196 ADAPTATION AND PROGRESS 



attract attention and call out the impulse to imitate. The child imitates the 

 acts of persons. 



Thus he is admitted to the inside of the other's mind, as it were, and dis- 

 covers that bodies are not, as minds are, centers of feeling, will, and knowl- 

 edge. He makes very quickly the discovery that his own personality is 

 likewise two-sided; that he, too, is a mind on the inside, and that that which 

 others see of him on the outside is not the mind, but merely the physical 

 person. He goes through a series of distinguishable processes of interpreta- 

 tion, all worked out in detail by the psychologist, which are of momentous 

 significance for the evolution of personality. 



Put very briefly and untechnically, these processes are in outline as fol- 

 lows: 



The mind of others is at first to the child the source of capricious and 

 mysterious actions and events. It is located simply in the physical person 

 of others: it is then " projective " — simply " projected " into the other 

 person, nurse, mother, or whoever it be. 



But this sort of presence is then taken over into himself, by imitation, and 

 illustrated in those more intimate experiences which are peculiar to his own 

 mental life — pains, efforts, emotional crises, etc. These become the means by 

 which he interprets the " projective " characteristics of others. Their inner 

 life is understood in terms of his own. The whole set of events, having per- 

 sonal, and not merely physical or bodily significance, becomes " subjective "; 

 it is peculiar to the " subject," which is now for the first time differentiated 

 with some clearness from things. 



This is followed again by a return movement. The subjective experiences, 

 — say a series of violent efforts, or a violent pain, — are in analogous circum- 

 stances read into others also. When the emotional expression warrants it, 

 or when cries or gestures indicate it, the subjective is made over to other 

 persons; it is " ejected " into the individuals of the immediate entourage. 



Other persons are thought of then in just the same terms as the private 

 self; and the private self in the same terms as other persons; it is impossible 

 to distinguish them, so far as the meaning in subjective terms is concerned. 

 The thought of self is of a larger self which includes personalities in general, 

 and the different persons, in all that which is not singular or characteristic of 

 each, are fundamentally the same. 1 



This dialectic of personal growth has its analogue in the give- 

 and-take process continually going on between the individual and 

 society. " We see that society," says Baldwin, " stands as a 

 quasi-personality under a two-fold relation of give-and-take 

 to the individuals who make up the social group. It is related 

 to these individuals in two ways: first, as having itself become 

 what it is by the absorption of the thoughts, struggles, sentiments, 

 co-operations, etc., of individuals; second, as itself finding its new 



1 The Individual and Society, pp. 18-26. 



