Читать книгу: «Mind, Self & Society»

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Publisher: heptagon

Berlin 2013

ISBN: 978-3-934616-58-5

www.heptagon.de

The text was also published on the CD-ROM: »Sociological Classics, Berlin 2000.« The original book is: »George Herbert Mead: Mind, Self & Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviourist, Chicago 1934.«

PART I. THE POINT OF VIEW OF SOCIAL BEHAVIORISM
1. SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY AND BEHAVIORISM

SOCIAL psychology has, as a rule, dealt with various phases of social experience from the psychological standpoint of individual experience. The point of approach which I wish to suggest is that of dealing with experience from the standpoint of society, at least from the standpoint of communication as essential to the social order. Social psychology, on this view, presupposes an approach to experience from the standpoint of the individual, but undertakes to determine in particular that which belongs to this experience because the individual himself belongs to a social structure, a social order.

No very sharp line can be drawn between social psychology and individual psychology. Social psychology is especially interested in the effect which the social group has in the determination of the experience and conduct of the individual member. If we abandon the conception of a substantive soul endowed with the self of the individual at birth, then we may regard the development of the individual's self, and of his self-consciousness within the field of his experience, as the social psychologist's special interest. There are, then, certain phases of psychology which are interested in studying the relation of the individual organism to the social group to which it belongs, and these phases constitute social psychology as a branch of general psychology. Thus, in the study of the experience and behavior of the individual organism or self in its dependence upon the social group to which it belongs, we find a definition of the field of social psychology.

While minds and selves are essentially social products, products or phenomena of the social side of human experience, the physiological mechanism underlying experience is far from irrelevant – indeed is indispensable – to their genesis and existence; for individual experience and behavior is, of course, physiologically basic to social experience and behavior: the processes and mechanisms of the latter (including those which are essential to the origin and existence of minds and selves) are dependent physiologically upon the processes and mechanisms of the former, and upon the social functioning of these. Individual psychology, nevertheless, definitely abstracts certain factors from the situation with which social psychology deals more nearly in its concrete totality. We shall approach this latter field from a behavioristic point of view.

The common psychological standpoint which is represented by behaviorism is found in John B. Watson. The behaviorism which we shall make use of is more adequate than that of which Watson makes use. Behaviorism in this wider sense is simply an approach to the study of the experience of the individual from the point of view of his conduct, particularly, but not exclusively, the conduct as it is observable by others. Historically, behaviorism entered psychology through the door of animal psychology. There it was found to be impossible to use what is termed introspection. One cannot appeal to the animal's introspection, but must study the animal in terms of external conduct. Earlier animal psychology added an inferential reference to consciousness, and even undertook to find the point in conduct at which consciousness appears. This inference had, perhaps, varying degrees of probability, but it was one which could not be tested experimentally. It could be then simply dropped as far as science was concerned. It was not necessary for the study of the conduct of the individual animal. Having taken that behavioristic standpoint for the lower animals, it was possible to carry it over to the human animal.

There remained, however, the field of introspection, of experiences which are private and belong to the individual himself – experiences commonly called subjective. What was to be done with these? John B. Watson's attitude was that of the Queen in Alice in Wonderland – »Off with their heads!« – there were no such things. There was no imagery, and no consciousness. The field of so-called introspection Watson explained by the use of language symbols. These symbols were not necessarily uttered loudly enough to be heard by others, and often only involved the muscles of the throat without leading to audible speech. That was all there was to thought. One thinks, but one thinks in terms of language. In this way Watson explained the whole field of inner experience in terms of external behavior. Instead of calling such behavior subjective it was regarded as the field of behavior that was accessible only to the individual himself. One could observe his own movements, his own organs of articulation, where other persons could not normally observe them. Certain fields were accessible to the individual alone, but the observation was not different in kind; the difference lay only in the degree of accessibility of others to certain observations. One could be set up in a room by himself and observe something that no one else could observe. What a man observed in the room would be his own experience. Now, in this way something goes on in the throat or the body of the individual which no one else can observe. There are, of course, scientific instruments that can be attached to the throat or the body to reveal the tendency toward movement. There are some movements that are easily observable and others which can be detected only by the individual himself, but there is no qualitative difference in the two cases. It is simply recognized that the apparatus of observation is one that has various degrees of success. That, in brief, is the point of view of Watson's behavioristic psychology. It aims to observe conduct as it takes place, and to utilize that conduct to explain the experience of the individual without bringing in the observation of an inner experience, a consciousness as such.

There was another attack on consciousness, that of William James in his 1904 article entitled, »Does ›Consciousness‹ Exist?« James pointed out that if a person is in a room the objects of the interior can be looked at from two standpoints. The furniture, for instance, may be considered from the standpoint of the person who bought it and used it, from the point of view of its color values which attach to it in the minds of the persons who observe them, its aesthetic value, its economic value, its traditional value. All of these we can speak of in terms of psychology; they will be put into relationship with the experience of the individual. One man puts one value upon it and another gives it another value. But the same objects can be regarded as physical parts of a physical room. What James insisted upon was that the two cases differ only in an arrangement of certain contents in different series. The furniture, the walls, the house itself, belong to one historical series. We speak of the house as having been built, of the furniture as having been made. We put the house and furniture into another series when one comes in and assesses these objects from the point of view of his own experience. He is talking about the same chair, but the chair is for him now a matter of certain contours, certain colors, taken from his own experience. It involves the experience of the individual. Now one can take a cross-section of both of these two orders so that at a certain point there is a meeting of the two series. The statement in terms of consciousness simply means the recognition that the room lies not only in the historical series but also in the experience of the individual. There has been of late in philosophy a growing recognition of the importance of James's insistence that a great deal has been placed in consciousness that must be returned to the so-called objective world.

Psychology itself cannot very well be made a study of the field of consciousness alone; it is necessarily a study of a more extensive field. It is, however, that science which does make use of introspection, in the sense that it looks within the experience of the individual for phenomena not dealt with in any other sciences – phenomena to which only the individual himself has experiential access. That which belongs (experientially) to the individual qua individual, and is accessible to him alone, is certainly included within the field of psychology, whatever else is or is not thus included. This is our best clue in attempting to isolate the field of psychology. The psychological datum is best defined, therefore, in terms of accessibility. That which is accessible, in the experience of the individual, only to the individual himself, is peculiarly psychological.

I want to point out, however, that even when we come to the discussion of such »inner« experience, we can approach it from the point of view of the behaviorist, provided that we do not too narrowly conceive this point of view. What one must insist upon is that objectively observable behavior finds expression within the individual, not in the sense of being in another world, a subjective world, but in the sense of being within his organism. Something of this behavior appears in what we may term »attitudes«, the beginnings of acts. Now, if we come back to such attitudes we find them giving rise to all sorts of responses. The telescope in the hands of a novice is not a telescope in the sense that it is to those on top of Mount Wilson. If we want to trace the responses of the astronomer, we have to go back into his central nervous system, back to a whole series of neurons; and we find something there that answers to the exact way in which the astronomer approaches the instrument under certain conditions. That is the beginning of the act; it is a part of the act. The external act which we do observe is a part of the process which has started within; the values which we say the instrument has are values through the relationship of the object to the person who has that sort of attitude. If a person did not have that particular nervous system, the instrument would be of no value. It would not be a telescope.

In both versions of behaviorism certain characteristics which things have and certain experiences which individuals have can be stated as occurrences inside of an act. But part of the act lies within the organism and only comes to expression later; it is that side of behavior which I think Watson has passed over. There is a field within the act itself which is not external, but which belongs to the act, and there are characteristics of that inner organic conduct which do reveal themselves in our own attitudes, especially those connected with speech. Now, if our behavioristic point of view takes these attitudes into account we find that it can very well cover the field of psychology. In any case, this approach is one of particular importance because it is able to deal with the field of communication in a way which neither Watson nor the introspectionist can do. We want to approach language not from the standpoint of inner meanings to be expressed, but in its larger context of co-operation in the group taking place by means of signals and gestures. Meaning appears within that process. Our behaviorism is a social behaviorism.

Social psychology studies the activity or behavior of the individual as it lies within the social process; the behavior of an individual can be understood only in terms of the behavior of the whole social group of which he is a member, since his individual acts are involved in larger, social acts which go beyond himself and which implicate the other members of that group.

We are not, in social psychology, building up the behavior of the social group in terms of the behavior of the separate individuals composing it; rather, we are starting out with a given social whole of complex group activity, into which we analyze (as elements) the behavior of each of the separate individuals composing it. We attempt, that is, to explain the conduct of the individual in terms of the organized conduct of the social group, rather than to account for the organized conduct of the social group in terms of the conduct of the separate individuals belonging to it. For social psychology, the whole (society) is prior to the part (the individual), not the part to the whole; and the part is explained in terms of the whole, not the whole in terms of the part or parts. The social act is not explained by building it up out of stimulus plus response; it must be taken as a dynamic whole – as something going on – no part of which can be considered or understood by itself – a complex organic process implied by each individual stimulus and response involved in it.

In social psychology we get at the social process from the inside as well as from the outside. Social psychology is behavioristic in the sense of starting off with an observable activity – the dynamic, ongoing social process, and the social acts which are its component elements – to be studied and analyzed scientifically. But it is not behavioristic in the sense of ignoring the inner experience of the individual – the inner phase of that process or activity. On the contrary, it is particularly concerned with the rise of such experience within the process as a whole. It simply works from the outside to the inside instead of from the inside to the outside, so to speak, in its endeavor to determine how such experience does arise within the process. The act, then, and not the tract, is the fundamental datum in both social and individual psychology when behavioristically conceived, and it has both an inner and an outer phase, an internal and an external aspect.

These general remarks have had to do with our point of approach. It is behavioristic, but unlike Watsonian behaviorism it recognizes the parts of the act which do not come to external observation, and it emphasizes the act of the human individual in its natural social situation.

2. THE BEHAVIORISTIC SIGNIFICANCE OF ATTITUDES

The problem that presents itself as crucial for human psychology concerns the field that is opened up by introspection; this field apparently could not be dealt with by a purely objective psychology which only studied conduct as it takes place for the observer. In order that this field could be brought within the range of objective psychology, the behaviorist, such as Watson, did what he could to cut down the field itself, to deny certain phenomena supposed to lie only in that field, such as »consciousness« as distinct from conduct without consciousness. The animal psychologist studied conduct without taking up the question as to whether it was conscious conduct or not. But when we reach the field of human conduct we are in fact able to distinguish reflexes which take place without consciousness. There seems, then, to be a field which the behavioristic psychology cannot reach. The Watsonian behaviorist simply did what he could to minimize this difference.

The field of investigation of the behaviorist has been quite largely that of the young infant, where the methods employed are just the methods of animal psychology. He has endeavored to find out what the processes of behavior are, and to see how the activities of the infant may be used to explain the activities of the adult. It is here that the psychologist brings in the conditioned reflexes. He shows that by a mere association of certain stimuli he can get results which would not follow from these secondary stimuli alone. This conditioning of reflexes can be carried over into other fields, such as those of terror on the part of an infant. He can be made to fear something by associating the object with others producing terror. The same process can be used for explaining more elaborate conduct in which we associate elements with certain events which are not directly connected with them, and by elaborating this conditioning we can, it is believed, explain the more extended processes of reasoning and inference. In this way a method which belongs to objective psychology is carried over into the field which is dealt with ordinarily in terms of introspection. That is, instead of saying we have certain ideas when we have certain experiences, and that these ideas imply something else, we say that a certain experience has taken place at the same time that the first experience has taken place, so that now this secondary experience arouses the response which belongs to the primary experience.

There remain contents, such as those of imagery, which are more resistant to such analysis. What shall we say of responses that do not answer to any given experience? We can say, of course, that they are the results of past experiences. But take the contents themselves, the actual visual imagery that one has: it has outline; it has color; it has values; and other characters which are isolated with more difficulty. Such experience is one which plays a part, and a very large part, in our perception, our conduct; and yet it is an experience which can be revealed only by introspection. The behaviorist has to make a detour about this type of experience if he is going to stick to the Watsonian type of behavioristic psychology.

Such a behaviorist desires to analyze the act, whether individual or social, without any specific reference to consciousness whatever and without any attempt to locate it either within the field of organic behavior or within the larger field of reality in general. He wishes, in short, to deny its existence as such altogether. Watson insists that objectively observable behavior completely and exclusively constitutes the field of scientific psychology, individual and social. He pushes aside as erroneous the idea of »mind« or »consciousness«, and attempts to reduce all »mental« phenomena to conditioned reflexes and similar physiological mechanisms – in short, to purely behavioristic terms. This attempt, of course, is misguided and unsuccessful, for the existence as such of mind or consciousness, in some sense or other, must be admitted – the denial of it leads inevitably to obvious absurdities. But though it is impossible to reduce mind or consciousness to purely behavioristic terms – in the sense of thus explaining it away and denying its existence as such entirely – yet it is not impossible to explain it in these terms, and to do so without explaining it away, or denying its existence as such, in the least. Watson apparently assumes that to deny the existence of mind or consciousness as a psychical stuff, substance, or entity is to deny its existence altogether, and that a naturalistic or behavioristic account of it as such is out of the question. But, on the contrary, we may deny its existence as a psychical entity without denying its existence in some other sense at all; and if we then conceive it functionally, and as a natural rather than a transcendental phenomenon, it becomes possible to deal with it in behavioristic terms. In short, it is not possible to deny the existence of mind or consciousness or mental phenomena, nor is it desirable to do so; but it is possible to account for them or deal with them in behavioristic terms which are precisely similar to those which Watson employs in dealing with non-mental psychological phenomena (phenomena which, according to his definition of the field of psychology, are all the psychological phenomena there are). Mental behavior is not reducible to non-mental behavior. But mental behavior or phenomena can be explained in terms of non-mental behavior or phenomena, as arising out of, and as resulting from complications in, the latter.

