pendence when under the master's sway, and not surrender themselves to blind subjection.

To adopt Hegel's system again to-day without qualifications, after so many tremendous revolutions in life, would be a thoroughly artificial restoration. And all such restorations, seeing that they subordinate their own time to one which is alien to it, are wont to be extremely unfruitful. Nor do they harmonise well with the deeprooted conviction of thought, according to which all reality is an unceasing, onward-streaming of life. May the students of to-day, therefore, separate in Hegel the transitory from the intransitory, may they work out clearly and courageously those elements in his thought which are independent of his time and are calculated to further to-day the aspirations of high creative endeavor, and may they free themselves by searching criticism from everthing that was either at the beginning insufficient or has been proved by subsequent developments to be insufficient. It is the mark of all really great achievements and great men to be able to stand such winnowing, and, when everything has been rejected, to remain great still. And we believe that Hegel, too, can stand this test.

RUDOLPH EUCKEN.

JENA.

As

THE GENESIS OF SOCIAL "INTERESTS.”

S AN INTRODUCTION to what is to follow, I may be allowed to quote a passage from an earlier work1 in which is given the theory of the rise of the notion of self, on which the point of the present slight paper rests.

"One of the most remarkable tendencies of the very young child in its responses to its environment is the tendency to recognise differences of personality. It responds to what I have called 'suggestions of personality.'. . . I think this distinction be tween persons and things, between agencies and objects, is the child's very first step toward a sense of the qualities which distinguish persons. The sense of uncertainty or lack of confidence grows stronger and stronger in its dealings with persons—an uncertainty contingent upon the moods, emotions, nuances of expression, and shades of treatment, of the persons around it. A person stands for a group of experiences quite unstable in its prophetic as it is in its historical meaning. This we may, for brevity of expression, assuming it to be first in order of development, call the 'projective stage' in the growth of the personal consciousness, which is so important an element in social emotion.

"Further observation of children shows that the instrument of transition from such a 'projective' to a subjective sense of personality is the child's active bodily self, and the method of it is the principle of imitation. As a matter of fact, accommodation by actual muscular imitation does not arise in most children until about the seventh month, so utterly organic is the child before this, and so great is the impetus of its inherited instincts and tendencies. But when the organism is ripe, by reason of cerebral development, for the enlargement of its active range by new accommodations, then he begins to be dissatisfied with 'projects,' with contemplation, and so starts on his career of imitation. And of course he imitates persons. .. But it is only when a new kind of experience arises which we call effort-a set opposition to strain, stress, resistance, pain, an experience which arises, I think

1 Mental Development in the Child and the Race: Methods and Processes (Macmillan, 2d ed., 1895). PP. 335 ff.

first as imitative effort that there comes that great line of cleavage in his experience which indicates the rise of volition, and which separates off the series now first really subjective. . . . The subject sense, then, is an actuating sense. What has formerly been projective' now becomes 'subjective.' The associates of other personal bodies, the attributes which made them different from things, are now attached to his own body with the further peculiarity of actuation. This we may call the subjective stage in the growth of the self-notion. . . . Again, it is easy to see what now happens. The child's subject sense goes out by a kind of return dialectic, which is really simply a second case of assimilation, to illuminate these other persons. The project of the earlier period is now lighted up, claimed, clothed on with the raiment of self-hood, by analogy with the subjective. The projective becomes ejective; that is, other people's bodies, says the child to himself, have experiences in them such as mine has. They are also me's: let them be assimilated to my me copy. This is the third stage; the ejective, or 'social' self, is born.

"The ego and the alter are thus born together. Both are crude and unreflective, largely organic, an aggregate of sensations, prime among which are efforts pushes, strains, physical pleasures and pains. And the two get purified and clarified together by this twofold reaction between project and subject, and between subject and eject. My sense of myself grows by imitation of you, and my sense of yourself grows in terms of my sense of myself. Both ego and alter are thus essentially social; each is a socius, and each is an imitative creation. So for a long time the child's sense of self includes too much. The circumference of the notion is too wide. It includes the infant's mother, and little brother, and nurse, in a literal sense; for they are what he thinks of and aims to act like by imitating, when he thinks of himself. To be separated from his mother is to lose a part of himself, as much so as to be separated from a hand or foot. And he is dependent for his growth directly upon these suggestions which come in for imitation from his personal milieu."

