IX MIND AS AN ORGAN OF WHOLES 245 



to submit and swear fealty to the controlling power. Indeed 

 the purely individualist Self or mere individual is a figment 

 of abstraction. For the Self only comes to realisation and 

 consciousness of itself, not alone and in individual isolation 

 and separateness, but in society, among other selves with 

 whom it interacts in social intercourse. I would never 

 come to know myself and be conscious of my separate in- 

 dividual identity were it not that I become aware of others 

 like me: consciousness of other selves is necessary for con- 

 sciousness of self or self-consciousness. The individual 

 has therefore a social origin in experience. Nay, more, it 

 is through the use of the purely social instrument of language 

 that I rise above the mere immediacy of experience and 

 immersion in the current of my experience. Language 

 gives names to the items of my experience, and thus through 

 language they are first isolated and abstracted from the 

 continuous body of my experience. Through the naming 

 power of language, again, several items of experience can be 

 grouped together under one name, which becomes distinctive 

 of their general resemblances, in disregard of their minor 

 differences. In other words, the power of forming general 

 concepts becomes possible only through the social instrument 

 of language. Thus the entire developed apparatus of thought 

 with which I measure the universe and garner an untold 

 wealth of personal experience is not my individual equipment 

 and possession, but a socially developed instrument which I 

 share with the rest of my fellows. Nay, my very self, so 

 uniquely individual in appearance, is, as I have said, largely 

 a social construction, and rounded out of the social inter- 

 course and psychical interaction with my fellows. The 

 individual Self or Personality rests not on its individual 

 foundations but on the whole universe. Psychology con- 

 clusively proves that, and Holism but accentuates it by 

 tracing the individual to his sources in the whole. The 

 individual Self is not singular, springing from one root, so 

 to say. It combines an infinity of elements growing out of 

 the individual endowment and experience on the one hand 

 and the social tradition and experience on the other. All 



