Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/556

540 are still full of an affected self-hood, just at the very points when he most nearly approaches self-consciousness. At one time he is 'mamma's boy,' and accordingly behaves sentimentally as such. Or again he becomes 'a big boy,' and struts imitatively. Or he wants pity, and then deliberately poses as a 'tired boy,' imitates weakness, is artificially babyish. When, however, he is wholly naïve, as when he suffers or is angry, then he simply drops all attempts at self-consciousness, and is busy, not with himself at all, but with the nearly immediate experience, i.e., with his pain or his passion. Then, to be sure, we observers talk of the narrow selfishness,—the egoism of childhood; but this egoism is now far from implying self-consciousness. I have dwelt perhaps too long on the child's case. What I want is to illustrate the essentially vicarious character of the primitive self-consciousness. Strange as the assertion seems, I am convinced that each one of us believed in the existence of other minds before he became conscious of his own mind as such. And for all our life I hold this to be true, namely, that we do not get at the existence of the minds of our fellows by an induction from our own individual case, nearly as much as we make use of precisely the reverse line of reasoning. I do not often say to myself when thinking of my fellows: 'Yonder people behave as I do, hence they must be alive as I am.' The normal social consciousness runs rather thus: 'When I imitate these people, when I get under the influence of their suggestions, listen receptively to their words, follow their gestures, conform to their customs, accept their authority, well, then I constantly get new ideas, and these new ideas are as such the revelations of yonder minds. But now, as this result proves, I am capable of getting these ideas. Hence I am as much a real person, as truly a thinker, as they are.' In this way it is that I explicitly attain my self-consciousness.

Our private self-consciousness, as a fact, needs this constant reassurance of its power to share the common intelligence, in order to support its own assurance of itself. When I utterly