If we are going to use behavioristic psychology to explain conscious behavior we have to be much more thoroughgoing in our statement of the act than Watson was. We have to take into account not merely the complete or social act, but what goes on in the central nervous system as the beginning of the individual's act and as the organization of the act. Of course, that takes us beyond the field of our direct observation. It takes us beyond that field because we cannot get at the process itself. It is a field that is more or less shut off, seemingly because of the difficulty of the country itself that has to be investigated. The central nervous system is only partly explored. Present results, however, suggest the organization of the act in terms of attitudes. There is an organization of the various parts of the nervous system that are going to be responsible for acts, an organization which represents not only that which is immediately taking place, but also the later stages that are to take place. If one approaches a distant object he approaches it with reference to what he is going to do when he arrives there. If one is approaching a hammer he is muscularly all ready to seize the handle of the hammer. The later stages of the act are present in the early stages – not simply in the sense that they are all ready to go off, but in the sense that they serve to control the process itself. They determine how we are going to approach the object, and the steps in our early manipulation of it. We can recognize, then, that the innervation of certain groups of cells in the central nervous system can already initiate in advance the later stages of the act. The act as a whole can be there determining the process.

We can also recognize in such a general attitude toward an object an attitude that represents alternative responses, such as are involved when we talk about our ideas of an object. A person who is familiar with a horse approaches it as one who is going to ride it. He moves toward the proper side and is ready to swing himself into the saddle. His approach determines the success of the whole process. But the horse is not simply something that must be ridden. It is an animal that must eat, that belongs to somebody. It has certain economic values. The individual is ready to do a whole series of things with reference to the horse, and that readiness is involved in any one of the many phases of the various acts. It is a horse that he is going to mount; it is a biological animal; it is an economic animal. Those characters are involved in the ideas of a horse. If we seek this ideal character of a horse in the central nervous system we would have to find it in all those different parts of the initiated acts. One would have to think of each as associated with the other processes in which he uses the horse, so that no matter what the specific act is, there is a readiness to act in these different ways with reference to the horse. We can find in that sense in the beginning of the act just those characters which we assign to »horse« as an idea, or if you like, as a concept.

If we are going to look for this idea in a central nervous system we have to look for it in the neurons, particularly in the connection between the neurons. There are whole sets of connections there which are of such a character that we are able to act in a number of ways, and these possible actions have their effect on the way in which we do act. For example, if the horse belongs to the rider, the rider acts in a different way than if it belongs to someone else. These other processes involved determine the immediate action itself and particularly the later stages of the act, so that the temporal organization of the act may be present in the immediate process. We do not know how that temporal organization takes place in the central nervous system. In some sense these later processes which are going to take place, and are in some sense started, are worked into the immediate process. A behavioristic treatment, if it is made broad enough, if it makes use of the almost indefinite complexities existing in the nervous system, can adjust itself to many fields which were supposed to be confined to an introspective attack. Of course, a great deal of this must be hypothetical. We learn more day by day of what the connections are, but they are largely hypothetical. However, they can at least be stated in a behavioristic form. We can, therefore, in principle, state behavioristically what we mean by an idea.

3. THE BEHAVIORISTIC SIGNIFICANCE OF GESTURES

The behaviorist of the Watsonian type has been prone to carry his principle of conditioning over into the field of language. By a conditioning of reflexes the horse has become associated with the word »horse«, and this in turn releases the set of responses. We use the word, and the response may be that of mounting, buying, selling, or trading. We are ready to do all these different things. This statement, however, lacks the recognition that these different processes which the behaviorist says are identified with the word »horse« must be worked into the act itself, or the group of acts, which gather about the horse. They go to make up that object in our experience, and the function of the word is a function which has its place in that organization; but it is not, however, the whole process. We find that same sort of organization seemingly extended in the conduct of animals lower than man: those processes which go to make up our objects must be present in the animals themselves who have not the use of language. It is, of course, the great value, or one of the great values, of language that it does give us control over this organization of the act. That is a point we will have to consider in detail later, but it is important to recognize that that to which the word refers is something that can lie in the experience of the individual without the use of language itself. Language does pick out and organize this content in experience. It is an implement for that purpose.

Language is a part of social behavior. There are an indefinite number of signs or symbols which may serve the purpose of what we term »language«. We are reading the meaning of the conduct of other people when, perhaps, they are not aware of it. There is something that reveals to us what the purpose is – just the glance of an eye, the attitude of the body which leads to the response. The communication set up in this way between individuals may be very perfect. Conversation in gestures may be carried on which cannot be translated into articulate speech. This is also true of the lower animals. Dogs approaching each other in hostile attitude carry on such a language of gestures. They walk around each other, growling and snapping, and waiting for the opportunity to attack. Here is a process out of which language might arise, that is, a certain attitude of one individual that calls out a response in the other, which in turn calls out a different approach and a different response, and so on indefinitely. In fact, as we shall see, language does arise in just such a process as that. We are too prone, however, to approach language as the philologist does, from the standpoint of the symbol that is used. We analyze that symbol and find out what is the intent in the mind of the individual in using that symbol, and then attempt to discover whether this symbol calls out this intent in the mind of the other. We assume that there are sets of ideas in persons' minds and that these individuals make use of certain arbitrary symbols which answer to the intent which the individuals had. But if we are going to broaden the concept of language in the sense I have spoken of, so that it takes in the underlying attitudes, we can see that the so-called intent, the idea we are talking about, is one that is involved in the gesture or attitudes which we are using. The offering of a chair to a person who comes into the room is in itself a courteous act. We do not have to assume that a person says to himself that this person wants a chair. The offering of a chair by a person of good manners is something which is almost instinctive. This is the very attitude of the individual. From the point of view of the observer it is a gesture. Such early stages of social acts precede the symbol proper, and deliberate communication.

One of the important documents in the history of modern psychology, particularly for the psychology of language, is Darwin's Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Here Darwin carried over his theory of evolution into the field of what we call »conscious experience«. What Darwin did was to show that there was a whole series of acts or beginnings of acts which called out certain responses that do express emotions. If one animal attacks another, or is on the point of attacking, or of taking the bone of another dog, that action calls out violent responses which express the anger of the second dog. There we have a set of attitudes which express the emotional attitude of dogs; and we can carry this analysis into the human expression of emotion.

The part of our organism that most vividly and readily expresses the emotions is the face, and Darwin studied the face from this point of view. He took, naturally, the actor, the man whose business it is to express the emotions by the movements of the countenance, and studied the muscles themselves; and in studying them he undertook to show what the value of these changes of the face might be in the actual act. We speak of such expressions as those of anger, and note the way in which the blood may suffuse the face at one stage and then leave it at another. Darwin studied the blood flow in fear and in terror. In these emotions one can find changes taking place in the blood flow itself. These changes have their value. They represent, of course, changes in the circulation of blood in the acts. These actions are generally actions which are rapid and can only take place if the blood is flowing rapidly. There must be a change in the rhythm of circulation and this generally registers itself in the countenance.

Many of our acts of hostility exhibit themselves in attitudes of the face similar to animals which attack with their teeth. The attitude, or in a more generalized term, the gesture, has been preserved after the value of the act has disappeared. The title of Darwin's work indicates his point of approach. He was dealing with these gestures, these attitudes, as expressive of emotions and assuming at the time that the gesture has this function of expressing the emotions. That attitude has been preserved, on this view, after the value of the act has disappeared. This gesture seems to remain for the purpose of expressing emotions. One naturally assumed there an attitude in the experience of animals which answers in some sense to those of the human animal. One could apply the doctrine of the survival of the fittest here also. The implication in this particular case was that these gestures or attitudes had lost the value which they had in the original acts, and yet had survived. The indication was that they had survived because they served certain valuable functions, and the suggestion was that this was the expression of the emotions. That attitude on Darwin's part is reflected in the work of other psychologists, men who were interested, as Darwin was, in the study of the act, in the information that is conveyed by one individual to another by his attitude. They assume that these acts had a reason for existence because they expressed something in the mind of the individual. It is an approach like that of the philologist. They assume that language existed for the purpose of conveying certain ideas, certain feelings.

If one considers, he realizes that this is a false approach. It is quite impossible to assume that animals do undertake to express their emotions. They certainly do not undertake to express them for the benefit of other animals. The most that can be said is that the »expressions« did set free a certain emotion in the individual, an escape valve, so to speak, an emotional attitude which the animal needed, in some sense, to get rid of. They certainly could not exist in these lower animals as means of expressing emotions; we cannot approach them from the point of view of expressing a content in the mind of the individual. We can, of course, see how, for the actor, they may become definitely a language. An actor, for example, may undertake to express his rage, and he may do it by an expression of the countenance, and so convey to the audience the emotion he intended. However, he is not expressing his own emotion but simply conveying to the audience the evidence of anger, and if he is successful he may do it more effectively, as far as the audience is concerned, than a person who is in reality angered. There we have these gestures serving the purpose of expression of the emotions, but we cannot conceive that they arose as such a language in order to express emotion. Language, then, has to be studied from the point of view of the gestural type of conduct within which it existed without being as such a definite language. And we have to see how the communicative function could have arisen out of that prior sort of conduct.

The psychology of Darwin assumed that emotion was a psychological state, a state of consciousness, and that this state could not itself be formulated in terms of the attitude or the behavior of the form. It was assumed that the emotion is there and that certain movements might give evidence of it. The evidence would be received and acted upon by other forms that were fashioned like itself. That is, it presupposed the conscious state over against the biological organism. The conscious state was that which was to be expressed in the gesture or the attitude. It was to be expressed in behavior and to be recognized in some fashion as existent in the consciousness of the other form through this medium of expression. Such was the general psychological attitude which Darwin accepted.

Contrary to Darwin, however, we find no evidence for the prior existence of consciousness as something which brings about behavior on the part of one organism that is of such a sort as to call forth an adjustive response on the part of another organism, without itself being dependent on such behavior. We are rather forced to conclude that consciousness is an emergent from such behavior; that so far from being a precondition of the social act, the social act is the precondition of it. The mechanism of the social act can be traced out without introducing into it the conception of consciousness as a separable element within that act; hence the social act, in its more elementary stages or forms, is possible without, or apart from, some form of consciousness.

4. RISE OF PARALLELISM IN PSYCHOLOGY

The psychology which stresses parallelism has to be distinguished from the psychology which regards certain states of consciousness as existing in the mind of the individual, and succeeding each other in accordance with their own laws of association. The whole doctrine of the psychology which follows Hume was predominantly associationistic. Given certain states of consciousness they were supposed to be held together by other similar elements. Among these elements were those of pleasure and pain. Connected with this atomism of associated conscious states was a psychology of action grounded on the association of pleasure and pain with certain other sensations and experiences. The doctrine of association was the dominant psychological doctrine; it dealt with static rather than dynamic experience.

The pushing of the psychological side further and further into the central nervous system revealed that there were whole series of experiences which might be called sensations and yet were very different from those which could be regarded as static, such as sound, odor, taste, and color. Association belonged to this static world. It was increasingly recognized that there was a large part of our experience which was dynamic. The form of actual doing was present in some of the sensations which answered to the innervation of sensory nerves. There was also the study of those tracts which went down to the viscera, and these certainly were aligned with the emotional experiences. The whole process of the circulation of the blood had been opened up, and the action which involved the sudden change of the circulation of the blood. Fear, hostility, anger, which called for sudden movement, or terror, which deprived the individual of the ability to move, reflected themselves in the visceral conditions; and also had their sensory aspects connected with the central nervous system. There was, then, a type of experience which did not fall into place in a static world. Wilhelm Wundt approached his problem from the standpoint of this sort of physiology which offered a clew by means of which one could follow out these various dynamic experiences into the mechanism of the organism itself.

The treatment which had been given to the central nervous system and its motor and sensory nerves had been that of bringing a nerve current to a central nervous system which was then in turn responsible for a sensation that happened in »consciousness«. To get a complete statement of what we call the act one had to follow up the sensory side and then follow out the motor results that took place because of what happened in consciousness. The physiology to which I have referred in a certain sense separated itself from the field of consciousness. It was difficult to carry over such a mechanism as this into the lower animals. That, at least, took the psychologist out of the field of animal experience. Darwin regarded the animal as that out of which human conduct evolves, as well as the human form, and if this is true then it must be that in some sense consciousness evolves.

The resulting approach is from the point of view of conduct itself, and here the principle of parallelism is brought in. What takes place in consciousness runs parallel with what takes place in the central nervous system. It is necessary to study the content of the form as physiological and also as psychological. The center of consciousness, within which is registered that which affects the sensory nerves and out of which springs the conduct due to sensation and memory images, is to be taken out of the physiological mechanism; and yet one must find a parallel in what takes place in the nervous system for what the physiologist had placed in consciousness as such. What I have referred to in the matter of the emotions seemed to present a physiological counterpart for what takes place in consciousness, a field that seemed to belong peculiarly to the mental side of life. Hate, love, anger – these are seemingly states of mind. How could they be stated in physiological terms? The study of the acts themselves from an evolutionary standpoint, and also the study of the changes that take place in the organism itself when it is under the influence of what we call an emotion, present analogues to these emotional states. One could find something there that definitely answered to the emotions.

The further development of this lead occurred in James's theory of the emotions. Because we run away when we are afraid, and strike when we are angry, we can find something in the physiological organism that answers to fear and to anger. It is an attitude in the organism which answers to these emotional states, especially these visceral conditions to which I have referred, and the sudden changes in the circulation which are found associated with emotions. It becomes possible to relate the psychical conditions with physiological ones. The result was that one could make a much more complete statement of the conduct of the individual in physiological terms, could find a parallel for that which is stated in terms of consciousness in the mechanism of the body and in the operation of that mechanism. Such a psychology was called, naturally enough, a physiological psychology. It was a statement in terms of what went on in the organism of the content with which the psychologist had been dealing. What is there in the act of the animal which answers to these different so-called psychological categories? What is there that answers to the sensations, to the motor responses? When these questions were answered physiologically, they, of course, involved mechanisms located inside of the act, for all that takes place in the body is action. It may be delayed action, but there is nothing there that is itself simply a state, a physiological state that could be compared with a static state. We come then to the sensations and undertake to state them in terms of complete reflex action. We deal with the sensation from the standpoint of the stimulus, and when we come to deal with the various emotional states we deal with them in terms of the preparation for action and the act itself as it is going on. That is, it becomes now essential to relate a set of psychical states with the different phases of the act. Parallelism, then, is an attempt to find analogues between action and experienced contents.

