Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/553

537 stage, must be of the vaguest. But it surely must feel somehow that here are most attractive objects, whose doings incite what we, the observers, call its own activities in such wise that the incited activities are observed ere long, and with great delight, to agree with the observed activities of the attractive objects themselves. But the activities imitated are not only interesting; they are, in general, for the beings who display them to the child, more or less intelligent activities. They are such activities as holding things up to be looked at or played with, and later, pointing out things, using tools, pronouncing the names of things, or putting things together or taking them apart in ways such as reveal the qualities of the things themselves. As the infant slowly learns to imitate, he, therefore, also learns much more than to imitate. The intelligent activities imitated become, in the very act of imitating them, more or less intelligible to the child. Through his imitations he gets ideas of things,—of the nature, for instance, of his playthings, or of the tools that he tries to employ,—ideas that alone he could never have got. Now I affirm that these new ideas of things which he gets as he consciously and lovingly imitates,—these intelligent and intelligible aspects which the activities imitated come to possess for him,—that all these, I say, are from the first for the child new ideas that he tends to refer to the perceived organisms of the people whom he imitated, and little, or not at all, to what we call himself. For these new ideas come to him as embodying the meaning, the intelligible value, the purport of the acts which he is taught to imitate. But these acts are the acts of the beings imitated. The new ideas, therefore, tend from the outset to be thought of as their ideas. And so the order of the growth of the child's knowledge that there are minds here about him, behind these faces, is substantially this: Here in his world he perceives fascinating beings. It is not needful to suppose that he perceives them explicitly as beings in what we call the external world. The distinction between outer and inner is still, at best, only half developed in his mind. But he at least perceives these things as facts imposed upon him; and he