Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/559

543 by assenting or by declining to assent when we imitated it thus or thus, just as our fellows approve or condemn our efforts to imitate them, then the object would be itself a comrade. We should then regard it as a live thing, a mind. As a fact, however, physical objects remain unresponsive silent partners in this world of an always essentially social consciousness. We men together imitate them, but they remain indifferent to our concern.

Hence it is that we arrive at a dualistic conception of the external world. The social world consists of minds whose thoughts we seem to share when, by directly imitative gestures, or by the symbolically imitative devices of language, we give and take ideas, and get or give approval and disapproval. Thus, the social world consists of beings at once imitable and imitative or responsive. The external physical world consists of supposed beings that are defined (1) as external to us precisely as we are already known to be external to one another; but (2) it consists of imitable beings that are unresponsive and that do not imitate. Hence, dualism gets its view of external realities that are not minds. These are the 'things-in-themselves' of all dualistic theories of the universe. Of the nature of these external things we now know, on this level, only that that alone is relatively verifiable about them which is socially communicable. The knowably external in the physical world is, therefore, essentially that which you verify precisely as I describe it and vice versa. Hence, we get, indeed, even while we retain this dualistic position, a certain "Deduction of the Categories" which (within the sphere of this cruder sort of thinking) may well seem to supersede, or rather to fulfill, the Kantian deduction. As a fact, it is much rather a mere restatement in rational fullness of the true spirit of the Kantian deduction, when one seeks to apply Kant's thoughts to the world as viewed on this level of consciousness. In essence the Kantian unity of Apperception and the unity of Experience are nothing but the constantly presupposed unity of our social as distinct from private and