The inevitable result of this analysis was to carry psychology from a static to a dynamic form. It was not simply a question of relating what was found in introspection with what is found in the organism; it became a question of relating together those things which were found in introspection in the dynamic way in which the physiological elements were related to the life of the organism. Psychology became in turn associational, motor, functional, and finally behavioristic.

The historical transformation of psychology was a process which took place gradually. Consciousness was something which could not be simply dispensed with. In early psychology there was a crude attempt to account for consciousness as a certain secretion in the brain, but this was only a ridiculous phase of the transformation. Consciousness was something that was there, but it was something that could be brought into closer and closer relationship with what went on in the body. What went on there had a certain definite order. Everything that took place in the body was part of an act. The earlier conception of the central nervous system assumed that one could locate certain faculties of the mind in certain parts of the brain, but a study of the central nervous system did not reveal any such correlation. It became evident that there were nothing but paths in the central nervous system. The cells of the brain were seen to be parts of the nervous paths provided with material for carrying on the system, but nothing was found there to carry on the preservation of an idea as such. There was nothing in the central nervous system which would enable one to locate a tract given over to abstractions. There was a time when the frontal lobe was regarded as the locus of thought-processes – but the frontal lobe also represents nothing but paths. The paths make very complicated conduct possible, they complicate the act enormously through the mechanism of the brain; but they do not set up any structure which functionally answers to ideas. So the study of consciousness from the standpoint of the organism inevitably led men to look at consciousness itself from the point of view of action.

What, for example, is our experience that answers to clenching of the fist? Physiological psychology followed the action out through the nerves that came from the muscles of the arm and hand. The experience of the act would then be the sensation of what was going on; in consciousness as such there is an awareness of what the organ was doing; there is a parallelism between what goes on in the organ and what takes place in consciousness. This parallelism is, of course, not a complete parallelism. There seems to be consciousness corresponding only to the sensory nerves. We are conscious of some things and not conscious of others, and attention seems to play a very great part in determining which is the case. The parallelism which we carry over does not seem to be complete, but one which occurs only at various points. The thing that is interesting here is that it is the organism that now provides the clew for the analysis. Only portions of the response appear in consciousness as such. The organism has assumed the primary place. Experimental psychology started off from what it could get hold of in the physiological system, and then undertook to find out what in consciousness seemed to answer to it. The scientist felt that he had the same assurance that the physiologist had in identifying these facts in the nervous system, and given those facts he could look into consciousness. It was simpler to start off with the neurosis and then register what was found in the psychosis. Thus, the acceptance of some sort of a parallelism between the contents of consciousness and the physiological processes of the central nervous system led to a conception of those contents dynamically, in terms of acts, instead of statically, in terms of states. In this way the contents of consciousness were approached from below (that is, naturalistically) rather than from above (that is, transcendentally), by a study of the physiological processes of the central nervous system to determine what in the mind answers to the activities of the physiological organism.

There was a question as to the directive centers for unified action. We are apt to think of the central nervous system from the point of view of the telephone board, with calls coming in and responses going out. Certain centers come to be conceived as principal centers. If you go back to the base of the brain, to that portion which is the essence of the central nervous system of lower forms, you do find an organization there which controls in its activity other activities; but when you come to conduct in the human form, you fail to find any such system in which there is a single directive center or group of centers. One can see that the various processes which are involved in running away from danger can be processes which are so interrelated with other activities that the control comes in the organization. One sees the tree as a possible place of escape if a bull is after him; and in general, one sees things which will enable the ongoing activity to be carried out. A varying group of centers may be the determining factor in the whole activity of the individual. That is the concept which has also been carried over into the field of growth. Certain parts of the embryo start growing, and control the action of growth until some other process comes into control. In the cortex, that organ which in some sense answers to human intelligence, we fail to find any exclusive and unvarying control, that is, any evidence of it in the structure of the form itself. In some way we can assume that the cortex acts as a whole, but we cannot come back to certain centers and say that this is where the mind is lodged in thinking and in action. There are an indefinite number of cells connected with each other, and their innervation in some sense leads to a unitary action, but what that unity is in terms of the central nervous system it is almost impossible to state. All the different parts of the cortex seem to be involved in everything that happens. All the stimuli that reach the brain are reflected into all parts of the brain, and yet we do get a unitary action. There remains, then, a problem which is by no means definitely solved: the unity of the action of the central nervous system. Wundt undertook to find certain centers which would be responsible for this sort of unity, but there is nothing in the structure of the brain itself which isolated any parts of the brain as those which direct conduct as a whole. The unity is a unity of integration, though just how this integration takes place in detail we cannot say.

What I wanted to bring out is that the approach to psychological theory from the standpoint of the organism must inevitably be through an emphasis upon conduct, upon the dynamic rather than the static. It is, of course, possible to work in the other direction, that is, to look at experience from the point of view of the psychologist and to draw conclusions as to what must go on in the central nervous system. It is possible to recognize, for example, that we are not simply at the mercy of the different stimuli that play in the central nervous system – the natural view of the physiologist. We can see these organs adjust themselves to different types of stimuli. When air waves come in they affect the particular organs of the ear; when tastes and odors come in the stimuli get to tracts in the proper organs that respond. There may seem to be merely a response of the organism to the stimuli. This position is taken over into the psychology of Spencer, who accepted the Darwinian principle of evolution. The influence of environment is exercised over the form, and the adaptation of the form results from the influences of the environment on it. Spencer conceived of the central nervous system as being continually played upon by stimuli which set up certain paths, so that it was the environment which was fashioning the form.

The phenomena of attention, however, give a different picture of conduct. The human animal is an attentive animal, and his attention may be given to stimuli that are relatively faint. One can pick out sounds at a distance. Our whole intelligent process seems to lie in the attention which is selective of certain types of stimuli. Other stimuli which are bombarding the system are in some fashion shunted off. We give our attention to one particular thing. Not only do we open the door to certain stimuli and close it to others, but our attention is an organizing process as well as a selective process. When giving attention to what we are going to do we are picking out the whole group of stimuli which represent successive activity. Our attention enables us to organize the field in which we are going to act. Here we have the organism as acting and determining its environment. It is not simply a set of passive senses played upon by the stimuli that come from without. The organism goes out and determines what it is going to respond to, and organizes that world. One organism picks out one thing and another picks out a different one, since it is going to act in a different way. Such is an approach to what goes on in the central nervous system which comes to the physiologist from the psychologist.

The physiology of attention is a field which is still a dark continent. The organism itself fits itself to certain types of conduct, and this is of considerable importance in determining what the animal will do. There also lie back in the organism responses, such as those of escape from danger, that represent a peculiar sensitivity. A sound in some other direction would not have the same effect. The eye is very sensitive to motions that lie outside of the field of central vision, even though this area of the retina of the eye is not so sensitive to form and distinctions of color. You look for a book in a library and you carry a sort of mental image of the back of the book; you render yourself sensitive to a certain image of a friend you are going to meet. We can sensitize ourselves to certain types of stimuli and we can build up the sort of action we are going to take. In a chain set of responses the form carries out one instinctive response and then finds itself in the presence of another stimulus, and so forth; but as intelligent beings we build up such organized reactions ourselves. The field of attention is one in which there must be a mechanism in which we can organize the different stimuli with reference to others so that certain responses can take place. The description of this is something we can reach through a study of our own conduct, and at present that is the most that we can say.

Parallelism in psychology was very largely under the control of the study of the central nervous system, and that led on inevitably to functional, motor, voluntaristic, and finally behavioristic psychology. The more one could state of the processes of the individual in terms of the central nervous system, the more one would use the pattern which one found in the central nervous system to interpret conduct. What I am insisting upon is that the patterns which one finds in the central nervous system are patterns of action – not of contemplation, not of appreciation as such, but patterns of action. On the other hand I want to point out that one is able to approach the central nervous system from the psychologist's point of view and set certain problems to the physiologist. How is the physiologist to explain attention? When the physiologist attempts that he is bound to do so in terms of the various paths. If he is going to explain why one path is selected rather than another he must go back to these terms of paths and actions. You cannot set up in the central nervous system a selective principle which can be generally applied throughout; you cannot say there is a specific something in the central nervous system that is related to attention; you cannot say that there is a general power of attention. You have to state it specifically, so that even when you are directing your study of the central nervous system from the point of view of psychology, the type of explanation that you are going to get will have to be in terms of paths which represent action.

Such, in brief, is the history of the appearance of physiological psychology in its parallelistic form, a psychology which had moved to the next stage beyond that of associationalism. Attention is ordinarily stressed in tracing this transition, but the emphasis on attention is one which is derived largely from the study of the organism as such, and it accordingly should be seen in the larger context we have presented.

5. PARALLELISM AND THE AMBIGUITY OF »CONSCIOUSNESS«

»Consciousness« is a very ambiguous term. One often identifies consciousness with a certain something that is there under certain conditions and is not there under other conditions. One approaches this most naturally by assuming that it is something that happens under certain conditions of the organism, something, then, that can be conceived of as running parallel with certain phenomena in the nervous system, but not parallel with others. There seems to be no consciousness that answers to the motor processes as such; the consciousness we have of our action is that which is sensory in type and which answers to the current which comes from the sensory nerves which are affected by the contraction of the muscles. We are not conscious of the actual motor pocesses, but we have a sensory process that runs parallel to it. This is the situation out of which parallelistic psychology arises. It implies on the one side an organism which is a going concern, that seemingly can run without consciousness. A person continues to live when he is under a general anesthetic. Consciousness leaves and consciousness returns, but the organism itself runs on. And the more completely one is able to state the psychological processes in terms of the central nervous system the less important does this consciousness become.

The extreme statement of that sort was given by Hugo Münsterberg. He assumed the organism itself simply ran on, but that answering to certain nervous changes there were conscious states. If one said that he did something, what that amounted to was a consciousness of the movement of the muscles of his body in doing it; the consciousness of the beginning of the act is that which he interpreted as his own volition to act. There is only a consciousness of certain processes that are going on. Parallelism in this extreme form, however, left out of account just such processes as those of attention and the selective character of consciousness. If the physiologist had been able to point out the mechanism of the central nervous system by which we organize our action, there might be still dominant such a statement in terms of this extreme parallelism which would regard the individual as simply conscious of the selection which the organism made. But the process of selection itself is so complex that it becomes almost impossible to state it, especially in such terms. Consciousness as such is peculiarly selective, and the processes of selection, of sensitizing the organ to stimuli, are something very difficult to isolate in the central nervous system. William James points out that the amount of difference which you have to give to a certain stimulus to make it dominant is very slight, and he could conceive of an act of volition which holds on to a certain stimulus, and just gives it a little more emphasis than it otherwise would have. Wundt tried to make parallelism possible by assuming the possibility of certain centers which could perform this selective function. But there was no satisfactory statement of the way in which one could get this interaction between an organism and a consciousness, of the way in which consciousness could act upon a central nervous system. So that we get at this stage of the development of psychology parallelism rather than interactionism.

The parallelistic phase of psychology reveals itself not simply as one of the passing forms which has appeared in psychological investigation, but as one which has served a very evident purpose and met a very evident need.

We do distinguish, in some sense, the experiences that we call conscious from those going on in the world around us. We see a color and give it a certain name. We find that we are mistaken, due to a defect in our vision, and we go back to the spectral colors and analyze it. We say there is something that is independent of our immediate sensory process. We are trying to get hold of that part of experience that can be taken as independent of one's own immediate response. We want to get hold of that so that we can deal with the problem of error. Where no error is involved we do not draw the line. If we discover that a tree seen at a distance is not there when we reach the spot, we have mistaken something else for a tree. Thus, we have to have a field to which we can refer our own experience; and also we require objects which are recognized to be independent of our own vision. We want the mechanism which will make that distinction at any time, and we generalize it in this way. We work out the theory of sense perception in terms of the external stimulus, so that we can get hold of that which can be depended upon in order to distinguish it from that which cannot be depended upon in the same way. Even an object that is actually there can still be so resolved. In the laboratory we can distinguish between the stimulus and the sense experience. The experimenter turns on a certain light and he knows just what that light is. He can tell what takes place in the retina and in the central nervous system, and then he asks what the experiences are. He puts all sorts of elements in the process so that the subject will mistake what it is. He gets on the one side conscious data and on the other side the physical processes that are going on. He carries this analysis only into a field which is of importance for his investigation; and he himself has objects out there which could be analyzed in the same fashion.

We want to be able to distinguish what belongs to our own experience from that which can be stated, as we say, in scientific terms. We are sure of some processes, but we are not sure as to the reaction of people to these processes. We recognize that there are all sorts of differences among individuals. We have to make this distinction, so we have to set up a certain parallelism between things which are there and have a uniform value for everybody, and things which vary with certain individuals. We seem to get a field of consciousness and a field of physical things which are not conscious.

I want to distinguish the differences in the use of the term »consciousness« to stand for accessibility to certain contents, and as synonymous with certain contents themselves. When you shut your eyes you shut yourself off from certain stimuli. If one takes an anesthetic the world is inaccessible to him. Similarly, sleep renders one inaccessible to the world. Now I want to distinguish this use of consciousness, that of rendering one accessible and inaccessible to certain fields, from these contents themselves which are determined by the experience of the individual. We want to be able to deal with an experience which varies with the different individuals, to deal with the different contents which in some sense represent the same object. We want to be able to separate those contents which vary from contents which are in some sense common to all of us. Our psychologists undertake definitely to deal with experience as it varies with individuals. Some of these experiences are dependent upon the perspective of the individual and some are peculiar to a particular organ. If one is color-blind he has a different experience from a person with a normal eye.

When we use »consciousness«, then, with reference to those conditions which are variable with the experience of the individual, this usage is a quite different one from that of rendering ourselves inaccessible to the world. In one case we are dealing with the situation of a person going to sleep, distracting his attention or centering his attention – a partial or complete exclusion of certain parts of a field. The other use is in application to the experience of the individual that is different from the experience of anybody else, and not only different in that way but different from his own experience at different times. Our experience varies not simply with our own organism but from moment to moment, and yet it is an experience which is of something which has not varied as our experiences vary, and we want to be able to study that experience in this variable form, so that some sort of parallelism has to be set up. One might attempt to set up the parallelism outside of the body, but the study of the stimuli inevitably takes us over into the study of the body itself.

