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 hisown. 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 areturn 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. 
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. 
