Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/550

534 the structure, and all the essential traditions of your mother-tongue, and of every other language that you know, will at once vanish. In other words, as pure and naked private Ego, you will be speechless. Language, as you first learned it, was never for your consciousness, your independent invention. Always, even where you were actually original in speech, you were trying, at the outset, to speak as other people spoke. Well, now, nearly all our thinking, not only about the non-Ego, but also about the Ego, is notoriously carried on in language. I believe that there does unquestionably exist a wordless thought, although that, too, needs, as its support, imitatively acquired symbolic acts of another sort; but wordless thought aside, nearly all of our more abstract and mature thinking is done in language. Well, if so, this, I say, surely applies also to our thoughts about ourselves. Are these thoughts explicit, then they are very largely embodied in language which we have learned from others, and have first been taught by others to apply to ourselves. For example:—'I exist.' Yes, indeed; but how came I by this idea of existence? Should I have this idea, as such, in my consciousness, if I had not the word, or some equivalent symbol? And when I first learned the meaning of that symbol, I learned it by trying to imitate what I all the while took to be the thought of another man. Had I not been imitative, I should never have got the thought from him. He taught me to recognize what existence is. Later I learned, and again, probably, through social suggestion, say by reading Descartes, to apply that idea to myself. The question, of course, is not now of the certainty, but of the origin for me, of the thought 'I exist.' I insist: this thought I do, indeed, verify by my own inner reflection, but it first took its origin for me in social intercourse with my fellows. Had they never taught me that I exist, I should never have come to take note of the now so obvious fact. Just so with the still more derived and empirical ideas that make up my idea of myself as this particular person. 'I am a man'—yes, but what is a man? Have I not learned what a man is by observing my fellows, and by later accepting their