Different positions will lead to different experiences in regard to such an object as a penny placed on a certain spot. There are other phenomena that are dependent upon the character of the eye, or the effect of past experiences. What the penny would be experienced as depends upon the past experiences that may have occurred to the different individuals. It is a different penny to one person from what it is to another; yet the penny is there as an entity by itself. We want to be able to deal with these spatially perspectival differences in individuals. Still more important from a psychological standpoint is the perspective of memory, by means of which one person sees one penny and another sees another penny. These are characters which we want to separate, and it is here that the legitimacy of our parallelism lies, namely, in that distinction between the object as it can be determined, physically and physiologically, as common to all, and the experience which is peculiar to a particular organism, a particular person.

Setting this distinction up as a psychological doctrine gives the sort of psychology that Wundt has most effectively and exhaustively presented. He has tried to present the organism and its environment as identical physical objects for any experience, although the reflection of them in the different experiences are all different. Two persons studying the same central nervous system at the dissecting table will see it a little differently; yet they see the same central nervous system. Each of them has a different experience in that process. Now, put on one side the organism and its environment as a common object and then take what is left, so to speak, and put that into the experience of the separate individuals, and the result is a parallelism: on the one side the physical world, and on the other side consciousness.

The basis for this distinction is, as we have seen, a familiar and a justifiable one, but when put into the form of a psychology, as Wundt did, it reaches its limits; and if carried beyond leads into difficulty. The legitimate distinction is that which enables a person to identify that phase of an experience which is peculiar to himself, which has to be studied in terms of a moment in his biography. There are facts which are important only in so far as they lie in the biography of the individual. The technique of that sort of a separation comes back to the physiological environment on one side and to the experience on the other. In this way an experience of the object itself is contrasted with the individual's experience, consciousness on one side with the unconscious world on the other.

If we follow this distinction down to its limits we reach a physiological organism that is the same for all people, played upon by a set of stimuli which is the same to all. We want to follow the effects of such stimuli in the central nervous system up to the point where a particular individual has a specific experience. When we have done that for a particular case, we use this analysis as a basis for generalizing that distinction. We can say that there are physical things on one side and mental events on the other. We assume that the experienced world of each person is looked upon as a result of a causal series that lies inside of his brain. We follow stimuli into the brain, and there we say consciousness flashes out. In this way we have ultimately to locate all experience in the brain, and then old epistemological ghosts arise. Whose brain is it? How is the brain known? Where does that brain lie? The whole world comes to lie inside of the observer's brain; and his brain lies in everybody else's brain, and so on without end. All sorts of difficulties arise if one undertakes to erect this parallelistic division into a metaphysical one. The essentially practical nature of this division must now be pointed out.

6. THE PROGRAM OF BEHAVIORISM

We have seen that a certain sort of parallelism is involved in the attempt to state the experience of the individual in so far as it is peculiar to him as an individual. What is accessible only to that individual, what takes place only in the field of his own inner life, must be stated in its relationship to the situation within which it takes place. One individual has one experience and another has another experience, and both are stated in terms of their biographies; but there is in addition that which is common to the experience of all. And our scientific statement correlates that which the individual himself experiences, and which can ultimately be stated only in terms of his experience, with the experience which belongs to everyone. This is essential in order that we may interpret what is peculiar to the individual. We are always separating that which is peculiar to our own reaction, that which we can see that other persons cannot see, from that which is common to all. We are referring what belongs to the experience just of the individual to a common language, to a common world. And when we carry out this relationship, this correlation, into what takes place physically and physiologically, we get a parallelistic psychology.

The particular color or odor that any one of us experiences is a private affair. It differs from the experience of other individuals, and yet there is the common object to which it refers. It is the same light, the same rose, that is involved in these experiences. What we try to do is to follow these common stimuli in through the nervous system of each of these individuals. We aim to get the statement in universal terms which will answer to those particular conditions. We want to control them as far as we can, and it is that determination of the conditions under which the particular experience takes place that enables us to carry out that control.

If one says that his experience of an object is made up of different sensations and then undertakes to state the conditions under which those sensations take place, he may say that he is stating those conditions in terms of his own experience. But they are conditions which are common to all. He measures, he determines just what is taking place, but this apparatus with which he measures is, after all, made up of his sensuous experience. Things that are hot or cold, rough or smooth, the objects themselves, are stated in terms of sensations; but they are stated in terms of sensations which we can make universal, and we take these common characters of experience and find in terms of them those experiences which are peculiar to the different individuals.

Psychology is interested in this correlation, in finding out what the relationship is between what goes on in the physical world and what goes on in the organism when a person has a sensory experience. That program was carried out by Hermann Helmholtz. The world was there in terms which could be stated in the laws of science, i.e., the stimuli were stated in physical terms. What goes on in the nervous system could be stated more and more exactly, and this could be correlated with certain definite experiences which the individual found in his own life. And the psychologist is interested in getting the correlation between the conditions under which the experience takes place and that which is peculiar to the individual. He wishes to make these statements as universal as possible, and is scientific in that respect. He wants to state the experience of an individual just as closely as he can in terms of the field which he can control, those conditions under which it appears. He naturally tries to state the conduct of the individual in terms of his reflexes, and he carries back as far as he can the more complex reflexes of the individual to the simpler forms of action. He uses, as far as he is able to use, a behavioristic statement, because that can be formulated in terms of this same field over which he has control.

The motive back of modern psychology gets an expression in the field of mental testing, where one is getting correlations between certain situations and certain responses. It is characteristic of this psychology that not only is it as behavioristic as it can be (in that it states the experience of the individual as completely as it can in objective terms), but it also is interested in getting such statements and correlations so that it can control conduct as far as possible. We find modern psychology interested in practical problems, especially those of education. We have to lead the intelligences of infants and children into certain definite uses of media, and certain definite types of responses. How can we take the individual with his peculiarities and bring him over into a more nearly uniform type of response? He has to have the same language as others, and the same units of measurement; and he has to take over a certain definite culture as a background for his own experience. He has to fit himself into certain social structures and make them a part of himself. How is that to be accomplished? We are dealing with separate individuals and yet these individuals have to become a part of a common whole. We want to get the correlation between this world which is common and that which is peculiar to the individual. So we have psychology attacking the questions of learning, and the problems of the school, and trying to analyze different intelligences so that we can state them in terms which are as far as possible common; we want something which can correlate with the task which the child has to carry out. There are certain definite processes involved in speech. What is there that is uniform by means of which we are able to identify what the individual can do and what particular training he may have to take? Psychology also goes over into the field of business questions, of salesmanship, personnel questions; it goes over into the field of that which is abnormal and tries to get hold of that which is peculiar in the abnormal individual and to bring it into relation with the normal, and with the structures which get their expression in these abnormalities. It is interesting to see that psychology starts off with this problem of getting correlations between the experience of individuals and conditions under which it takes place, and undertakes to state this experience in terms of behavior; and that it at once endeavors to make a practical use of this correlation it finds for the purposes of training and control. It is becoming essentially a practical science, and has pushed to one side the psychological and philosophical problems which have been tied up with earlier dogma under associational psychology. Such are the influences which work in the behavioristic psychology.

This psychology is not, and should not be regarded as, a theory which is to be put over against an associational doctrine. What it is trying to do is to find out what the conditions are under which the experience of the individual arises. That experience is of the sort that takes us back to conduct in order that we may follow it. It is that which gives a distinctive mark to a psychological investigation. History and all the social sciences deal with human beings, but they are not primarily psychological. Psychology may be of great importance in dealing with, say, economics, the problem of value, of desire, the problems of political science, the relation of the individual to the state, personal relations which have to be considered in terms of individuals. All of the social sciences can be found to have a psychological phase. History is nothing but biography, a whole series of biographies; and yet all of these social sciences deal with individuals in their common characters; and where the individual stands out as different he is looked at from the point of view of that which he accomplishes in the whole society, or in terms of the destructive effect which he may have. But we are not primarily occupied as social scientists in studying his experience as such. Psychology does undertake to work out the technique which will enable it to deal with these experiences which any individual may have at any moment in his life, and which are peculiar to that individual. And the method of dealing with such an experience is in getting the conditions under which that experience of the individual takes place. We should undertake to state the experience of the individual just as far as we can in terms of the conditions under which it arises. It is essentially a control problem to which the psychologist is turning. It has, of course, its aspect of research for knowledge. We want to increase our knowledge, but there is back of that an attempt to get control through the knowledge which we obtain; and it is very interesting to see that our modern psychology is going farther and farther into those fields within which control can be so realized. It is successful in so far as it can work out correlations which can be tested. We want to get hold of those factors in the nature of the individual which can be recognized in the nature of all members of society but which can be identified in the particular individual. Those are problems which are forcing themselves more and more to the front.

There is another phase of recent psychology which I should refer to, namely, configuration or gestaltpsychology, which has been of interest in recent years. There we have the recognition of elements or phases of experience which are common to the experience of the individual and to those conditions under which this experience arises. There are certain general forms in the field of perception in the experience of the individual as well as in the objects themselves. They can be identified. One cannot take such a thing as a color and build it up out of certain sets of sensations. Experience, even that of the individual, must start with some whole. It must involve some whole in order that we may get the elements we are after. What is of peculiar importance to us is this recognition of an element which is common in the perception of the individual and that which is regarded as a condition under which that perception arises – a position in opposition to an analysis of experience which proceeds on the assumption that the whole we have in our perception is simply an organization of these separate elements. Gestalt psychology gives us another element which is common to the experience of the individual and the world which determines the conditions under which that experience arises. Where before one had to do with the stimuli and what could be traced out in the central nervous system, and then correlated with the experience of the individual, now we have a certain structure that has to be recognized both in the experience of the individual and the conditioning world.

A behavioristic psychology represents a definite tendency rather than a system, a tendency to state as far as possible the conditions under which the experience of the individual arises. Correlation gets its expression in parallelism. The term is unfortunate in that it carries with it the distinction between mind and body, between the psychical and the physical. It is true that all the operations of stimuli can be traced through to the central nervous system, so we seem to be able to take the problem inside of our skins and get back to something in the organism, the central nervous system, which is representative of everything that happens outside. If we speak of a light as influencing us, it does not influence us until it strikes the retina of the eye. Sound does not exert influence until it reaches the ear, and so on, so that we can say the whole world can be stated in terms of what goes on inside of the organism itself. And we can say that what we are trying to correlate are the happenings in the central nervous system on the one side and the experience of the individual on the other.

But we have to recognize that we have made an arbitrary cut there. We cannot take the central nervous system by itself, nor the physical objects by themselves. The whole process is one which starts from a stimulus and involves everything that takes place. Thus, psychology correlates the difference of perceptions with the physical intensity of the stimulus. We could state the intensity of a weight we were lifting in terms of the central nervous system but that would be a difficult way of stating it. That is not what psychology is trying to do. It is not trying to relate a set of psychoses to a set of neuroses. What it is trying to do is to state the experiences of the individual in terms of the conditions under which they arise, and such conditions can very seldom be stated in terms of the neuroses. Occasionally we can follow the process right up into the central nervous system, but it is quite impossible to state most of the conditions in those terms. We control experiences in the intensity of the light which we have, in the noises that we produce, control them in terms of the effects which are produced on us by heat and cold. That is where we get our control. We may be able to change these by dealing with actual organisms, but in general we are trying to correlate the experience of the individual with the situation under which it arises. In order that we may get that sort of control we have to have a generalized statement. We want to know the conditions under which experience may appear. We are interested in finding the most general laws of correlation we can find. But the psychologist is interested in finding that sort of condition which can be correlated with the experience of the individual. We are trying to state the experience of the individual and situations in just as common terms as we can, and it is this which gives the importance to what we call behavioristic psychology. It is not a new psychology that comes in and takes the place of an old system.

An objective psychology is not trying to get rid of consciousness, but trying to state the intelligence of the individual in terms which will enable us to see how that intelligence is exercised, and how it may be improved. It is natural, then, that such a psychology as this should seek for a statement which would bring these two phases of the experience as close to each other as possible, or translate them into language which is common to both fields. We do not want two languages, one of certain physical facts and one of certain conscious facts. If you push that analysis to the limit you get such results as where you say that everything that takes place in consciousness in some way has to be located in the head, because you are following up a certain sort of causal relation which affects consciousness. The head you talk about is not stated in terms of the head you are observing. Bertrand Russell says the real head he is referring to is not the head that the physiologist is looking at, but the physiologist's own head. Whether that is the case or not, it is a matter of infinite indifference to psychologists. That is not a problem in the present psychology, and behaviorism is not to be regarded as legitimate up to a certain point and as then breaking down. Behavioristic psychology only undertakes to get a common statement that is significant and makes our correlation successful. The history of psychology has been a history which moved in this direction, and anyone who looks at what takes place in the psychological Associations at the present time, and the ways in which psychology is being carried over into other fields, sees that the interest, the impulse that lies behind it, is in getting just such a correlation which will enable science to get a control over the conditions of experience.

The term »parallelism« has an unfortunate implication: it is historically and philosophically bound up with the contrast of the physical over against the psychical, with consciousness over against the unconscious world. Actually, we simply state what an experience is over against those conditions under which it arises. That fact lies behind »parallelism«, and to carry out the correlation one has to state both fields in as common a language as possible, and behaviorism is simply a movement in that direction. Psychology is not something that deals with consciousness; psychology deals with the experience of the individual in its relation to the conditions under which the experience goes on. It is social psychology where the conditions are social ones. It is behavioristic where the approach to experience is made through conduct.

PART II. MIND
7. WUNDT AND THE CONCEPT OF THE GESTURE

THE particular field of social science with which we are concerned is one which was opened up through the work of Darwin and the more elaborate presentation of Wundt.

If we take Wundt's parallelistic statement we get a point of view from which we can approach the problem of social experience. Wundt undertook to show the parallelism between what goes on in the body as represented by processes of the central nervous system, and what goes on in those experiences which the individual recognizes as his own. He had to find that which was common to these two fields – what in the psychical experience could be referred to in physical terms.

