Page:Philosophical Review Volume 7.djvu/419

405 a certain psychical process, not to content-identity. It is conceivable that a thorough analysis of the conditions and nature of effort would reveal this process as having a social import, but this Mr. Baldwin does not give beyond trying to attach effort to imitation—thus coming back to that, after all, as the only guarantee of sociality.

Hence the 'subjective' self is still non-social and some way must be found to socialize it. Mr. Baldwin tries to work this out along at least three different and incompatible lines. One has already been referred to: others imitate in turn. Of this, nothing more need be said. Mr. Baldwin's allusion to parrots and tuning forks seems to me quite sufficient (p. 479). The second is that the agent does not feel sure of himself, does not complete his thought of himself, until his self-thought has received the acceptance and confirmation of others an acceptance which he eagerly attempts to get, the need for the integration of himself being so great. (See the discussion, pp. 112-120: the child's sense of reality "involves social confirmation," etc.) This means, in turn, that the child's thought is already, tentatively and partially at least, social, and that it enacts itself to secure completion by social confirmation or else revision and criticism. It is the precise counterpart of the discussion already referred to in which 'particularization' is treated not as merely personal, or private, but as a certain construing of a social situation. I am far from objecting to this doctrine; but we must note, in the first place, that it now assumes society as given in order to explain the social nature of the individual, and, in the second, that it is in flat contradiction not merely to what is said about the subjective sense of personality elsewhere, but to other statements regarding the ejective process itself. While here the ejective process is the fulfilment, the guarantee of the child's social nature, at other places (pp. 19-20) the ejective self is the habitual; it "despises" others, practices superior activities upon them, is "unsocial, aggressive, and self-centred." (See also p. 231.) This is the legitimate, the only consistent, development of that view which regards the 'subjective' self as itself barely subjective, or exclusively individual. To read this out, to act this out, would, of course, be to assert it as against others, and when Mr. Baldwin wants to account for the 'egoistic' self, this is his basis of explanation, while at other times the ejective process is that of generalization which extends the social content.

But the third path followed is an attempted fusion of these two. According to it, the sense of personality at first is general; it is unspecified as regards reference to ego and alter, and is afterwards differentiated. (This would seem to mean that personality at first projective, is '