Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/532

516 while its perceptive consciousness is slowly clearing, gets a notion of something that has many important elements in common with what you and I now call our external world. Further, I do not doubt that a beast of prey, which is comparatively unsocial, and which is still highly intelligent, not only responds, as we see it doing, to our physical world, but also, in some fashion, is conscious of the response as involving many elements of what you and I call the reality of the outer world. But now what I affirm is, that the idea of a real external world, such as the infant has in the first three or four months of life, or such as the extremely unsocial beast of prey may keep for a life-time, must not in the least be confounded with the idea that you and I, ever since we learned to converse freely with our fellows, have possessed of the meaning of externality. The infantile idea of externality, the unsocial animal's consciousness of something existent beyond him, must at best be related to our present notion of externality as instrumental music is related to articulate speech,—e.g., as the birdsongs of the Waldweben in Wagner's "Siegfried" are related to the articulate warnings that the hero later overhears when he has tasted the dragon's heart and has come to comprehend the tongues of the birds. We often say that instrumental music is full of meaning; but still, as Lotze observes, Die Musik ist kein Denken. Well, just so, the infant playing with its fists in the field of vision, or making its first efforts at grasping, is indeed meaning to deal with what we call the external world. But it has as yet no such thought of externality as we have, and it can have no such thought; for our notion of externality involves one great element which cannot be present to the consciousness of the infant until the gradually evolving social consciousness has reached a decidedly advanced stage. And this element is the one which is furnished to us by our ever present assurance that our external world exists for other minds beside our own private mind, i.e., for the minds of our fellows with whom we stand in social relations.