Page:Philosophical Review Volume 7.djvu/414

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400
THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.
[Vol. VII.

tection of the situation under which it arises and the part which it plays. I do not find anywhere in Mr. Baldwin's book a clear recognition of the two possible meanings of 'sense of personality;' the one sense in which it means awareness of the particular contents which as matter of fact make up the person at a given time, and the other, the sense of personality qua personality. The former is a matter which will concern simply the onlooker, the scientific observer and investigator. The latter alone is personality to the individual himself, and hence is alone strictly psychological.

I do not mean that Mr. Baldwin does not recognize and take account of both these points of view; I mean simply that his results seem to be vague, ambiguous, and often flatly contradictory, because of unconscious shifting about from one to the other. From the point of view which I have termed that of content, there is no psychological derivation of the concepts of conscious personality, of conscious sociality, or of conscious placing of the one with reference to the other. Society is regarded as there; the individual is regarded as there; and the inquiry is simply into the give and take between the two. Such an inquiry is interesting and important, but, I must repeat, it is not in so far a psychological inquiry at all. When we want to know how the sense of individuality develops psychically, it is no answer to say: through the assimilation of social elements, that is, of contents derived from other personalities. This would give us the social or objective differences between John Smith and Peter Robinson, but it throws absolutely no light on the other question of how the sense of personality and of individuality originate and grow. On the other side, we want to know about the process of social growth and are told that social factors constitute and influence the individual; here society is taken for granted. In other words, when we want to know about the individual we are referred to society; when we want to know about society we are referred to the individual. Both concepts are assumed, not explained or derived.

It may be said that this does Mr. Baldwin injustice, because he insists upon precisely this point himself: "I do not see in short how the personality of this child can be expressed in any but social terms; nor how, on the other hand, social terms can get any content of value but from the understanding of a developing individual. This is a circle of definition of course, and that is just my point. On the one hand we can get no doctrine of society, but by getting the psychology of the socius with all its natural history ; and, on the other hand, we can get no true view of the socius at any time without describing the