Wundt isolated a very valuable conception of the gesture as that which becomes later a symbol, but which is to be found in its earlier stages as a part of a social act. It is that part of the social act which serves as a stimulus to other forms involved in the same social act. I have given the illustration of the dog-fight as a method of presenting the gesture. The act of each dog becomes the stimulus to the other dog for his response. There is then a relationship between these two; and as the act is responded to by the other dog, it, in turn, undergoes change. The very fact that the dog is ready to attack another becomes a stimulus to the other dog to change his own position or his own attitude. He has no sooner done this than the change of attitude in the second dog in turn causes the first dog to change his attitude. We have here a conversation of gestures. They are not, however, gestures in the sense that they are significant. We do not assume that the dog says to himself, »If the animal comes from this direction he is going to spring at my throat and I will turn in such a way.« What does take place is an actual change in his own position due to the direction of the approach of the other dog.

We find a similar situation in boxing and in fencing, as in the feint and the parry that is initiated on the part of the other. And then the first one of the two in turn changes his attack; there may be considerable play back and forth before actually a stroke results. This is the same situation as in the dog-fight. If the individual is successful a great deal of his attack and defense must be not considered, it must take place immediately. He must adjust himself »instinctively« to the attitude of the other individual. He may, of course, think it out. He may deliberately feint in order to open up a place of attack. But a great deal has to be without deliberation.

In this case we have a situation in which certain parts of the act become a stimulus to the other form to adjust itself to those responses; and that adjustment in turn becomes a stimulus to the first form to change his own act and start on a different one. There are a series of attitudes, movements, on the part of these forms which belong to the beginnings of acts that are the stimuli for the responses that take place. The beginning of a response becomes the stimulus to the first form to change his attitude, to adopt a different act. The term »gesture« may be identified with these beginnings of social acts which are stimuli for the response of other forms. Darwin was interested in such gestures because they expressed emotions, and he dealt with them very largely as if this were their sole function. He looked at them as serving the function with reference to the other forms which they served with reference to his own observation. The gestures expressed emotions of the animal to Darwin; he saw in the attitude of the dog the joy with which he accompanied his master in taking a walk. And he left his treatment of the gestures largely in these terms.

It was easy for Wundt to show that this was not a legitimate point of attack on the problem of these gestures. They did not at bottom serve the function of expression of the emotions: that was not the reason why they were stimuli, but rather because they were parts of complex acts in which different forms were involved. They became the tools through which the other forms responded. When they did give rise to a certain response, they were themselves changed in response to the change which took place in the other form. They are part of the organization of the social act, and highly important elements in that organization. To the human observer they are expressions of emotion, and that function of expressing emotion can legitimately become the field of the work of the artist and of the actor. The actor is in the same position as the poet: he is expressing emotions through his own attitude, his tones of voice, through his gestures, just as the poet through his poetry is expressing his emotions and arousing that emotion in others. We get in this way a function which is not found in the social act of these animals, or in a great deal of our own conduct, such as that of the boxer and the fencer. We have this interplay going on with the gestures serving their functions, calling out the responses of the others, these responses becoming themselves stimuli for readjustment, until the final social act itself can be carried out. Another illustration of this is in the relation of parent-form to the infant – the stimulating cry, the answering tone on the part of the parent-form, and the consequent change in the cry of the infant-form. Here we have a set of adjustments of the two forms carrying out a common social act involved in the care of the child. Thus we have, in all these instances, a social process in which one can isolate the gesture which has its function in the social process, and which can become an expression of emotions, or later can become the expression of a meaning, an idea.

The primitive situation is that of the social act which involves the interaction of different forms, which involves, therefore, the adjustment of the conduct of these different forms to each other, in carrying out the social process. Within that process one can find what we term the gestures, those phases of the act which bring about the adjustment of the response of the other form. These phases of the act carry with them the attitude as the observer recognizes it, and also what we call the inner attitude. The animal may be angry or afraid. There are such emotional attitudes which lie back of these acts, but these are only part of the whole process that is going on. Anger expresses itself in attack; fear expresses itself in flight. We can see, then, that the gestures mean these attitudes on the part of the form, that is, they have that meaning for us. We see that an animal is angry and that he is going to attack. We know that that is in the action of the animal, and is revealed by the attitude of the animal. We cannot say the animal means it in the sense that he has a reflective determination to attack. A man may strike another before he means it; a man may jump and run away from a loud sound behind his back before he knows what he is doing. If he has the idea in his mind, then the gesture not only means this to the observer but it also means the idea which the individual has. In one case the observer sees that the attitude of the dog means attack, but he does not say that it means a conscious determination to attack on the part of the dog. However, if somebody shakes his fist in your face you assume that he has not only a hostile attitude but that he has some idea behind it. You assume that it means not only a possible attack, but that the individual has an idea in his experience.

When, now, that gesture means this idea behind it and it arouses that idea in the other individual, then we have a significant symbol. In the case of the dog-fight we have a gesture which calls out appropriate response; in the present case we have a symbol which answers to a meaning in the experience of the first individual and which also calls out that meaning in the second individual. Where the gesture reaches that situation it has become what we call »language«. It is now a significant symbol and it signifies a certain meaning.

The gesture is that phase of the individual act to which adjustment takes place on the part of other individuals in the social process of behavior. The vocal gesture becomes a significant symbol (unimportant, as such, on the merely affective side of experience) when it has the same effect on the individual making it that it has on the individual to whom it is addressed or who explicitly responds to it, and thus involves a reference to the self of the individual making it. The gesture in general, and the vocal gesture in particular, indicates some object or other within the field of social behavior, an object of common interest to all the individuals involved in the given social act thus directed toward or upon that object. The function of the gesture is to make adjustment possible among the individuals implicated in any given social act with reference to the object or objects with which that act is concerned; and the significant gesture or significant symbol affords far greater facilities for such adjustment and readjustment than does the non-significant gesture, because it calls out in the individual making it the same attitude toward it (or toward its meaning) that it calls out in the other individuals participating with him in the given social act, and thus makes him conscious of their attitude toward it (as a component of his behavior) and enables him to adjust his subsequent behavior to theirs in the light of that attitude. In short, the conscious or significant conversation of gestures is a much more adequate and effective mechanism of mutual adjustment within the social act – involving, as it does, the taking, by each of the individuals carrying it on, of the attitudes of the others toward himself – than is the unconscious or non-significant conversation of gestures.

When, in any given social act or situation, one individual indicates by a gesture to another individual what this other individual is to do, the first individual is conscious of the meaning of his own gesture – or the meaning of his gesture appears in his own experience – in so far as he takes the attitude of the second individual toward that gesture, and tends to respond to it implicitly in the same way that the second individual responds to it explicitly. Gestures become significant symbols when they implicitly arouse in an individual making them the same responses which they explicitly arouse, or are supposed to arouse, in other individuals, the individuals to whom they are addressed; and in all conversations of gestures within the social process, whether external (between different individuals) or internal (between a given individual and himself), the individual's consciousness of the content and flow of meaning involved depends on his thus taking the attitude of the other toward his own gestures. In this way every gesture comes within a given social group or community to stand for a particular act or response, namely, the act or response which it calls forth explicitly in the individual to whom it is addressed, and implicitly in the individual who makes it; and this particular act or response for which it stands is its meaning as a significant symbol. Only in terms of gestures as significant symbols is the existence of mind or intelligence possible; for only in terms of gestures which are significant symbols can thinking – which is simply an internalized or implicit conversation of the individual with himself by means of such gestures – take place. The internalization in our experience of the external conversations of gestures which we carry on with other individuals in the social process is the essence of thinking; and the gestures thus internalized are significant symbols because they have the same meanings for all individual members of the given society or social group, i.e., they respectively arouse the same attitudes in the individuals making them that they arouse in the individuals responding to them: otherwise the individual could not internalize them or be conscious of them and their meanings. As we shall see, the same procedure which is responsible for the genesis and existence of mind or consciousness – namely, the taking of the attitude of the other toward one's self, or toward one's own behavior – also necessarily involves the genesis and existence at the same time of significant symbols, or significant gestures.

In Wundt's doctrine, the parallelism between the gesture and the emotion or the intellectual attitude of the individual, makes it possible to set up a like parallelism in the other individual. The gesture calls out a gesture in the other form which will arouse or call out the same emotional attitude and the same idea. Where this has taken place the individuals have begun to talk to each other. What I referred to before was a conversation of gestures which did not involve significant symbols or gestures. The dogs are not talking to each other; there are no ideas in the minds of the dogs; nor do we assume that the dog is trying to convey an idea to the other dog. But if the gesture, in the case of the human individual, has parallel with it a certain psychical state which is the idea of what the person is going to do, and if this gesture calls out a like gesture in the other individual and calls out a similar idea, then it becomes a significant gesture. It stands for the ideas in the minds of both of them.

There is some difficulty in carrying out this analysis if we accept Wundt's parallelism. When a person shakes his fist in your face, that is a gesture in the sense in which we use the term, the beginning of an act that calls out a response on your part. Your response may vary: it may depend on the size of the man, it may mean shaking your fist, or it may mean flight. A whole series of different responses are possible. In order that Wundt's theory of the origin of language may be carried out, the gesture which the first individual makes use of must in some sense be reproduced in the experience of the individual in order that it may arouse the same idea in his mind. We must not confuse the beginning of language with its later stages. It is quite true that as soon as we see the attitude of the dog we say that it means an attack, or that when we see a person looking around for a chair that it means he would like to sit down. The gesture is one which means these processes, and that meaning is aroused by what we see. But we are supposed to be at the beginning of these developments of language. If we assume that there is a certain psychical state answering to a physical state how are we going to get to the point where the gesture will arouse the same gesture in the attitude of the other individual? In the very beginning the other person's gesture means what you are going to do about it. It does not mean what he is thinking about or even his emotion. Supposing his angry attack aroused fear in you, then you are not going to have anger in your mind, but fear. His gesture means fear as far as you are concerned. That is the primitive situation. Where the big dog attacks the little dog, the little dog puts his tail between his legs and runs away, but the gesture does not call out in the second individual what it did in the first. The response is generally of a different kind from the stimulus in the social act, a different action is aroused. If you assume that there is a certain idea answering to that act, then you want at a later stage to get the idea of the first form, but originally your idea will be your own idea which answers to a certain end. If we say that gesture »A« has idea »a« as answering to it, gesture »A« in the first form calls out gesture »B« and its related idea »b« in the second form. Here the idea that answers to gesture »A« is not idea »a« but idea »b«. Such a process can never arouse in one mind just the idea which the other person has in his.

How, in terms of Wundt's psychological analysis of communication, does a responding organism get or experience the same idea or psychical correlate of any given gesture that the organism making this gesture has? The difficulty is that Wundt presupposes selves as antecedent to the social process in order to explain communication within that process, whereas, on the contrary, selves must be accounted for in terms of the social process, and in terms of communication; and individuals must be brought into essential relation within that process before communication, or the contact between the minds of different individuals, becomes possible. The body is not a self, as such; it becomes a self only when it has developed a mind within the context of social experience. It does not occur to Wundt to account for the existence and development of selves and minds within, or in terms of, the social process of experience; and his presupposition of them as making possible that process, and communication within it, invalidates his analysis of that process. For if, as Wundt does, you presuppose the existence of mind at the start, as explaining or making possible the social process of experience, then the origin of minds and the interaction among minds become mysteries. But if, on the other hand, you regard the social process of experience as prior (in a rudimentary form) to the existence of mind and explain the origin of minds in terms of the interaction among individuals within that process, then not only the origin of minds, but also the interaction among minds (which is thus seen to be internal to their very nature and presupposed by their existence or development at all) cease to seem mysterious or miraculous. Mind arises through communication by a conversation of gestures in a social process or context of experience – not communication through mind.

Wundt thus overlooks the important fact that communication is fundamental to the nature of what we term »mind«; and it is precisely in the recognition of this fact that the value and advantage of a behavioristic account of mind is chiefly to be found. Thus, Wundt's analysis of communication presupposes the existence of minds which are able to communicate, and this existence remains an inexplicable mystery on his psychological basis; whereas the behavioristic analysis of communication makes no such presupposition, but instead explains or accounts for the existence of minds in terms of communication and social experience; and by regarding minds as phenomena which have arisen and developed out of the process of communication and of social experience generally – phenomena which therefore presuppose that process, rather than being presupposed by it – this analysis is able to throw real light on their nature. Wundt preserves a dualism or separation between gesture (or symbol) and idea, between sensory process and psychic content, because his psychophysical parallelism commits him to this dualism; and though he recognizes the need for establishing a functional relationship between them in terms of the process of communication within the social act, yet the only relationship of this sort which can be established on his psychological basis is one which entirely fails to illuminate the bearing that the context of social experience has upon the existence and development of mind. Such illumination is provided only by the behavioristic analysis of communication, and by the statement of the nature of mind in terms of communication to which that analysis leads.

8. IMITATION AND THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE

Wundt's difficulty has been resolved in the past through the concept of imitation. Of course, if it were true that when a person shakes his fist in your face you just imitate him, you would be doing what he is doing and have the same idea as he has. There are, in fact, certain cases where the responses are like the stimuli in the social act, but as a rule they are different. And yet it has been generally assumed that certain forms imitate each other. There has been a good deal of study on this problem of imitation and the part it is supposed to play in conduct, especially in lower forms; but the result of this study has been to minimize imitation, even in the conduct of the higher animals. The monkey has been traditionally the most imitative animal, but under scientific study this was found to be a myth. The monkey learns very quickly but he does not imitate. Dogs and cats have been studied from this standpoint, and the conduct of one form has not been found to serve the purpose of arousing the same act in the other form.

In the human form there seems to be imitation in the case of a vocal gesture, the important gesture as far as language is concerned. So the philologist in particular, before the psychologist reached a more accurate analysis, went on the assumption that we imitate the sounds that we hear. There seemed to be a good deal of evidence for this also in certain animal forms, particularly those forms that utilize a richer phonetic articulation, such as birds. The sparrow can be taught to imitate the canary by close association with the canary. The parrot learns to »speak«. It is not, we shall see, genuine speech, for he is not conveying ideas, but we commonly say the parrot imitates the sounds that appear about it.