The outcome serves to afford a point of departure for the view which we may entertain of the person as he appears to himself in society. If it be true, as all the evidence goes to show, that what the person thinks of himself is a pole or terminus at one end of an opposition in the sense of personality generally, and that the other pole or terminus is the thought he has of the other person, the alter, then it is impossible to take his thought of himself at any time and say that in thinking of himself he is not essentially thinking of the alter also. What he calls himself now is in large measure an in

1In isolating the "thought elements" in the self, I do not, of course, deny the organic sensation and feeling elements; but, from the social point of view, the latter are unavailing.

corporation of elements that at an earlier period of his thought of personality, he called some one else. The acts now possible to himself, and so used by him to describe himself in thought to himself, were formerly only possible to the other; but by imitating that other he has brought them over to the opposite pole, and found them applicable with a richer meaning, and a modified value, as true predicates of himself also. If he thinks of himself in any particular past time, he can single out what was then he, as opposed to what has since become he; and the residue, the part of him that has since become he, that was then only thought of-if it was thought of as an attribute of personality at all—as attaching to some one whom he was acquainted with. For example, last year I thought of my friend W. as a man who had great skill on the bicycle and who wrote readily on the typewriter; my sense of his personality included these accomplishments, in what I have called a "projective" way. My sense of myself did not have these elements, except as my thought of my normal capacity to acquire delicate movements was comprehensive. But now, this year, I have learned to do both these things. I have taken the elements of W's personality formerly recognised, and by imitative learning, brought them over to myself. I now think of myself as one who rides a "wheel" and writes on a "machine." But I am able to think of myself thus only as my thought includes, in a way now called "subjective," the personal accomplishments of W., and with him of the more or less generalised alter which in this illustration we have taken him to stand for. So the truth we now learn is this: that each and all of the particular marks which I now call mine, when I think of myself, has had just this origin; I have first found it in my social environment, and by reason of my social and imitative disposition, have transferred it to myself by trying to act as if it were true of me, and so coming to find out that it is true of me. And further, all the things I hope to learn, to acquire, to become, all— if I think of them in a way to have any clear thought of my possible future-are now, before I acquire them, simply elements of my thought of others, of the social alter, or of what considered gen erally we may call the "socius."

But we should also note that what has been said of the one pole of this dialectical relation, the pole of self, is equally true of the other also the pole represented by the other person, the alter. What do I have in mind when I think of him as a person? Evidently I must construe him, a person, in terms of what I think of myself, the only person whom I know in the intimate way we call "subjective." I cannot say that my thought of my friend W. is exhausted by the movements of wheel-riding or typewriting; nor of any collection of such acts, considered for themselves. Back of it all there is the attribution of the very fact of subjectivity which I have myself. And the subjectivity of him-it is just like that of me, to the degree to which I have any picture of it at all. I constantly enrich the actions which were at first his alone, and then became mine by imitation of him, with the meaning, the rich subjective value, the interpretation in terms of private ownership, which my appropriation of them in the first instance from him, has enabled me to make. So my thought of any other man-or all other men-is, to the richest degree, that which I understand of myself, together with the uncertainties of interpretation which my further knowledge of his acts enables me to conjecture. I think him rational, emotional, volitional, as I am; and the details of his more special characteristics, as far as I understand them at all, I weave out of possible actions of my own, when circumstances call me out in similar ways. But there is always the sense that there is more to understand about him; for as we have seen, he constantly, by the diversities between us which I do not yet comprehend, sets. me new actions to imitate for my own growth.

So the dialectic may be read thus: my thought of self is in the main, as to its character as a personal self, filled up with my thought of others, distributed variously as individuals; and my thought of others, as persons, is mainly filled up with myself. In other words, but for certain minor distinctions in the filling, and for certain compelling distinctions between that which is immediate and that which is objective, the self and the alter are to our thought one and the same thing.