Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/557

541 fail for a while to comprehend my fellows, I begin to wonder whether, after all, I am not myself mad. Self-confidence is always a dependent affair. We can only choose whether our dependence shall be rational or capricious. Self-consciousness needs constantly renewed draughts of that water of life, the imitated authority of other minds. Your vainest man is the one who, despite his explicit independence of the opinions of others, can least bear the shock of criticism from his fellow. Your wisest man is the one who is most clearly aware of his dependence upon his fellows.

But to return to the order of development: The child that has begun to possess the social consciousness is for the first time in the presence of a supersensual reality. He has objects, viz., the desired ideas of other people,—objects which he continually hopes to win, to imitate, and so far as may be, through representative imitation, to possess. Yet these ideas, these objects, are now conceived as beyond him, and as existent apart from him, so that their esse and their percipi have parted company, as the esse and percipi of the objects of his world of possible private experience never would or could have done. Now, however, comes the factor that is decisive for his conception of the external world as such. Here is the place where appears a process substantially identical with what Avenarius, in the book called Der Menschliche Weltbegriff, calls the decidedly momentous and even fateful process of "Introjection"; only that I myself read this process in an order different from the order in which Avenarius states it.

At this point, namely, the child, imitating the unseen thoughts of his visible guide, finds himself and his guide alike imitating and so thinking about certain objects that seem to be present in the child's own visible and tangible world of permanent possibilities of sensation—viz., tools, playthings, animals, etc. The abstract expression of this still naïve