Imitation as a general instinct is now discredited in human psychology. There was a time when people assumed that there was a definite impulse on the part of the human animal just to do what it saw other people do. There is a great deal of seeming imitation on the part of children. Also there is among undeveloped forms a speech that appears to be nothing but imitation. There are persons whom we consider unintelligent who say things over without having any idea of what is meant, a bare repetition of sounds they hear. But the question still remains why the form should so imitate. Is there any reason for imitation? We assume that all conduct has back of it some function. What is the function of imitation? Seemingly we get an answer in the development of young forms. The young fox goes about with the parents, hunts with them, learns to seize and avoid the right animals; it has no original objection to the odor of a man, but after it has been with the old fox the scent of man will cause it to run away. There is, in this case, a series of responses which become definitely associated with a particular stimulus; if the young form goes about with the parent, those responses which are all there in its nature become associated with certain definite stimuli. We can, in a very generalized sense, speak of the fox as imitating its parents and avoiding man. But that usage would not imply running away as an automatic act of imitation. The young fox has been put in a situation in which it does run away, and when the odor of man is present it becomes definitely associated with this flight response. No young forms in the lower animals ever merely imitate the acts of the adult form, but they do acquire during their period of infancy the association of a set of more or less instinctive responses to a certain set of stimuli.

The above observations and reservations do not, as we shall see, justify the questionable sense in which the notion of imitation has often been used. The term »imitation« became of great importance, for a time, in social psychology and in sociology. It was used as a basis for a whole theory of sociology by the French sociologist, Gabriel Tarde. The psychologist at first, without adequate analysis, assumed on the part of the person a tendency to do what other persons do. One can see how difficult it would be to work out any mechanism of that sort. Why should a person wink because another person winks? What stimulus would cause another person to act in that way? The sight of another person acting in another way? This is an impossible assumption.

In the parallelism of Wundt we have the basis for his account of language. Wundt assumed a physical situation which has a certain import for the conduct of the form, and on the other hand he assumed a psychical complex of ideas which are in a certain sense the expression of physiological or biological values. His problem is to get out of this situation language as significant communication.

There are such situations as that represented by the conversation of gestures to which I have referred, situations in which certain phases of the act become stimuli to the forms involved in it to carry out their part in the act. Now these parts of the act which are stimuli for the other forms in their social activity are gestures. Gestures are then that part of the act which is responsible for its influence upon other forms. The gesture in some sense stands for the act as far as it affects the other form. The threat of violence, such as a clenched fist, is the stimulus to the other form for defense or flight. It carries with it the import of the act itself. I am not referring to import in terms of reflective consciousness, but in terms of behavior. For the observer the gesture means the danger and the response of the individual to that danger. It calls out a certain sort of an act. If we assume a consciousness in which there is not only present the stimulus in the form of sensation but also an idea, then there is in the mind the sensation in which this stimulus appears, a vision of the clenched fist, and besides that the idea of the attack. The clenched fist in so far as it calls out that idea may be said to mean the danger.

Now the problem is to get this relationship between the idea and the symbol itself into the conversation of gestures. As I pointed out before, this relationship is not given in the immediate response of fighting or running. It may be present there, but as far as the conversation of gestures is concerned an act of one sort calls out an act of a different sort in the other form. That is, the threat which is involved leads, we will say, to flight. The idea of flight is not the idea of attack. In the conversation of gestures there is the preparation for the full social process involving the actions in different forms, and the gestures, which are the parts of the act, serve to stimulate the other forms. They call out acts different from themselves. While they may call out acts which are alike, as a rule the response is different from the stimulus itself. The cry of a child calls out the response of the care of the mother; the one is fear and the other protection, solicitude. The response is not in any sense identical with the other act. If there is an idea, in the Wundtian sense, the psychical content that answers to a certain particular stimulus, that will not get its reflection in the response.

What language seems to carry is a set of symbols answering to certain content which is measurably identical in the experience of the different individuals. If there is to be communication as such the symbol has to mean the same thing to all individuals involved. If a number of individuals respond in different ways to the stimulus, the stimulus means different things to them. If a number of persons are lifting a weight, one person takes one position and another a different position. If it is a co-operative process requiring different sorts of responses, then the call on the part of one individual to act calls out different responses in the others. The conversation of gestures does not carry with it a symbol which has a universal significance to all the different individuals. It may be quite effective without that, since the stimulus which one individual gives may be the proper stimulus to call out different responses in the individuals in the group. It is not essential that the individuals should give an identical meaning to the particular stimulus in order that each may properly respond. People get into a crowd and move this way, and that way; they adjust themselves to the people coming toward them, as we say, unconsciously. They move in an intelligent fashion with reference to each other, and perhaps all of them think of something entirely different, but they do find in the gestures of others, their attitudes and movements, adequate stimuli for different responses. This illustrates a conversation of gestures in which there is co-operative activity without any symbol that means the same thing to all. Of course, it is possible for intelligent individuals under such conditions to translate these gestures into significant symbols, but one need not stop to translate into terms of that sort. Such a universal discourse is not at all essential to the conversation of gestures in co-operative conduct.

Such co-operative conduct is presumably the only type of conduct which one finds among the ants and bees. In these very complex societies there is an interrelationship of different forms that seemingly is as complex as human conduct in many respects. There are societies of a million individuals in some of the large ant nests, and divided up into different groups with different functions. What is a stimulus to action for one leads to a different response in another. There is co-operative activity, but no evidence of any significant language in the conduct of these insects. It is, of course, a field in which a great deal of work has to be done, but still there has been no evidence found of any significant symbols.

I want to make clear the difference between those two situations. There can be a high degree of intelligence, as we use that term, in the conduct of animals without any significant symbols, without any presentation of meanings as such. What is essential is co-operative activity, so that the gesture of one form calls out the proper response to others. But the gesture of one may call out very different responses on the part of other forms, and yet there may be no common meaning which all the different forms give to any particular gesture. There is no common symbol that for the ants means food. Food means a great many things, things that have to be gathered, that have to be stored, that have to be carried by the workers and placed in the mouths of the fighters. There is no evidence that there is any symbol that means food as such. The sight, the odor of food, and its position lead to a certain response. An ant picks a food object up and staggers back to the nest with it. Later it means something to be eaten, it means a whole series of activities. The odor along the path is a stimulus to other insects following along the path, but there is no symbol that means »path« to such a group. The odor of a strange form in the nest means attack from other forms, but if a strange ant is dipped in liquid formed by crushing ants from the nest and then placed in the nest there is no attack, even though his form is very much larger. The odor does not mean an enemy as such. Contrast these two situations: in one there is a highly complex social activity in which the gestures are simply stimuli to the appropriate response of the whole group; in the human situation there is a different response which is mediated by means of particular symbols or particular gestures which have the same meaning for all members of a group. Here the cry of an enemy is not simply a stimulus to attack. It means that a person of a different race, of a different community, is present, and that there is warfare going on. It has the same meaning to all individuals and that meaning may mediate a whole series of different responses.

As I have said, the problem from Wundt's standpoint is to get this second character over into the more primitive conversation of gestures, or conduct which is mediated by a conversation of gestures. A mere intelligent response on the part of the different members of a group to a single stimulus (to what to the observer is a single stimulus) does not carry with it any communication. Now how is one to reach genuine language? Wundt starts off with the assumption that there are psychical conditions that answer to certain stimuli, and an association between them. Certain sights, odors, and especially sounds are associated with certain ideas. If, when a person uses a certair sound, he has that idea in his own mind, and the gesture that he uses, say a vocal gesture, calls out the same gesture in the other, then that gesture in the other person will call out the same idea in him. Say the word »enemy« calls out a hostile response. Now, when I say »enemy« it calls out the same response in your mind that it calls out in mine. There we would have a particular symbol that has a common meaning. If all members of the group were so constituted that it has this meaning, then there would be a basis for communication by means of significant symbols.

The difficulty in this analysis to which I have been referring is to account for a particular gesture calling out the same gesture in another individual, even if we assume that this same idea is associated with the same vocal gesture in another individual. Assuming that the word »enemy« means hostility, how can the situation arise in which one person says »enemy«, and the other person says »enemy« too? Where one person says »enemy« one individual will fight and another will run away. There we have two different significations answering to the sound. What we want to get is the one stimulus which has a certain psychical content calling out the same stimulus in another form, and so the same content. We seem to have the beginnings of that process among the talking birds. One stimulus seems to call out the same stimulus in the conduct of the other form. What the psychical accompaniment is in the birds, of course, we cannot tell, but we can record that they seem to have no such signification as they have in our experience. The parrot does not mean what the sentences mean to us. We have noted, however, that the canary's melody can be taken over by the sparrow, and this seemingly imitative process we must soon discuss in detail.

We argued that there is no evidence of any general tendency on the part of forms to imitate each other. If one attempts to state such a tendency it breaks down mechanically. It would mean that we have a tendency to do the same thing that other people are doing, and also that these tendencies are not only in our nature, but also that they are attached to certain specific stimuli which mean what the other people are doing. The sight of one person doing something would be a stimulus to another person to do the same thing. We should have to assume that what the person is doing is already a reaction that is in the nature of the imitating individual. It would mean that we have in our nature already all of these various activities, and that they are called out by the sight of other people doing the same thing. It is a perfectly impossible assumption.

When the psychologist came to analyze imitation he restricted it to the field in which people happened to be doing the same thing. If one person is running he may be said to arouse the stimulus for other people to run at the same time. We do assume that the sight of one animal actually running is the stimulus to other animals to run. That is very important for the preservation of animals that go in droves. Cattle grazing in a pasture all drift along together. One animal left by himself will be nervous and will not graze, but if put with other animals it is again normal. It does more readily what it is doing provided it is in a group. The tendency to drift together is not an impossible sort of an instinct, since we can conceive that the movement of animals in a certain direction should be a stimulus to other animals. That is about all that there is in the »herding« instinct, if reduced down to something concrete in the action of the form itself. The animal acts more normally when with others in the same group. He will feed better than otherwise. But when you come to some specific act about all you can find is that the animals do tend to move in the same direction. This may lead to a stampede in the herd. Something of that sort is involved in the so-called »sentinel«. One animal, a little more sensitive than the others, lifts his head and starts to run away, and the other animals do tend to move with the sentinel form. It is not, of course, imitation in the sense of copying; for one animal is not copying the other animal. The one animal simply tends to run when the other does. If a cat is put in a puzzle box and the cat does get to the point where it opens the door by a lever action and does that often enough, it will strike that lever the first thing. Now, if another cat is put in, and where it can see the first cat, it will not imitate it. There is no evidence that what one animal does becomes a stimulus to the other animal to do the same thing. There is no direct imitative activity.

There does, however, seem to be a tendency to imitate among men, and in particular to reproduce vocal gestures. We find the latter tendency among birds as well as among men. If you go into a locality where there is a peculiar dialect and remain there for a length of time you find yourself speaking the same dialect, and it may be something which you did not want to do. The simplest way of stating it is to say that you unconsciously imitate. The same thing is also true of various other mannerisms. If you think of a certain person you are very apt to find yourself speaking as the other person spoke. Any mannerism which the individual has is one which you find yourself tending to carry out when the person comes to your mind. That is what we call »imitation«, and what is curious is that there is practically no indication of such behavior on the part of lower forms. You can teach the sparrow to sing as a canary but you have to keep that sparrow constantly listening to a canary. It does not take place readily. The mocking bird does seem to take up the calls of other birds. It seems to be peculiarly endowed in this particular way. But in general the taking over of the processes of others is not natural to lower forms. Imitation seems to belong to the human form, where it has reached some sort of independent conscious existence.

But »imitation« gives no solution for the origin of language. We have to come back to some situation out of which we can reach some symbol that will have an identical meaning, and we cannot get it out of a mere instinct of imitation, as such. There is no evidence that the gesture generally tends to call out the same gesture in the other organism.

Imitation as the mere tendency on the part of an organism to reproduce what it sees or hears other organisms doing is mechanically impossible; one cannot conceive an organism as so constructed that all the sights and sounds which reach it would arouse in the organism tendencies to reproduce what it sees and hears in those fields of experience. Such an assumption is possible only in terms of an older psychology. If one assumed that the mind is made up out of ideas, that the character of our conscious experience is nothing but a set of impressions of objects, and if one adjusts to these impressions, so to speak, a motor tendency, one might conceive of that as being one which would seek to reproduce what was seen and heard. But as soon as you recognize in the organism a set of acts which carry out the processes which are essential to the life of the form, and undertake to put the sensitive or sensory experience into that scheme, the sensitive experience, as stimulus we will say to the response, cannot be a stimulus simply to reproduce what is seen and heard; it is rather a stimulus for the carrying out of the organic process. The animal sees or smells the food and hears the enemy, the parent form sees and hears the infant form – these are all stimuli to the forms to carry through the processes which are essential to the species to which they belong. They are acts which go beyond the organism taken by itself, but they belong to co-operative processes in which groups of animals act together, and they are the fulfilment of the processes which are essential to the life of the forms. One cannot fit into any such scheme as that a particular impulse of imitation, and if one undertakes to present the mechanism which would make intelligible that process, even the intricacies of the central nervous system would be inadequate. An individual would be in such a situation as one of Gulliver's figures who undertook to save his breath by not talking, and so carried a bagful of all the objects about which he would want to talk. One would have to carry about an enormous bagful, so to speak, of such possible actions if they were to be represented in the central nervous system. Imitation, however, cannot be taken as a primitive response.

9. THE VOCAL GESTURE AND THE SIGNIFICANT SYMBOL

The concept of imitation has been used very widely in the field of the vocal gesture. There we do seem to have a tendency on the part of certain organisms to reproduce sounds which are heard. Human beings and the talking birds provide illustrations. But even here »imitation« is hardly an immediate tendency, since it takes quite a while to get one bird to reproduce the song, or for the child to take over the phonetic gesture of the human form. The vocal gesture is a stimulus to some sort of response; it is not simply a stimulus to the calling out of the sound which the animal hears. Of course, the bird can be put into a situation where it may reach the mere repetition of that which it hears. If we assume that one sound that the bird makes calls out another sound, when the bird hears this first sound it responds by the second. If one asked why one note answers to another, one would have to go to some process where the vocal gesture would have a different physiological significance. An illustration is the cooing process of pigeons. There one note calls out another note in the other form. It is a conversation of gestures, where a certain attitude expressing itself in a certain note calls out another attitude with its corresponding note. If the form is to call out in itself the same note that it calls out in the other, it must act as the other acts, and use the note that the other makes use of in order to reproduce the particular note in question. So you find, if you put the sparrow and the canary together in neighboring cages, where the call of one calls out a series of notes in the other, that if the sparrow finds itself uttering a note such as a canary does, the vocal gesture here must be more or less of the same type. Where that situation exists, the sparrow in its own process of vocalization makes use of such notes as those which the canary makes use of. The sparrow is influencing not only the canary, but also in hearing itself it is influencing itself. The note that it is making use of, if it is identical with the note of the canary, calls out a response in itself that the canary's note would call out in itself. Those are the situations that have become emphasized and maintained where one has what we term »imitation«. Where the sparrow is actually making use of a phonetic vocal gesture of the canary through a common note in the repertoire of both of them, then the sparrow would be tending to bring out in itself the same response that would be brought out by the note of the canary. That, then, would give an added weight in the experience of the sparrow to that particular response.

