the account given of the rise of the sense of obligation, we should
expect the two very subtle aspects of this sensitiveness which are actually present.
First, in general, our dread and fear before another's fancied opinion is in direct
proportion to our own sense of self-condemnation. Consciousness is clear on this point. It
must be so if it is true that our sense of self-condemnation is of social origin, $.e.
arises from our imitative response to the well-sanctioned opinions and commands of others.
But second, the intelligent observation of the opinions of others, and the suffering of
the penalties of social law, react back constantly to purify and elevate the standard
which one sets himself, just as they originally stimulated its rise. There is, therefore,
a constant progress through the action and reaction of society upon the individual and the
individual upon society. And religious sanctions get much of their force, it seems to me,
in just this same way.
Josiah Royce [13] distinguishes between the two earlier phases of self which have been pointed out, but does not develop the third. Yet he indicates clearly and with emphasis the twofold element of conflict under which the moral sense develops. The ordinary accounts on the natural history side, from Darwin [14] to the present, simply describe a conflict in consciousness between sympathy and selfishness. This fails to do justice to the 'law' element, which moralists justly emphasize, in the genesis of morality. It gives no standard
(330) of values, no scale for the estimation of the worths of the impulses which represent temporary and changing selves. I should go farther than Royce does in emphasizing this element, believing as I do that there is no full sense of oughtness until the child gets the basis of a habit, which not only calls upon him to deny his private selfishness in favour of sympathy, but also his private sympathies in favour of reasonable regularity reamed through submission. The opposition, that is, between my regular personal ideal and all else, -- whether it be the regularity of my selfish habit or the irregularity of my generous responses, -- this is the essential condition of the rise of obligation. And it is in so far as this ought-feeling goes out beyond the copy elements drawn from actual instances of action, and anticipates better or more ideal action, that the antithesis between the 'ought' and the 'is' gets psychological justification.
The question, finally, whether obedience is a case of imitation, [15] is a matter of words. It is imitation, in the large sense of the term. As far as the copy set in the 'word of command' is reproduced, the reaction is imitative. A child cannot obey a command to do what he does not know how to do. The circumstances of his doing it, however, the forcible presentation of the copy by another person, this seems only to add additional elements to the copy itself, not to be in any sense an interference, or a prevention of the due operation of imitation. The child has in view, when he obeys, not only the thing he is to do, but the circumstances -- the consequences, the punishment, the reward -- and these also he seeks to reproduce or to avoid. On the other hand, it may well be asked whether all of our voluntary imitations and actions generally, are not, in a sense, cases of obedience; for
(331) it is only when an idea gets some suggestive force, or sanctions, or social setting' that it is influential in bringing us out for its reproduction. Of course this is only further play on definitions; but it serves to indicate the real elements in the situation. When Tonnies says that obedience comes first and imitation afterwards, he refers to voluntary imitation of a particular action which the child has already learned to do. But the whole theory of his learning must go before, and it could hardly be said that the child learned to do a thing at first simply by being commanded to do it.
Endnotes
- The balance of this chapter, and the next (Chap. XII.), give en resume positions which
are developed as topics of independent and practical value in the volume, Social and
Ethical Interpretations. They are given here under the general head of imitation, in
order to make passably complete the applications of the imitative principle; in this way
also the treatment of the other volume is rendered somewhat less theoretical.
- This is, I own, a remarkably early recognition of a pictorial rendering of expression; but I have the date recorded. The picture will be found on page 227 of Bissell's Biblical Antiquities. Darwin reported 'sympathy' in his child, six months and eleven days old, Mind, II., p. 289.
- See the detailed observations and analysis of these 'personal projects,' above, Chap. VI., §§ 3, 6. The use of the word 'project' is justified in the earlier connection.
- It is in exhibition of this new sense of agency, or power over its own actions, with their suggestiveness to others, that the child's first conscious 'lies' seem to appear; and these lies are generally of great value as being the means of bringing out, in its earliest forms, the originality and invention of the boy or girl. Cases are given in the chapter on 'Invention' in Social and Ethical Interpretations.
- I think an adequate apprehension of the distinctions conveyed by the three words 'projective,' 'subjective,' and 'ejective,' would do much to banish the popular 'psychologist's fallacy.'
- Professor Josiah Royce has expressed, in an article in the Philosophical Review, November, 1894, a view of the growth of the self-notion in the child's consciousness in close agreement, in many points, with this; and I take pleasure in referring to his development as similar to the detailed statement of my other volume. My present text appeared, in much the same words as now, in Mind for January, 1894. Royce's paper is now to be found in his volume, Studies in Good and Evil.
- Kritik der reinen Erfahrung, and also Der menschliche Weltbegriff.
- Der menschliche Weltbegriff, § 51, p. 30, and § 95, p. 49.
- In the use of the two facts, 'personality-suggestion' and 'imitation,' therefore, my development is unindebted to Avenarius, who writes from the point of view of race history and criticism. I do not adopt the word 'introjection,' since it covers too much. My word 'project' signifies the child's sense of others' personality before it has a sense of its own. The rest proceeds by imitation. This distinction of method raises a further question which, as I have already said (Chap. I.), should be carefully discussed in all problems for which a genetic solution is sought, i.e. how far the genetic process itself in the individual's growth has become a matter of race habit or instinct. That is, granted a process of origin correctly depicted, to what extent must we say that each new individual of the race passes through it in all its details? The origin of impulse and instinct illustrate the effects of selection in abbreviating these processes and starting the individual from points of higher vantage. I am not prepared to say that an isolated child, for example, might not get a crude self-notion (as he might learn to speak somehow) if deprived of all social suggestions; but that fact would be subject to explanation as part of the ability to learn which is the outcome, on a large scale, of the very genetic process which it appears to supersede.
- See, however, Chap. XII Cf. the later work.
- A further important aid to the child in this development is his observation of the way
that other people behave to one another in his presence.
On the nature of 'ideals' and the rise of conceptual emotion, in which, in my view, the sense of ideals, as being ideal, really consists, see my Handbook of Psychology, Vol. II., Chap. IX., carried further in Thought and Things, Vol. I., Chap. X., § 8.
- I can only mention here Hegel's striking treatment of the genetic development of the ethical and religious sense (Philosophy of Mind, § II.), altogether the best ever written, in my opinion, and Adam Smith's remarkable doctrine of the social element in the moral sense, covered by the term 'sympathy' (in Theory of the Moral Sentiments). Many facts give support to Hegel's intuitions. On the distinctively social function of imitation, Tarde and Sighele both dwell in the works named, the latter endeavouring to lay the foundations of a science of 'collective psychology.' A similar task is set in my later volume. As to religious emotion, it is astonishing enough that the law of imitation should reach so far as to touch those mysterious 'ideas of reason' which have so long baffled metaphysics. But -- why should it not? Is not the cry 'Anthropomorphism!' as old as Xenophanes? And is it not a plea for or against imitation ?
- International Journal of Ethics, July, 1893, p. 430.
- Descent of Man, Part 1., Chap. III.
- See discussion by Tarde, loc. cit., and Paulhan, Revue Philosophique, August, 1890, p. 179; also Tonnies, Philosophische Monalshefte, 1893, p. 308