If the vocal gesture which the sparrow makes is identical with that which it hears when the canary makes use of the same note, then it is seen that its own response will be in that case identical with the response to the canary's note. It is this which gives such peculiar importance to the vocal gesture: it is one of those social stimuli which affect the form that makes it in the same fashion that it affects the form when made by another. That is, we can hear ourselves talking, and the import of what we say is the same to ourselves that it is to others. If the sparrow makes use of a canary's note it is calling out in itself the response that the canary's note calls out. In so far, then, as the sparrow does make use of the same note that the canary makes use of, it will emphasize the vocal responses to this note because they will be present not only when the canary makes use of it but also when the sparrow makes use of it. In such a case it is presupposed that the particular stimulus is present in the form itself, that is, that the vocal stimulus which calls out the particular note which is learned is present in the repertoire of the sparrow as well as in that of the canary. If one recognizes that, then one can see that those particular notes answering to this stimulus will be, so to speak, written in, underlined. They will become habitual. We are supposing that one note calls out another, a stimulus calls out a response. If this note which calls out this response is used not only by the canary but also by the sparrow, then whenever the sparrow hears the canary it makes use of that particular note, and if it has the same note in its own repertoire then there is a double tendency to bring about this particular response, so that it becomes more frequently made use of and becomes more definitely a part of the singing of the sparrow than otherwise. Such are the situations in which the sparrow does take the role of the canary in so far as there are certain notes to which it tends to react just as the canary does. There is a double weight, so to speak, upon this particular note or series of notes. It is in such a fashion that we can understand the learning by the sparrow of the canary's song. One has to assume a like tendency in the two forms if one is going to get any mechanism for imitation at all.

To illustrate this further let us go back to the conversation of gestures in the dog-fight. There the stimulus which one dog gets from the other is to a response which is different from the response of the stimulating form. One dog is attacking the other, and is ready to spring at the other dog's throat; the reply on the part of the second dog is to change its position, perhaps to spring at the throat of the first dog. There is a conversation of gestures, a reciprocal shifting of the dogs' positions and attitudes. In such a process there would be no mechanism for imitation. One dog does not imitate the other. The second dog assumes a different attitude to avoid the spring of the first dog. The stimulus in the attitude of one dog is not to call out the response in itself that it calls out in the other. The first dog is influenced by its own attitude, but it is simply carrying out the process of a prepared spring, so that the influence on the dog is simply in reinforcing the process which is going on. It is not a stimulus to the dog to take the attitude of the other dog.

When, however, one is making use of the vocal gesture, if we assume that one vocal element is a stimulus to a certain reply, then when the animal that makes use of that vocal gesture hears the resulting sound he will have aroused in himself at least a tendency to respond in the same way as the other animal responds. It may be a very slight tendency – the lion does not appreciably frighten itself by its roar. The roar has an effect of frightening the animal he is attacking, and it has also the character of a challenge under certain conditions. But when we come to such elaborate processes of vocalization as those of the song of birds, there one vocal gesture calls out another vocal gesture. These, of course, have their function in the intercourse of the birds, but the gestures themselves become of peculiar importance. The vocalization plays a very large part in such a process as wooing, and one call tends to call out another note. In the case of the lion's roar the response is not so much a vocal sound as it is a flight, or, if you like, a fight. The response is not primarily a vocal response. It is rather the action of the form itself. But in the song of birds, where vocalization is carried out in an elaborate fashion, the stimulus does definitely call out a certain response so that the bird when singing is influenced by its own stimulus to a response which will be like that which is produced in another form. That response which is produced in itself, since it is also produced by the influence of others, gets twice the emphasis that it would have if it were just called out by the note of others. It is called out more frequently than the response to other sounds. It is this that gives the seeming evidence of imitation in the case of sounds or vocal gestures. The stimulus that calls out a particular sound may be found not only in the other forms of the group but also in the repertoire of the particular bird which uses the vocal gesture. This stimulus A calls out the response B. Now if this stimulus A is not like B, and if we assume that A calls out B, then if A is used by other forms these forms will respond in the fashion B. If this form also uses the vocal gesture A, it will be calling out in itself the response B, so that the response B will be emphasized over against other responses because it is called out not only by the vocal gestures of other forms but also by the form itself. This would never take place unless there were an identity represented by A, in this case an identity of stimuli.

In the case of the vocal gesture the form hears its own stimulus just as when this is used by other forms, so it tends to respond also to its own stimulus as it responds to the stimulus of other forms. That is, birds tend to sing to themselves, babies to talk to themselves. The sounds they make are stimuli to make other sounds. Where there is a specific sound that calls out a specific response, then if this sound is made by other forms it calls out this response in the form in question. If the sparrow makes use of this particular sound then the response to that sound will be one which will be heard more frequently than another response. In that way there will be selected out of the sparrow's repertoire those elements which are found in the song of the canary, and gradually such selection would build up in the song of the sparrow those elements which are common to both, without assuming a particular tendency of imitation. There is here a selective process by which is picked out what is common. »Imitation« depends upon the individual influencing himself as others influence him, so that he is under the influence not only of the other but also of himself in so far as he uses the same vocal gesture.

The vocal gesture, then, has an importance which no other gesture has. We cannot see ourselves when our face assumes a certain expression. If we hear ourselves speak we are more apt to pay attention. One hears himself when he is irritated using a tone that is of an irritable quality, and so catches himself. But in the facial expression of irritation the stimulus is not one that calls out an expression in the individual which it calls out in the other. One is more apt to catch himself up and control himself in the vocal gesture than in the expression of the countenance.

It is only the actor who uses bodily expressions as a means of looking as he wants others to feel. He gets a response which reveals to him how he looks by continually using a mirror. He registers anger, he registers love, he registers this, that, or the other attitude, and he examines himself in a glass to see how he does so. When he later makes use of the gesture it is present as a mental image. He realizes that that particular expression does call out fright. If we exclude vocal gestures, it is only by the use of the mirror that one could reach the position where he responds to his own gestures as other people respond. But the vocal gesture is one which does give one this capacity for answering to one's own stimulus as another would answer.

If there is any truth in the old axiom that the bully is always the coward, it will be found to rest on the fact that one arouses in himself that attitude of fear which his bullying attitude arouses in another, so that when put into a particular situation which calls his bluff, his own attitude is found to be that of the others. If one's own attitude of giving way to the bullying attitude of others is one that arouses the bullying attitude, he has in that degree aroused the attitude of bullying in himself. There is a certain amount of truth in this when we come back to the effect upon one's self of the gesture of which he makes use. In so far as one calls out the attitude in himself that one calls out in others, the response is picked out and strengthened. That is the only basis for what we call imitation. It is not imitation in the sense of simply doing what one sees another person doing. The mechanism is that of an individual calling out in himself the response which he calls out in another, consequently giving greater weight to those responses than to the other responses, and gradually building up those sets of responses into a dominant whole. That may be done, as we say, unconsciously. The sparrow does not know it is imitating the canary. It is just a gradual picking up of the notes which are common to both of them. And that is true wherever there is imitation.

So far as exclamatory sounds are concerned (and they would answer in our own vocal gestures to what is found in those of animals), the response to these does not enter into immediate conversation, and the influence of these responses on the individual are comparatively slight. It seems to be difficult to bring them into relationship with significant speech. We are not consciously frightened when we speak angrily to someone else, but the meaning of what we say is always present to us when we speak. The response in the individual to an exclamatory cry which is of the same sort as that in the other does not play any important part in the conduct of the form. The response of the lion to its roar is of very little importance in the response of the form itself, but our response to the meaning of what we say is constantly attached to our conversation. We must be constantly responding to the gesture we make if we are to carry on successful vocal conversation. The meaning of what we are saying is the tendency to respond to it. You ask somebody to bring a visitor a chair. You arouse the tendency to get the chair in the other, but if he is slow to act you get the chair yourself. The response to the vocal gesture is the doing of a certain thing, and you arouse that same tendency in yourself. You are always replying to yourself, just as other people reply. You assume that in some degree there must be identity in the reply. It is action on a common basis.

I have contrasted two situations to show what a long road speech or communication has to travel from the situation where there is nothing but vocal cries over to the situation in which significant symbols are utilized. What is peculiar to the latter is that the individual responds to his own stimulus in the same way as other people respond. Then the stimulus becomes significant; then one is saying something. As far as a parrot is concerned, its »speech« means nothing, but where one significantly says something with his own vocal process he is saying it to himself as well as to everybody else within reach of his voice. It is only the vocal gesture that is fitted for this sort of communication, because it is only the vocal gesture to which one responds or tends to respond as another person tends to respond to it. It is true that the language of the hands is of the same character. One sees one's self using the gestures which those who are deaf make use of. They influence one the same way as they influence others. Of course, the same is true of any form of script. But such symbols have all been developed out of the specific vocal gesture, for that is the basic gesture which does influence the individual as it influences others. Where it does not become significant is in the vocalization of the two birds. Nevertheless, the same type of process is present, the stimulus of the one bird tending to call out the response in another bird which it tends to call out, however slightly, in the bird itself.

10. THOUGHT, COMMUNICATION, AND THE SIGNIFICANT SYMBOL

We have contended that there is no particular faculty of imitation in the sense that the sound or the sight of another's response is itself a stimulus to carry out the same reaction, but rather that if there is already present in the individual an action like the action of another, then there is a situation which makes imitation possible. What is necessary now to carry through that imitation is that the conduct and the gesture of the individual which calls out a response in the other should also tend to call out the same response in himself. In the dog-fight this is not present: the attitude in the one dog does not tend to call out the same attitude in the other. In some respects that actually may occur in the case of two boxers. The man who makes a feint is calling out a certain blow from his opponent, and that act of his own does have that meaning to him, that is, he has in some sense initiated the same act in himself. It does not go clear through, but he has stirred up the centers in his central nervous system which would lead to his making the same blow that his opponent is led to make, so that he calls out in himself, or tends to call out, the same response which he calls out in the other. There you have the basis for so-called imitation. Such is the process which is so widely recognized at present in manners of speech, of dress, and of attitudes.

We are more or less unconsciously seeing ourselves as others see us. We are unconsciously addressing ourselves as others address us; in the same way as the sparrow takes up the note of the canary we pick up the dialects about us. Of course, there must be these particular responses in our own mechanism. We are calling out in the other person something we are calling out in ourselves, so that unconsciously we take over these attitudes. We are unconsciously putting ourselves in the place of others and acting as others act. I want simply to isolate the general mechanism here, because it is of very fundamental importance in the development of what we call self-consciousness and the appearance of the self. We are, especially through the use of the vocal gestures, continually arousing in ourselves those responses which we call out in other persons, so that we are taking the attitudes of the other persons into our own conduct. The critical importance of language in the development of human experience lies in this fact that the stimulus is one that can react upon the speaking individual as it reacts upon the other.

A behaviorist, such as Watson, holds that all of our thinking is vocalization. In thinking we are simply starting to use certain words. That is in a sense true. However, Watson does not take into account all that is involved here, namely, that these stimuli are the essential elements in elaborate social processes and carry with them the value of those social processes. The vocal process as such has this great importance, and it is fair to assume that the vocal process, together with the intelligence and thought that go with it, is not simply a playing of particular vocal elements against each other. Such a view neglects the social context of language.

The importance, then, of the vocal stimulus lies in this fact that the individual can hear what he says and in hearing what he says is tending to respond as the other person responds. When we speak now of this response on the part of the individual to the others we come back to the situation of asking some person to do something. We ordinarily express that by saying that one knows what he is asking you to do. Take the illustration of asking someone to do something, and then doing it one's self. Perhaps the person addressed does not hear you or acts slowly, and then you carry the action out yourself. You find in yourself, in this way, the same tendency which you are asking the other individual to carry out. Your request stirred up in you that same response which you stirred up in the other individual. How difficult it is to show someone else how to do something which you know how to do yourself! The slowness of the response makes it hard to restrain yourself from doing what you are teaching. You have aroused the same response in yourself as you arouse in the other individual.

In seeking for an explanation of this, we ordinarily assume a certain group of centers in the nervous system which are connected with each other, and which express themselves in the action. If we try to find in a central nervous system something that answers to our word »chair«, what we should find would be presumably simply an organization of a whole group of possible reactions so connected that if one starts in one direction one will carry out one process, if in another direction one will carry out another process. The chair is primarily what one sits down in. It is a physical object at a distance. One may move toward an object at a distance and then enter upon the process of sitting down when one reaches it. There is a stimulus which excites certain paths which cause the individual to go toward that object and to sit down. Those centers are in some degree physical. There is, it is to be noted, an influence of the later act on the earlier act. The later process which is to go on has already been initiated and that later process has its influence on the earlier process (the one that takes place before this process, already initiated, can be completed). Now, such an organization of a great group of nervous elements as will lead to conduct with reference to the objects about us is what one would find in the central nervous system answering to what we call an object. The complications are very great, but the central nervous system has an almost infinite number of elements in it, and they can be organized not only in spatial connection with each other, but also from a temporal standpoint. In virtue of this last fact, our conduct is made up of a series of steps which follow each other, and the later steps may be already started and influence the earlier ones. The thing we are going to do is playing back on what we are doing now. That organization in the neural elements in reference to what we call a physical object would be what we call a conceptual object stated in terms of the central nervous system.

In rough fashion it is the initiation of such a set of organized sets of responses that answers to what we call the idea or concept of a thing. If one asked what the idea of a dog is, and tried to find that idea in the central nervous system, one would find a whole group of responses which are more or less connected together by definite paths so that when one uses the term »dog« he does tend to call out this group of responses. A dog is a possible playmate, a possible enemy, one's own property or somebody else's. There is a whole series of possible responses. There are certain types of these responses which are in all of us, and there are others which vary with the individuals, but there is always an organization of the responses which can be called out by the term »dog«. So if one is speaking of a dog to another person he is arousing in himself this set of responses which he is arousing in the other individual.

It is, of course, the relationship of this symbol, this vocal gesture, to such a set of responses in the individual himself as well as in the other that makes of that vocal gesture what I call a significant symbol. A symbol does tend to call out in the individual a group of reactions such as it calls out in the other, but there is something further that is involved in its being a significant symbol: this response within one's self to such a word as »chair«, or »dog«, is one which is a stimulus to the individual as well as a response. This is what, of course, is involved in what we term the meaning of a thing, or its significance. We often act with reference to objects in what we call an intelligent fashion, although we can act without the meaning of the object being present in our experience. One can start to dress for dinner, as they tell of the absent-minded college professor, and find himself in his pajamas in bed. A certain process of undressing was started and carried out mechanically; he did not recognize the meaning of what he was doing. He intended to go to dinner and found he had gone to bed. The meaning involved in his action was not present. The steps in this case were all intelligent steps which controlled his conduct with reference to later action, but he did not think about what he was doing. The later action was not a stimulus to his response, but just carried itself out when it was once started.

When we speak of the meaning of what we are doing we are making the response itself that we are on the point of carrying out a stimulus to our action. It becomes a stimulus to a later stage of action which is to take place from the point of view of this particular response. In the case of the boxer the blow that he is starting to direct toward his opponent is to call out a certain response which will open up the guard of his opponent so that he can strike. The meaning is a stimulus for the preparation of the real blow he expects to deliver. The response which he calls out in himself (the guarding reaction) is the stimulus to him to strike where an opening is given. This action which he has initiated already in himself thus becomes a stimulus for his later response. He knows what his opponent is going to do, since the guarding movement is one which is already aroused, and becomes a stimulus to strike where the opening is given. The meaning would not have been present in his conduct unless it became a stimulus to strike where the favorable opening appears.

Such is the difference between intelligent conduct on the part of animals and what we call a reflective individual. We say the animal does not think. He does not put himself in a position for which he is responsible; he does not put himself in the place of the other person and say, in effect, »He will act in such a way and I will act in this way.« If the individual can act in this way, and the attitude which he calls out in himself can become a stimulus to him for another act, we have meaningful conduct. Where the response of the other person is called out and becomes a stimulus to control his action, then he has the meaning of the other person's act in his own experience. That is the general mechanism of what we term »thought«, for in order that thought may exist there must be symbols, vocal gestures generally, which arouse in the individual himself the response which he is calling out in the other, and such that from the point of view of that response he is able to direct his later conduct. It involves not only communication in the sense in which birds and animals communicate with each other, but also an arousal in the individual himself of the response which he is calling out in the other individual, a taking of the role of the other, a tendency to act as the other person acts. One participates in the same process the other person is carrying out and controls his action with reference to that participation. It is that which constitutes the meaning of an object, namely, the common response in one's self as well as in the other person, which becomes, in turn, a stimulus to one's self.

If you conceive of the mind as just a sort of conscious substance in which there are certain impressions and states, and hold that one of those states is a universal, then a word becomes purely arbitrary – it is just a symbol. You can then take words and pronounce them backwards, as children do; there seems to be absolute freedom of arrangement and language seems to be an entirely mechanical thing that lies outside of the process of intelligence. If you recognize that language is, however, just a part of a co-operative process, that part which does lead to an adjustment to the response of the other so that the whole activity can go on, then language has only a limited range of arbitrariness. If you are talking to another person you are, perhaps, able to scent the change in his attitude by something that would not strike a third person at all. You may know his mannerism, and that becomes a gesture to you, a part of the response of the individual. There is a certain range possible within the gesture as to what is to serve as the symbol. We may say that a whole set of separate symbols with one meaning are acceptable; but they always are gestures, that is, they are always parts of the act of the individual which reveal what he is going to do to the other person so that when the person utilizes the clue he calls out in himself the attitude of the other. Language is not ever arbitrary in the sense of simply denoting a bare state of consciousness by a word. What particular part of one's act will serve to direct co-operative activity is more or less arbitrary. Different phases of the act may do it. What seems unimportant in itself may be highly important in revealing what the attitude is. In that sense one can speak of the gesture itself as unimportant, but it is of great importance as to what the gesture is going to reveal. This is seen in the difference between the purely intellectual character of the symbol and its emotional character. A poet depends upon the latter; for him language is rich and full of values which we, perhaps, utterly ignore. In trying to express a message in something less than ten words, we merely want to convey a certain meaning, while the poet is dealing with what is really living tissue, the emotional throb in the expression itself. There is, then, a great range in our use of language; but whatever phase of this range is used is a part of a social process, and it is always that part by means of which we affect ourselves as we affect others and mediate the social situation through this understanding of what we are saying. That is fundamental for any language; if it is going to be language one has to understand what he is saying, has to affect himself as he affects others.

11. MEANING

We are particularly concerned with intelligence on the human level, that is, with the adjustment to one another of the acts of different human individuals within the human social process; an adjustment which takes place through communication: by gestures on the lower planes of human evolution, and by significant symbols (gestures which possess meanings and are hence more than mere substitute stimuli) on the higher planes of human evolution.

The central factor in such adjustment is »meaning«. Meaning arises and lies within the field of the relation between the gesture of a given human organism and the subsequent behavior of this organism as indicated to another human organism by that gesture. If that gesture does so indicate to another organism the subsequent (or resultant) behavior of the given organism, then it has meaning. In other words, the relationship between a given stimulus – as a gesture – and the later phases of the social act of which it is an early (if not the initial) phase constitutes the field within which meaning originates and exists. Meaning is thus a development of something objectively there as a relation between certain phases of the social act; it is not a psychical addition to that act and it is not an »idea« as traditionally conceived. A gesture by one organism, the resultant of the social act in which the gesture is an early phase, and the response of another organism to the gesture, are the relata in a triple or threefold relationship of gesture to first organism, of gesture to second organism, and of gesture to subsequent phases of the given social act; and this threefold relationship constitutes the matrix within which meaning arises, or which develops into the field of meaning. The gesture stands for a certain resultant of the social act, a resultant to which there is a definite response on the part of the individuals involved therein; so that meaning is given or stated in terms of response. Meaning is implicit – if not always explicit – in the relationship among the various phases of the social act to which it refers, and out of which it develops. And its development takes place in terms of symbolization at the human evolutionary level.

We have been concerning ourselves, in general, with the social process of experience and behavior as it appears in the calling out by the act of one organism of an adjustment to that act in the responsive act of another organism. We have seen that the nature of meaning is intimately associated with the social process as it thus appears, that meaning involves this three-fold relation among phases of the social act as the context in which it arises and develops: this relation of the gesture of one organism to the adjustive response of another organism (also implicated in the given act), and to the completion of the given act – a relation such that the second organism responds to the gesture of the first as indicating or referring to the completion of the given act. For example, the chick's response to the cluck of the mother hen is a response to the meaning of the cluck; the cluck refers to danger or to food, as the case may be, and has this meaning or connotation for the chick.

The social process, as involving communication, is in a sense responsible for the appearance of new objects in the field of experience of the individual organisms implicated in that process. Organic processes or responses in a sense constitute the objects to which they are responses; that is to say, any given biological organism is in a way responsible for the existence (in the sense of the meanings they have for it) of the objects to which it physiologically and chemically responds. There would, for example, be no food – no edible objects – if there were no organisms which could digest it. And similarly, the social process in a sense constitutes the objects to which it responds, or to which it is an adjustment. That is to say, objects are constituted in terms of meanings within the social process of experience and behavior through the mutual adjustment to one another of the responses or actions of the various individual organisms involved in that process, an adjustment made possible by means of a communication which takes the form of a conversation of gestures in the earlier evolutionary stages of that process, and of language in its later stages.

Awareness or consciousness is not necessary to the presence of meaning in the process of social experience. A gesture on the part of one organism in any given social act calls out a response on the part of another organism which is directly related to the action of the first organism and its outcome; and a gesture is a symbol of the result of the given social act of one organism (the organism making it) in so far as it is responded to by another organism (thereby also involved in that act) as indicating that result. The mechanism of meaning is thus present in the social act before the emergence of consciousness or awareness of meaning occurs. The act or adjustive response of the second organism gives to the gesture of the first organism the meaning which it has.

Symbolization constitutes objects not constituted before, objects which would not exist except for the context of social relationships wherein symbolization occurs. Language does not simply symbolize a situation or object which is already there in advance; it makes possible the existence or the appearance of that situation or object, for it is a part of the mechanism whereby that situation or object is created. The social process relates the responses of one individual to the gestures of another, as the meanings of the latter, and is thus responsible for the rise and existence of new objects in the social situation, objects dependent upon or constituted by these meanings. Meaning is thus not to be conceived, fundamentally, as a state of consciousness, or as a set of organized relations existing or subsisting mentally outside the field of experience into which they enter; on the contrary, it should be conceived objectively, as having its existence entirely within this field itself. The response of one organism to the gesture of another in any given social act is the meaning of that gesture, and also is in a sense responsible for the appearance or coming into being of the new object – or new content of an old object – to which that gesture refers through the outcome of the given social act in which it is an early phase. For, to repeat, objects are in a genuine sense constituted within the social process of experience, by the communication and mutual adjustment of behavior among the individual organisms which are involved in that process and which carry it on. Just as in fencing the parry is an interpretation of the thrust, so, in the social act, the adjustive response of one organism to the gesture of another is the interpretation of that gesture by that organism – it is the meaning of that gesture.

At the level of self-consciousness such a gesture becomes a symbol, a significant symbol. But the interpretation of gestures is not, basically, a process going on in a mind as such, or one necessarily involving a mind; it is an external, overt, physical, or physiological process going on in the actual field of social experience. Meaning can be described, accounted for, or stated in terms of symbols or language at its highest and most complex stage of development (the stage it reaches in human experience), but language simply lifts out of the social process a situation which is logically or implicitly there already. The language symbol is simply a significant or conscious gesture.

Two main points are being made here: (I) that the social process, through the communication which it makes possible among the individuals implicated in it, is responsible for the appearance of a whole set of new objects in nature, which exist in relation to it (objects, namely, of »common sense«); and (2) that the gesture of one organism and the adjustive response of another organism to that gesture within any given social act bring out the relationship that exists between the gesture as the beginning of the given act and the completion or resultant of the given act, to which the gesture refers. These are the two basic and complementary logical aspects of the social process.

The result of any given social act is definitely separated from the gesture indicating it by the response of another organism to that gesture, a response which points to the result of that act as indicated by that gesture. This situation is all there – is completely given – on the non-mental, non-conscious level, before the analysis of it on the mental or conscious level. Dewey says that meaning arises through communication. It is to the content to which the social process gives rise that this statement refers; not to bare ideas or printed words as such, but to the social process which has been so largely responsible for the objects constituting the daily environment in which we live: a process in which communication plays the main part. That process can give rise to these new objects in nature only in so far as it makes possible communication among the individual organisms involved in it. And the sense in which it is responsible for their existence – indeed for the existence of the whole world of common-sense objects – is the sense in which it determines, conditions, and makes possible their abstraction from the total structure of events, as identities which are relevant for everyday social behavior; and in that sense, or as having that meaning, they are existent only relative to that behavior. In the same way, at a later, more advanced stage of its development, communication is responsible for the existence of the whole realm of scientific objects as well as identities abstracted from the total structure of events by virtue of their relevance for scientific purposes.

The logical structure of meaning, we have seen, is to be found in the threefold relationship of gesture to adjustive response and to the resultant of the given social act. Response on the part of the second organism to the gesture of the first is the interpretation – and brings out the meaning – of that gesture, as indicating the resultant of the social act which it initiates, and in which both organisms are thus involved. This threefold or triadic relation between gesture, adjustive response, and resultant of the social act which the gesture initiates is the basis of meaning; for the existence of meaning depends upon the fact that the adjustive response of the second organism is directed toward the resultant of the given social act as initiated and indicated by the gesture of the first organism. The basis of meaning is thus objectively there in social conduct, or in nature in its relation to such conduct. Meaning is a content of an object which is dependent upon the relation of an organism or group of organisms to it. It is not essentially or primarily a psychical content (a content of mind or consciousness), for it need not be conscious at all, and is not in fact until significant symbols are evolved in the process of human social experience. Only when it becomes identified with such symbols does meaning become conscious. The meaning of a gesture on the part of one organism is the adjustive response of another organism to it, as indicating the resultant of the social act it initiates, the adjustive response of the second organism being itself directed toward or related to the completion of that act. In other words, meaning involves a reference of the gesture of one organism to the resultant of the social act it indicates or initiates, as adjustively responded to in this reference by another organism; and the adjustive response of the other organism is the meaning of the gesture.

Gestures may be either conscious (significant) or unconscious (non-significant). The conversation of gestures is not significant below the human level, because it is not conscious, that is, not self-conscious (though it is conscious in the sense of involving feelings or sensations). An animal as opposed to a human form, in indicating something to, or bringing out a meaning for, another form, is not at the same time indicating or bringing out the same thing or meaning to or for himself; for he has no mind, no thought, and hence there is no meaning here in the significant or self-conscious sense. A gesture is not significant when the response of another organism to it does not indicate to the organism making it what the other organism is responding to.

Much subtlety has been wasted on the problem of the meaning of meaning. It is not necessary, in attempting to solve this problem, to have recourse to psychical states, for the nature of meaning, as we have seen, is found to be implicit in the structure of the social act, implicit in the relations among its three basic individual components: namely, in the triadic relation of a gesture of one individual, a response to that gesture by a second individual, and completion of the given social act initiated by the gesture of the first individual. And the fact that the nature of meaning is thus found to be implicit in the structure of the social act provides additional emphasis upon the necessity, in social psychology, of starting off with the initial assumption of an ongoing social process of experience and behavior in which any given group of human individuals is involved, and upon which the existence and development of their minds, selves, and self-consciousness depend.